[ravelantunes]

If AI automates most jobs and UBI becomes the primary source of income for most people, doesn't that imply the means of production eventually have to transfer to government control? Is there a different mechanism that makes this work without that transfer?

[KingOfCoders]

Robots and drones will keep the masses in check.

[steveBK123]

If AI somehow does materially, permanently change the amount of human employment required, I don't think anyone is going to like the outcomes.

I am to the left politically, but I do not think UBI can work in practice for the majority of population due to human nature and the resulting lack of purpose. People do seem to have an innate need for purpose, and most people need one imposed on them by circumstances, it would seem.

The % of people who will flourish and pursue their passions, given the means to pursue any higher purpose.. is stunningly low. They are the same people that are high-agency, intelligent, driven and will hustle in any job anyway.

The best case outcome for the majority is sitting on their couch consuming AI slop entertainment infinitely, and I am not optimistic we'd even land there.

The COVID bubble was the closest we've come in the US in terms of people having more time on their hands with less financial concerns (stimulus checks, employers subsidized to make payroll, unemployment payment increases, unemployment expiration extensions, federal benefit income caps raised, increased healthcare subsidies, student loan payment pauses, eviction moratoriums, etc etc). Unfortunately it seemed the outcome was less of human flourishing and more an increase in general disorder & disaffection.

Likewise, after Capital having financed trillions in investment to deliver AGI is not going to hand over the money to find UBI willingly.

Even people in the middle seem to be easily swayed by allegations of waste/scams in government benefits programs.

[Fire-Dragon-DoL]

Well,with the big asterisk that people were not allowed to meet eachother. That seems like a big limitation

[steveBK123]

Technically sure, in some places, for a limited period of time measured in weeks.. with many caveats.

In practice not really, and certainly not 6-18+ months after March 2020

[Fire-Dragon-DoL]

I didn't meet essentially anybody beside my wife for almost 2 years, that was a lot (canada)

[runlaszlorun]

Don't we have social media? </sarcasm>

[Mountain_Skies]

I'm far less worried about the consequences of automation than I am about the consequences of the chase for automation.

[youngtaff]

Where’s the money for UBI going to come from when billionaires are hoarders and don’t like paying tax?

[greyface-]

Currency debasement is an option. Taxes would be less inflationary, of course.

[Mountain_Skies]

If the means of production are taken from the billionaires and given to the government, how long would their wealth last? Not sure handing the means of production to a government would be a viable solution as politicians and bureaucrats are humans and often very terrible humans at that, but I don't see how billionaires could continue to last very long once they no longer have control over anything other than a declining number of currency units.

[danaris]

Statistically speaking, I'd take the worst of any hundred government bureaucrats over any single billionaire as far as "terrible humans" go.

[beeflet]

how are the means of production going to be taken? They have direct control of all of the robots.

[NortySpock]

Until Congress passes a law nationalizing their company, and forces them to sell their company to a holding company owned by the government.

[beeflet]

The government won't be able to force Robot Inc. to do anything. Robot Inc. has control of the robots, and the government has control over words on paper.

[goatlover]

Are robots immune to explosives, armor piercing rounds and EMP blasts in this scenario? Does the human military with all it's firepower cease to exist? Robot Inc is going to replace the US Armed Forces?

[xg15]

I guess the Tech Bro vision is that there just flat out won't be any interaction with money for the lower-classes anymore, because everything they need for living would be "free" (as in, provided by a set of perpetual "subscriptions" that don't require any direct compensation, but that tech companies can modify or even cancel at any point at their sole discretion)

[judahmeek]

This is some good black mirror material here

[croes]

UBI and capitalism don’t match.

Quite the opposite, capitalism even enforces useless work because it’s the main source of income.

That’s why all these AI bros dreams of AI benefits are BS unless they think they could get rid of capitalism

[spwa4]

You ignore human nature. I used to say "the brain is a transformer", not in the sense of how the current batch of AI transformers work, but in the sense of an mathematical transormation. The input gets transformed into human behavior. Human behavior is not something that exists independently of our environment and stimuli. And specifically: if nothing comes in, nothing comes back out (if you actually take away inputs, right up to the point that the brain stops controlling the body and you die, but you don't have to drive it nearly that far to just make sure nothing happens anymore).

Perhaps surprisingly, humans don't object to that. Our human intelligence works by subtracting what we can predict from the inputs and then focusing on the portion that remains.

So if AI either prevents interactions with humans or makes them more predictable, then human minds just ... stop. Literally. Humans won't do anything anymore.

UBI will either fail, or it will succeed and humans will just stop.

[aleph_minus_one]

> Quite the opposite, capitalism even enforces useless work because it’s the main source of income.

If the work was really so useless, companies would love to become leaner (i.e. fire the employees who do useless work). It's rather the government who by its control freakery introduces lots of red tape for companies.

[xhkkffbf]

Nothing gets rid of capitalism. In the socialist world, various forms of status just replace basic currency. When goods are limited, there has to be some way to ration them. In the former Soviet Union, it was just high party officials who were rich in limited goods. Maybe they didn't have "money" or US-style "capital", but they had other things that took that role.

[VirusNewbie]

How are billionaires “hoarders”? They may be a lot of things, but to use hoarders is a gross misunderstanding of wealth, billionaires, how equities work and more.

Bezos does not have a castle filled with a scrooge mcduck moneypool. There are not castles filled with grain that could otherwise be used to feed the starving peasants.

[steveBK123]

Don't most of them have prepper level bunkers on large parcels of property, a private jet flight away in case things go truly south?

[aswegs8]

Yeah but compared to the value they have in equities that are active companies, employing people, and generating value, these underground bunkers are small.

