[dmitrygr]

> most of the arguments against it are moot points or simply falsehoods.

Ah the “I am sure we can all agree … that I’m right” argument.

In actuality, there are plenty of very good arguments against unions. That you don’t like them changes nothing

[K0balt]

lol “unions” was thanks to AI deciding “ubi is” couldn’t be what I meant. This might be saying something about the possibility of this working out.

[AnimalMuppet]

OK, but the same response still applies. There still are plenty of arguments against UBI, and you still need to actually refute them rather than just dismiss them with "they're false or moot".

[K0balt]

I’d agree with you in a debate, for sure, but I’m just stating my opinion. Of course, opinions are like assholes, everybody’s got one lol, so I’m not saying im necessarily right.

But I do think in the special case of self maintaining, self manufacturing, intelligent servitors, I think the only way we can hope to sustain an economy of any kind would be to redistribute the output of those machines significantly, or we would end up with a concentration of power around capital that utterly eliminates the economy as we presently understand it.

As for moot, I mean that in this case, you aren’t taking anyone’s work to benefit others, so the usual arguments of socialism or wealth redistribution don’t have the same basis in injustice. Ultimately, the production of pure automation springs directly from the resources of the earth, and the earth is everyones, so it makes sense to redistribute the production to a significant extent.

As for false, I mean that the “no one will do anything” and other claims about UBI destroying productivity have all been refuted in study after study, and in the societies that already practice UBI. In this way, UBI is very distinct from needs based welfare, which is often imagined to incentivize low production, since low productivity is actually a requirement to qualify.

Ubi causing runaway inflation is another example of a thoroughly refuted claim that is easily given the lie by looking at extant UBI systems.

UBI seems to work best when it significantly removes or even eliminates stressors of survival (basic housing and food, medical care) while leaving lots of room to aspire to greater success. Throw away the stick, but leave the carrot.

It’s basically mirroring what behaviorists find time after time, that positive reinforcement is more effective than negative reinforcement. Also, it makes people more willing to take risks like starting a business, getting an education, or having a family. All of which are positives for developed nations.

[AnimalMuppet]

Good reply. A few things, though:

> But I do think in the special case of self maintaining, self manufacturing, intelligent servitors, I think the only way we can hope to sustain an economy of any kind would be to redistribute the output of those machines significantly, or we would end up with a concentration of power around capital that utterly eliminates the economy as we presently understand it.

That would definitely be true in the case of self maintaining, self manufacturing, intelligent servitors who can do everything. I'm not sure we would get that, even as the end state. (We're probably at about the end state of "electricity can do everything", and yet there's still large amounts of manual labor. It can't do everything.)

> Ultimately, the production of pure automation springs directly from the resources of the earth, and the earth is everyones, so it makes sense to redistribute the production to a significant extent.

Unfortunately, under current law, the earth is not everyones. Real estate and mineral rights are pretty well entrenched. (For that matter, so are national governments. Given that resources are not evenly distributed, that matters.)

So getting to your philosophical starting point would require a massive transformation of existing human society. (Of course, robots doing everything might have that effect...)

> Ubi causing runaway inflation is another example of a thoroughly refuted claim that is easily given the lie by looking at extant UBI systems.

What are your examples of "extant UBI systems"? And to what degree are they true UBI?

[K0balt]

> That would definitely be true in the case of self maintaining, self manufacturing, intelligent servitors who can do everything.

I think we will see enough of “everything” to invalidate the current paradigm of economic function. Something like 80 percent of all activity that does not involve high-touch customer interaction where people will prefer the more personal feeling of another human over the superior technical performance of a robot.

>Unfortunately, under current law, the earth is not everyone’s. Real estate and mineral rights are pretty well entrenched.

This is true, but we also tax those holdings in acknowledgement of their communal nature. Ideally, ownership would revert to the best steward, but we all know how that works out in practice lol. The status quo is only possible because the state retains a monopoly of coercive force. If the economic model is undermined, this monopoly is among the first of casualties. So while I don’t disagree completely, I’d have to say that we end up in a sort of race condition problem if the state hesitates too long to assert communal right to autonomous production.

> What are your examples of "extant UBI systems"? And to what degree are they true UBI?

Unfortunately all “UBI” experiments or implementations are limited in scope, because there is always a time or geographical limit to their application. So “true” UBI, which would largely eliminate the leverage that increased local wealth would have against market forces, has never been tried. As a result, existing trials have possibly been contaminated because the gradient at the edge is a problem.

Additionally, UBI in our context would be applied in an economic desert scenario, which means that wealth would not be increasing in the mean.

As for examples, there have been a few, but I’m on the can staring at my phone and I’m way too lazy to go back and try to search up the several examples of UBI experiments, so I’ll just leave you with the one I’m most familiar with because I lived there; Alaska’s permanent fund dividend. At 1-2k per year per human, it is a pretty big infusion for many families. Once again I’m too lazy to dig right now, but there has been many investigations of it’s effects on the economy, and the net result was that prices went -down- dramatically in response to dividends in an effort to capture market share. I would not expect to see this effect though, in the scenario we are exploring - once again it’s a gradient effect, I believe.

> massive transformation of existing human society.

something like a 3rd industrial revolution? As someone who is innovating in the developing technology in the sector, I believe that we are in for a much more sudden and extreme shift than both of the previous Industrial revolutions combined, compressed into a couple of decades. The first two spanned about 120 years of disruptive change between the two of them.