[ben_w]

(Not the person you're replying to)

I think a UBI system is only stable in conjunction with sufficient automation that work itself becomes redundant. Before that point, I don't think UBI can genuinely be sustained; and IMO even very close to that point the best I expect we will see, if we're lucky, is the state pension age going down. (That it's going up in many places suggests that many governments do not expect this level of automation any time soon).

Therefore, in all seriousness, I would anticipate a real UBI system to provide whatever housing you want, up to and including things that are currently unaffordable even to billionaires, e.g. 1:1 scale replicas of any of the ships called Enterprise including both aircraft carriers and also the fictional spaceships.

That said, I am a proponent of direct state involvement in the housing market, e.g. the UK council housing system as it used to be (but not as it now is, there're not building enough):

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_housing_in_the_United_K...

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_house

[oinfoalgo]

The bigger issue to me is that not all geography is anything close to equal.

I would much rather live on a beach front property than where I live right now. I don't because the cost trade off is too high.

To bring the real estate market into equilibrium with UBI you would have to turn rural Nebraska into a giant slab city like ghetto. Or every mid sized city would have a slab city ghetto an hour outside the city. It would be ultra cheap to live there but it would be a place everyone is trying to save up to move out of. It would create a completely new under class of people.

[ben_w]

> I would much rather live on a beach front property than where I live right now. I don't because the cost trade off is too high.

Yes, and?

My reference example was two aircraft carriers and 1:1 models of some fictional spacecraft larger than some islands, as personal private residences.

> To bring the real estate market into equilibrium with UBI you would have to turn rural Nebraska into a giant slab city like ghetto. Or every mid sized city would have a slab city ghetto an hour outside the city. It would be ultra cheap to live there but it would be a place everyone is trying to save up to move out of. It would create a completely new under class of people.

Incorrect.

Currently, about 83e6 hectares of this planet is currently a "built up area".

4827e6 ha, about 179 times the currently "built up" area, is cropland and grazing land. Such land can produce much more food than it already does, the limiting factor is the cost of labour to build e.g. irrigation and greenhouses (indeed, this would also allow production in what are currently salt flats and deserts, and enable aquaculture for a broad range of staples); as I am suggesting unbounded robot labour is already a requirement for UBI, this unlocks a great deal of land that is not currently available.

The only scenario in which I believe UBI works is one where robotic labour gives us our wealth. This scenario is one in which literally everyone can get their own personal 136.4 meters side length approximately square patch. That's not per family, that's per person. Put whatever you want on it — an orchard, a decorative garden, a hobbit hole, a castle, and five Olympic-sized swimming pools if you like, because you could fit all of them together at the same time on a patch that big.

The ratio (and consequently land per person), would be even bigger if I didn't disregard currently unusable land (such as mountains, deserts, glaciers, although of these three only glaciers would still be unusable in the scenario), and also if I didn't disregard land which is currently simply unused but still quite habitable e.g. forests (4000e6 ha) and scrub (1400e6 ha).

In the absence of future tech, we get what we saw in the UK with "council housing", but even this is still not as you say. While it gets us cheap mediocre tower blocks, it also gets us semi-detached houses with their own gardens, and even the most mediocre of the widely disliked Brutalist architecture era of the UK this policy didn't create a new underclass, it provided homes for the existing underclass. Finally, even at the low end they largely (but not universally) were an improvement on what came before them, and this era came to an end with a government policy to sell those exact same homes cheaply to their existing occupants.

[sneak]

Some people’s idea of wealth is to live in high density with others.

You bump up against the limits of physics, not economics.

If every place has the population density of Wyoming, real wealth will be the ability to live in real cities. That’s much like what we have now.

[ben_w]

> Some people’s idea of wealth is to live in high density with others.

Very true. But I'd say this is more of a politics problem than a physics one: any given person doesn't necessarily want to be around the people that want to be around them.

> If every place has the population density of Wyoming, real wealth will be the ability to live in real cities. That’s much like what we have now.

Cities* are where the jobs are, where the big money currently gets made, I'm not sure how much of what we have today with high density living is to show your wealth or to get your wealth — consider the density and average wealth of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atherton,_California, a place I'd never want to live in for a variety of reasons, which is (1) legally a city, (2) low density, (3) high income, (4) based on what I can see from the maps, a dorm town with no industrial or commercial capacity, the only things I can see which aren't homes (or infrastructure) are municipal and schools.

* in the "dense urban areas" sense, not the USA "incorporated settlements" sense, not the UK's "letters patent" sense

Real wealth is the ability to be special, to stand out from the crowd in a good way.

In a world of fully automated luxury for all, I do not know what this will look like.

Peacock tails of some kind to show off how much we can afford to waste? The rich already do so with watches that cost more than my first apartment, perhaps they'll start doing so with performative disfiguring infections to show off their ability to afford healthcare.