If you have money you generally don't want it to sit around and depreciate instead of investing into real-estate, private equity, etc. directly or indirectly.

[luckylion]

Possibly, but those are irrelevant sums compared to their total wealth.

[steveBK123]

Bezos has a $500M yacht thats longer than a football field

[Pooge]

Velocity would be much higher if the same amount of money was in the hands of millions more people.

Corruption of politics would be much harder, too.

[jandrewrogers]

That money is already in the hands of "millions more people". Invested money is efficiently and quickly converted into paychecks for ordinary people. That is the means by which investors hope to make a return on their investment.

[Pooge]

> Invested money is efficiently and quickly converted into paychecks for ordinary people.

It absolutely is not. Can you elaborate?

If by investment you mean funding rounds, then yes I guess. However, they don't use a noticeable of their personal wealth for that purpose at all.

Happy to be proven wrong, though.

[VirusNewbie]

They aren’t hoarding money, you don’t understand that?

What “money” velocity would be higher? Some of these companies have very little profit compared to wealth.

[Pooge]

I perfectly understand that they don't have a swimming pool of coins and bills. However, that doesn't make them less rich by any means.

Being illiquid doesn't mean they can't use that wealth.

[jgwil2]

But "using wealth" precisely means spending money, doesn't it? That is to say, the opposite of hoarding?

[nullocator]

Bill gates owns over 250,000 acres of land spread across like 15+ states, idk what to call that if not hoarding.

Don't pretend that because most of their wealth is termed as illiquid that it doesn't still count. It counts, they can access it and make use of their wealthy whenever they want. Rather than doing great good deeds, they are sitting on some cash and lots and lots of assets and their focus is on growing and expanding their wealth; that is hoarding.

[seanmcdirmid]

His foundation runs agriculture research in places like rural Louisiana. He isn’t hoarding the property, rather he is putting it to use for the greater good.

His foundation also has farms as investments, but these are agribusinesses that are in operation, they aren’t being left to lie fallow.

[class3shock]

They quite literally hoard the profit produced by the people that work for them. If they didn't, they wouldn't be billionaires. Pretending that because the wealth isn't in the form of a pool filled with gold coins that somehow makes it different is just misunderstanding wealth.

As far as feeding people, he could single handidly fund SNAP for a year and still have 100 billion plus.

[VirusNewbie]

>They quite literally hoard the profit produced by the people that work for the

Do you realize jeff bezos was a billionaire long before amazon recorded a profit? So quite literally no, this is not true.

[class3shock]

Im sorry, hoarding the value generated by everyone working at amazon. If you want to come up with another arbitrary distinction without a difference, be my guest.

[throw__away7391]

Exactly. A whole lot of people have been sold this idea that "taxing billionaires" is going to solve all their problems and provide endless spending for all the free things they want, but this is simply not the case. First off, the math, even the naive math that assumes that all billionaires' stock can be instantly liquidated at the current prices does not work. As individuals these people do have quite a lot, but there are not enough of them. The politicians constantly mention the same 5-6 individuals with net work measured in the hundreds of of billions, then list the number of billionaires, but the vast majority of these "billionaires" are single digit billionaires, with their net work held in an extremely illiquid investment such as private companies.

If you actually introduced your wet dream billionaire wealth tax that's going to pay for everything forever, all these people would be forced to go to the market at the same time and sell their assets while every other billionaire is also going to be in the same position at the same time, so who are they selling to? The market would crash (also incidentally impacting all your middle class retirement plans) destroying billions upon billions of dollars in wealth. But OK, let's say you get this money now, let's pretend you could get enough, and the government starts spending it on entitlement programs--what you have just done is convert investment into consumption. What do you expect to happen in this case? I'd expect surging inflation.

Society effectively consumes everything that we produce. If we want to consume more, we need to produce more. The government can put their finger on the scale as to what is produced and who consumes it, the government can put policies in place that lead to additional production via removing obstacles from productive activities, introducing obstacles to unproductive activities, making investments or subsidies, etc. but all of this is more complicated and messy, it needs to be done intelligently and carries risk of distorting market realities leading to unintended consequences. This is called "governing" and it's what politicians are supposed to be doing. Outsiders who want power but can't effectively govern are always trying to sell people on these "one weird trick" narratives of easy fixes to hard problems.

Bezos has, I believe, two jets and three yachts along with a number a large homes with large household staff. A lot for a person to be sure, but most of his wealth is unrealized investment in a company that delivers goods to hundreds of millions of people's homes and powers countless tech companies that are used by billions of people. Taking his boats and planes away is just not going to move the needle, it's not going to make groceries cheaper or reduce the price of college tuition or add housing stock (aside from a handful of luxury homes in a couple of neighborhoods around the wold) or add any new doctors to the medical field. Certainly taxes can be increased, but no one should expect this to make a real dent in the budget. We got into this situation by decades of taking the easy route, so of course people are looking for easy solutions.

This is the exact same kind of magical thinking that the right uses to convince people that their life would be oh so much better if they just kicked out all the immigrants. There is no magic bullet, most spending by the government is on the middle class, most consumption is by the middle class (this is even more dramatic if you measure this in real world physical goods terms rather than including "luxury" markup on spending by the upper middle class). This is a huge group, hundreds of millions, that collectively consumes an unfathomable amount of resources, and moving some numbers around on a few computers in downtown Manhattan is not going to change this.

[antisthenes]

> Is there a different mechanism that makes this work without that transfer?

Yeah. Corruption.

[general1465]

It is either UBI with massive taxation of everyone who provides AI services and thus keeping facade of capitalism or outright communism.

[analog31]

UBI could be packaged in the form of a jobs program. There's still plenty of work to do. AI can't protect our cities from immigrants.

/s