[danaris]

But right now, there is no way in hell we're going to get any kind of support for people who lost their jobs to AI. Not in the US, at least.

Look at the current administration. Do you think they would even consider providing anything like UBI?

They actively want to take us down the cyberpunk dystopia route (or even the Christofascist regressive dystopia route...). They want us to become serfs to technofeudal overlords. Or just die, and decrease the surplus population.

[marcus_holmes]

Agree, but this is how revolutions happen, and everyone knows it, so they're going to have to do something.

[danaris]

I think you (and many others) are overestimating the degree to which everyone does, in fact, know that (everyone should, but not everyone does...), while simultaneously underestimating the degree to which the people in charge right now think they're the absolute most specialest people. Or, in some cases, literally God's chosen.

Furthermore, they really, really want to be absolute rulers being treated like (the popular conception of) medieval lords by all of us, the peasants. They deeply believe that we are beneath them; that we do not deserve to have the means to thrive or even survive if they do not explicitly grant it to us; that our natural state is that of supplication, and theirs is that of power and control.

UBI would give that up. It would give us the unconditional means to live, regardless of their approval. And that they cannot abide.

[marcus_holmes]

I don't know any billionaires personally to be able to verify your statement, but I get the feeling this is a media caricature rather than their actual opinions. I've met a few tech millionaires and their opinions vary pretty wildly on this stuff.

[danaris]

Well...millionaires and billionaires aren't exactly the same group, are they?

An ordinary person, working diligently at a decent-paying job, can save up a million dollars if they're not unlucky.

Even a million-dollar-a-year salary is only 10x a fairly modest tech salary of 100k.

But a billion dollars a year is 1000 times that.

So...no, I don't know any billionaires personally either. I'm extrapolating from the things they say and do. But frankly, with the way the media is today, do you really think that more than a tiny fraction of it is trying to portray billionaires as worse than they are? Given how much of it is actually controlled by them, and bears the clear marks of their editorial hand?