[listenallyall]

I appreciate your perspective but clearly most UBI advocates are talking about something much sooner. However my response to your vision is that even if "work" is totally automated or redundant, the resources (building materials) and the energy to power the robots or whatever, will be more expensive and tightly controlled than ever. Power and wealth simply wont allow everything to be accessible to everyone. The idea that people would be able to build enormous mansions (or personal aircraft carriers or spaceships) just sounds rather absurd, no offense, but come on.

[mcny]

I think we are talking about two different things. The UBI I'm talking about won't allow you to have an enormous mansion, maybe just enough to avoid starving. The main plus point is it doesn't do means testing. The second plus point is if you really hate your job, you can quit without starving. This means we can avoid coworkers who really would like to not be there.

I think it is a solid idea. I don't know how it fits in the broader scheme of things though. If everyone in the US gets a UBI of the same amount, will people move somewhere rent is low?

From wikipedia:

> a social welfare proposal in which all citizens of a given population regularly receive a minimum income in the form of an unconditional transfer payment, i.e., without a means test or need to perform work.

It doesn't say you aren't allowed to work for more money. My understanding is you can still work as much as you want. You don't have to to get this payment. And you won't be penalized for making too much money.

[ben_w]

> I think we are talking about two different things. The UBI I'm talking about won't allow you to have an enormous mansion, maybe just enough to avoid starving.

We are indeed talking about different things with UBI here, but I'm asserting that the usual model of it can't be sustained without robots doing the economic production.

If the goal specifically is simply "nobody starves", the governments can absolutely organise food rations like this, food stamps exist.

> If everyone in the US gets a UBI of the same amount, will people move somewhere rent is low?

More likely, the rent goes up by whatever the UBI is. And I'm saying this as a landlord, I don't think it would be a good idea to create yet another system that just transfers wealth to people like me who happen to be property owners, it's already really lucrative even without that.

[listenallyall]

The response you're responding to here was to "ben_w", he discussed better-than-a-billionaire housing. My original reply to your earlier comment is above, basically just asking what type of housing you anticipate under a UBI system.

To me, "just enough to avoid starving" is a prison-like model, just without locked doors. But multiple residents of a very basic "cell", a communal food hall, maybe a small library and modest outdoors area. But most of the time when people talk about UBI, they describe the recipients living in much nicer housing than that.

[ben_w]

> the resources (building materials) and the energy to power the robots or whatever, will be more expensive and tightly controlled than ever.

I am also concerned about this possibility, but come at it from a more near-term problem.

I think there is a massive danger area with energy prices specifically, in the immediate run-up to AI being able to economically replace human labour.

Consider a hypothetical AI which, on performance metrics, is good enough, but is also too expensive to actually use — running it exceeds the cost of any human. The corollary is that whatever that threshold is, under the assumption of rational economics, no human can ever earn more than whatever it costs to run that AI. As time goes on, if the hardware of software improves, the threshold comes down.

Consider what the world looks like if the energy required to run a human-level AI at human-level speed costs the same as the $200/month that OpenAI charges for access to ChatGPT Pro (we don't need to consider what energy costs per kWh for this, prices may change radically as we reach this point).

Conditional on this AI actually being good enough at everything (really good enough, not just "we've run out of easily tested metrics to optimise"), then this becomes the maximum that a human can earn.

If a human is earning this much per month, can they themselves afford energy to keep their lights on, their phone charged, their refrigerator running?

Domestic PV systems (or even wind/hydro if you're lucky enough to be somewhere where that's possible) will help defend against this; personal gasoline/diesel won't, the fuel will be subject to the same price issues.

> Power and wealth simply wont allow everything to be accessible to everyone. The idea that people would be able to build enormous mansions (or personal aircraft carriers or spaceships) just sounds rather absurd, no offense, but come on.

While I get your point, I think a lot of the people in charge can't really imagine this kind of transformation. Even when they themselves are trying to sell the idea. Consider what Musk and Zuckerberg say about Mars and superintelligence respectively — either they don't actually believe the words leaving their mouths (and Musk has certainly been accused of this with Mars), or they have negligible imagination as to the consequences of the world they're trying to create (which IMO definitely describes Musk).

At the same time, "absurd"?

I grew up with a C64 where video games were still quite often text adventures, not real-time nearly-photographic 3D.

We had 6 digit phone numbers, calling the next town along needed an area code and cost more; the idea we'd have video calls that only cost about 1USD per minute was sci-fi when I was young, while the actual reality today is that video calls being free to anyone on the planet isn't even a differentiating factor between providers.

I just about remember dot-matrix printers, now I've got a 3D printer that's faster than going to the shops when I want one specific item.

Universal translation was a contrivance to make watching SciFi easier, not something in your pocket that works slightly better for images than audio, and even then because speech recognition in natural environments turned out to be harder than OCR in natural environments.

I'm not saying any of this will be easy, I don't know when it will be good enough to be economical — people have known how to make flying cars since 1936*, but they've been persistently too expensive to bother. AGI being theoretically possible doesn't mean we ourselves are both smart enough and long-lived enough as an advanced industrialised species to actually create it.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autogiro_Company_of_America_AC...