If and only if something like high-paying UBI comes along, and people are freed to pursue their passions and as a consequence, benefit the world much more intensely.
Inflation is a lack of goods for a given demand though. Ie if we can flood the world with cheap goods then inflation won't happen. That would make practical UBI possible. To some extent it has already happened.
My intuition, based on what I know of economics, is that a UBI policy would have results something like the following:
* Inflation, things get more expensive. People attempt to consume more, especially people with low income.
* People can't consume more than is produced, so prices go up.
* People who are above the break-even line (when you factor in the taxes) consume a bit less, or stay the same and just save less or reduce investments.
* Producers, seeing higher prices, are incentivized to produce more. Increases in production tend to be concentrated toward the things that people who were previously very income-limited want to buy. I'd expect a good bit of that to be basic essentials, but of course it would include lots of different things.
* The system reaches a new equilibrium, with the allocation of produced goods being a bit more aimed toward the things regular people want, and a bit less toward luxury goods for the wealthy.
* Some people quit work to take care of their kids full-time. The change in wages of those who stay working depends heavily on how competitive their skills are -- some earn less, but with the UBI still win out. Some may actually get paid more even without counting the UBI, if a lot of workers in their industry have quit due to the UBI, and there's increased demand for the products.
* Prices have risen, but not enough to cancel out one's additional UBI income entirely. It's very hard to say how much would be eaten up by inflation, but I'd expect it's not 10% or 90%, probably somewhere in between. Getting an accurate figure for that would take a lot of research and modeling.
Basically, I think it's complicated, with all the second and third-order effects, but I can't imagine a situation where so much of the UBI is captured by inflation that it makes it pointless. I do think that as a society, we should be morally responsible for people who can't earn a living for whatever reason, and I think UBI is a better system than a patchwork of various services with onerous requirements that people have to put a lot of effort into navigating, and where finding gainful employment will cause you to lose benefits.
The idea that AI will ever remove all struggle, even if it reaches AGI, is absurd. AI by itself can't give you a hug, for example--and even if advances in robotics make it possible for an AI-controlled robot to do that, there are dozens of unsolved problems beyond that to make that something that most people would even want.
AI enthusiasm really is reaching a religious level of ridiculous beliefs and this point.
I doubt ai will remove all struggle. I suspect we wouldn't see great extents of human passion in a world where everyone is fed, clothed, housed, etc without needing to exert themselves at all.
And AI isn't going to feed, clothe, or house people either.
AGI, at best, would provide ideas for how to do those things. And the current AI, which is not AGI, can only remix ideas humans have already given it--ideas which haven't fed, clothed, or housed us all yet.
That requires achieving post-scarcity to work in practice and be fair, though. If achievable, it’s not clear how it relates to AGI. I mean, there’s plenty of intelligence on this planet already, and resources are still limited - and it’s not like AGI would somehow change that.
One thing I thought recently, is that a large amount of work is currently monitoring and correcting human activity. Corporate law, accounting, HR and services etc. If we have AGI that is forced to be compliant, then all these businesses disappear. Large companies are suddenly made redundant, regardless of whether they replace their staff with AI or not.
I agree that if true AGI happens (current systems still cannot reason at all, only pretend to do so) and if it comes out cheaper to deploy and maintain, that would mean a lot of professions could be automated away.
However, I believe this had already happened quite a few times in history - industries becoming obsolete with technological advances isn’t anything new. This creates some unrest as society needs to transition, but those people are always learning a different profession. Or retire if they can. Or try to survive some other way (which is bad, of course).
It would be nice, of course, if everyone won’t have to work unless they feel the need and desire to do so. But in our reality, where the resources are scarce and their distribution in a way that everyone will be happy is a super hard unsolved problem (and AGI won’t help here - it’s not some Deus ex Machina coming to solve world problems, it’s just a thinking computer), I don’t see a realistic and fair way to achieve this.
Put simply, all the reasons we cannot implement UBI now will still remain in place - AGI simply won’t help with this.
I guess the point I am trying to make, is that paradoxically the more an AI company's products are integrated into the economy, the less value they can extract from the economy. As a large amount of the world's economic output is just dealing with the human factor.
For the vast majority of people, getting rid of necessary work will usher in an unprecedented crisis of meaning. Most people aren't the type pursue creative ends if they didn't have to work. They would veg out or engage in degenerate activities. Many people have their identity wrapped up in the work they do, or being a provider. Take this away without having something to replace it with will be devastating.
Good. Finally they’ll realize the meaninglessness of their work and how they’ve been exploited in the most insidious way. To the point of forgetting to answer the question of what it is they most want to do in life.
The brain does saturate eventually and gets bored. Then the crisis of meaning. Then something meaningful emerges.
We’re all gonna die. Let’s just enjoy life to the fullest.
>I do expect the next comment would be something like "work is a path to godliness"
And you think these kinds of maxims formed out of vacuums? They are the kinds of sayings that are formed through experience re-enforced over generations. We can't just completely reject all historical knowledge encoded in our cultural maxims and expect everything to work out just fine. Yes, it is true that most people not having productive work will fill the time with frivolous or destructive ends. Modernity does not mean we've somehow transcended our historical past.
> They are the kinds of sayings that are formed through experience re-enforced over generations.
Sure, but the whole point is that the conditions that led to those sayings would no longer be there.
Put a different way: those sayings and attitudes were necessary in the first place because society needed people to work in order to sustain itself. In a system where individual human work is no longer necessary, of what use is that cultural attitude?
> And you think these kinds of maxims formed out of vacuums?
No, they formed in societies where it WAS necessary for most people to work in order to support the community. We needed a lot of labor to survive, so it was important to incentivize people to work hard, so our cultures developed values around work ethics.
As we move more and more towards a world where we actually don’t need everyone to work, those moral values become more and more outdated.
This is just like old religious rules around eating certain foods; in the past, we were at risk from a lot of diseases and avoiding certain foods was important for our health. Now, we don’t face those same risks so many people have moved on from those rules.
The way most of the world is setup we will need to first address the unprecedented crisis of financing our day to day lives. We figure that out and I’m sure people will find other sources of meaning in their lives.
The people that truly enjoy their work and obtain meaning from it are vastly over represented here on HN.
Very few would be scared of AI if they had a financial stake in its implementation.
“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.” — Buckminster Fuller
It may be impossible in this world to expect a form of donation, but it is certainly not impossible to expect forms of investment.
One idea I had is everyone is paid a thriving wage, and in exchange, if they in the future develop their passion into something that can make a profit, they pay back 20% of their profits they make up to some capped amount.
This allows for extreme generality. It truly frees people to pursue whatever they fancy every day until they catch lightning in a bottle.
There would be 0 obligation as to what to do, and when to pay back the money. But of course would have to be only open to honest people, so that neither side is exploiting the other.
Both sides need a sense of gratitude, and wanting to give back. A philanthropic 'flair' "If it doesn't work out, it's okay", and a gratitude and wanting to give back someday on the side of the receiver, as they continue working on probably the most resilient thing they could ever work on (the safest investment), their lifelong passion.
Its just a modern religion really because anyone can understand this it is so basic and obvious.
You don't have to point out some bullshit captured study that says otherwise.