This is why UBI gets discussed so often at the same time as AGI/ASI.
If we're all redundant, how do we live? On a pension that starts at ${debatable from conception to adulthood}. Who provides the production on which the pension is spent? The AI.
Even assuming UBI is great (small scale tests say so, but have necessary limits so we can't be sure), there's going to be a huge mess with most attempts to roll out such a huge change.
Assuming AGI doesn't kill us all, I would imagine the argument for UBI will become much easier to defend once it causes 100x, 1000x, 10000x etc growth in the economy. Our job is mostly to hang on until one of those two outcomes occurs.
The thing is that economy does not make sense without people. Economy is a way to allocate human work and resources, and provide incentives for humans to collaborate, factoring in the available resource limits.
Now if AGI make people's work redundant, and makes economy grow 100-10000x times... what does that measure mean at all? Can produce lots of stuff not needed or affordable by anybody? So we just hand out welfare tickets to take care of the consumption of the ferocious production, a kind of paperclip-maximizer is doing? I suggest reading the novel Autofac, it might turn out prophetic.
Will that "growth" have any meaning then? Actually the current we print money and give it to the rich economic growth is pretty much this, so with algorithmic trading multiplying that money automatically... have we already achieved that inflection point?
> The thing is that economy does not make sense without people. Economy is a way to allocate human work and resources, and provide incentives for humans to collaborate, factoring in the available resource limits.
I disagree with the underlying presumption. We've been using animal labour since at least the domestication of wolves, and mechanical work since at least the ancient Greeks invented water mills. Even with regard to humans and incentives, slave labour (regardless of the name they want to give it) is still part of official US prison policy.
Economics is a way to allocate resources towards production, it isn't limited to just human labour as a resource to be allocated.
And it's capitalism specifically which is trying to equate(/combine?) the economy with incentives, not economics as a whole.
> Now if AGI make people's work redundant, and makes economy grow 100-10000x times... what does that measure mean at all?
From the point of view of a serf in 1700, the industrial revolution(s) did this.
Most of the population worked on farms back then, now it's something close to 1% of the population, and we've gone from a constant threat of famine and starvation, to such things almost never affecting developed nations, so x100 productivity output per worker is a decent approximation even in terms of just what the world of that era knew.
Same deal, at least if this goes well. What's your idea of supreme luxury? Super yacht? Mansion? Both at the same time, each with their own swimming pool and staff of cleaners and cooks, plus a helicopter to get between them? With a fully automated economy, all 8 billion of us can have that — plus other things beyond that, things as far beyond our current expectations as Google Translate's augmented reality mode is from the expectations of a completely illiterate literal peasant in 1700.
> Can produce lots of stuff not needed or affordable by anybody?
Note that while society does now have an obesity problem, we're not literally drowning in 100 times as much food as we can eat; instead, we became satisfied and the economy shifted, so that a large fraction of the population gained luxuries and time undreamed of to even the richest kings and emperors of 1700.
So "no" to "not needed".
I'm not sure what you mean by "or affordable" in this case? Who/what is setting the price of whatever it is you're imagining in this case, and why would they task an AI to make something at a price that nobody can pay?
> So we just hand out welfare tickets to take care of the consumption of the ferocious production, a kind of paperclip-maximizer is doing? I suggest reading the novel Autofac, it might turn out prophetic.
Could end up like that. Plenty of possible failure modes with AI. That's part of the whole AI alignment and AI safety topics.
But mainly, UBI is the other side of the equation: to take care of human needs in the world where we add zero economic value because AI is just better at everything.
> With a fully automated economy, all 8 billion of us can have that
We probably can't. I mean why stop at humans? Let's give every pet the same luxury, or ... in the limit we could give this to every living being. Ultimately someone is going to draw the line who gets what and who is useful or not "for the greater good".
It just happens that many living beings don't contribute to the goals of whoever is in charge and if they get in the way or cause resource waste nobody will care about them, humans or not.
Human rights and democracy is all cool, but I think we just witnessed enough workarounds that render human rights and democracy pretty much null and void.
The real issue is that we live in an economic system where people are exploited for labor, and in turn they buy products and services made with their own labor (and another class get to profit from it).
If we introduce AGI but keep the system, people will be unemployed. If people aren't employed (and instead machines do their jobs), then they can't buy stuff. The whole system crumbles.
But it's possible that AGI will be disruptive enough to completely change the system. Let's hope it's a change for the better.
I see an impending intersection of three phenomena, with potentially disastrous results for society:
* Social media is decreasing the average attention span. TikTok is accelerating the trend of people not having time to look past a soundbite or headline in an endless scrolling feed. Intellectual depth and critical thinking vanishes.
* AI deep fakes make truth unknowable. Given the above, the majority of people will take these at face value, or they will give up, because "who can even know what's true anymore?"
* UBI (required because of the coming labor automation revolution) will keep everyone complacent. I'm happy, why would I care who gets elected, or what the government does, as long as I can still buy stuff and eat well?
The logical conclusion is that we fully transition from citizens into a herd of consumers with goldfish attention spans. Voter participation rates plummet. The populace is no longer able to hold government accountable.
Assume the existence of a large scale Star Trek Replicator that can almost instantly create anything.
There are only two possibilities that result:
1) We now live in a post-scarcity society where everyone self-actualizes and no one wants for anything.
2) We now live in a society where the small % of the population that owns the Replicators self-actualizes and wants for nothing while the remaining 99.9% of the population can f** off and die.
While we can get to a post scarcity society where people can live for free without a job, there are still going to be economies around "liberal arts". You cant realistically say "hey replicator, give me a usb filled with music that I like". You would have to find out which music you like, and random search on this is not really enjoyable, which would then means that there is economic opportunity for discovery, e.t.c.
Sounds like we arrive at point #1 in any case, there's just a question if a mass genocide happens in between. Probably depends on how gradual the transition ends up being.
However, once automation actually starts progressing, without "evil" parties trying to rent seek/get rich, the cost of living will essentially become zero. There is a very real future where the only economies that exist are those that appeal to human emotional side - entertainment, sports, concerts, e.t.c. Everything else is subsidized by the government with tax collected on the former.
"These other people are useless, let's bypass them. But not me! I simply gain the ability to get anything I want."
The lack of second-order thinking is hilarious.