> I believe we should tax AI tokens and robots. Right now, if you’re an employer and you hire someone, you pay payroll taxes on their earnings. But if you buy a robot, you can usually write it off right away as a business expense. The tax system nudges you toward replacing people with machines.
Taxing AI tokens and Robots is not going to work. We can’t even define a robot, tokens are also too abstract and there is endless ways of gaming it, and let’s not forget cross border operations.
Tax profits, it was always the most equitable option.
I do think taxing profits is still insufficient, because unless the tax rate is close to 100% (lol) the "k-shaped" economy is still reinforced, but just slowed slightly. In combination with a wealth/holdings tax, maybe.
Personally I think the idea of taxing robots/tokens directly is too narrow an idea.
It's undesirable by the companies, but it's not impossible. There's this constant talk about "Making American Great Again (Again)", but not much talk about the economic conditions that made America Great. Like high corporate tax.
That's half the battle. The other half is closing all the loopholes and making stuff that used to be illegal, illegal again (e.g. stock buybacks).
It is because personal income tax should have never existed. Nor should have taxes on primary residence. These are the most regressive taxes possible, it is basically serfdom.
Can you explain this? I think consumption taxes are the most regressive taxes possible because they are "flat" and thus affect lower-income people harder.
Marginal income taxes are regressive now in the sense that folks with more wealth have far more resources to avoid paying them, but otherwise the reasoning seems less regressive than a consumption tax (e.g. VAT)
Tax production as a whole, because profits get hidden in whatever is this week's tax haven. Taxing production has the added benefit of being able to drop every other tax tangentially related to revenue.
> Instead, solutions should be developed through a public democratic process that includes elected officials, policymakers, educators, health workers, local officials, and community leaders. Millions of people will have their lives disrupted, and we’ll need a stronger, more flexible social safety net to help them manage the transition. Local communities are already raising concerns about the energy and water needed for data centers. Without solutions, some groups will push for stopping AI development and deployment altogether.
Sounds great, except it ignores the fact that capital interests have controlled the levers of our faux democracies for decades, with no end in sight.
More importantly, even if it did contain the solution, there is no obvious way for a country with an already corrupt government to transition to such a thing.
I think you mean no obvious pacific way. Which is what any democratic citizen wants and seeks out. There are other solutions and way too obvious, in fact you have examples all over the world going back centuries.
Use of the term of direct democracy feels dilution in that case. It is a significant step in that direction, though for me (and wikipedia) direct democracy is without the middleman. Switzerland still has parties, elected government and so forth, no?
For some real world data there are some studies about (I think) German branch of the Pirate Party using it in internal decision making and there is interesting insight for those curious.
It be nice if we all where allowed to vote on particular laws if interested, and defer certain topics to our delegated experts. (Chat Control for example, would be a non issue then.)
The technology for that approach has been mature enough since the rise of social media and private crypto currencies (as a means of electronic private vote, particularly around usage of smart contracts for delegation). What about the interest and spreading of these ideas? Pretty limited, to non-existent. Some people like to follow leaders, though naturally wouldn't expect it to be the silent majority.
Switzerland still has parties and a senate but the people can veto any law and the people can amend the constitution. This arguably is a sensible balance as it’s probably not tenable for the people to legislate full-time. Representatives can legislate and the people will override them when they disagree.
It probably does work good however Switzerland got dangerously close to "something happening" this year with the 10M referendum. And it was very close, with major parts of the country showing an absurd level of ignorance - sadly I don't believe in direct democracy, the "public" can be too easily swayed one way or another even if not today, but in a few decades, with the right messaging, yes. Although, to contradict myself, perhaps there is no interest in generating upheaval in Switzerland because everyone keeps the money there.
If your measure of "success" is women gaining voting rights in 1990 (!) in the last canton, then yeah, Switzerland is doing great.
That last piece of data is one that frightened me when visiting a museum there. There's a lot of horrible things that may still as well be ongoing for all I know.
It's an awful country to be honest, they reject any kind of social progress. Even animal rights is too much for them to bear or hear about.
A dutch woman was denied a swiss passport during the naturalization process because she campaigned too hard for animal rights.
https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-38595807
Switzerland is the land of paranoid hillybillies, by law they need to provide each citizen with 1 square meter of bunker space, every new build has a bunker in the basement.
The Limits to Growth is (should be) an important concept in a small country with finite land resources. But the consequences, read external pressure, would have been too severe.
Regarding ignorance/swayed. I think in much of the EU and especially Germany, the currently ruling parties are completly ignorant about needed changes in the migration approach. The "public" knows this. And its the rulers which need to be nudged by e.g. direct democracy.
> It probably does work good however Switzerland got dangerously close to "something happening" this year with the 10M referendum. And it was very close, with major parts of the country showing an absurd level of ignorance
Switzerland already voted against immigration once before in 2014, EU punished them for it and they walked it back quickly. No larger catastrophe happened.
Works great in a very wealthy country, whose "modern" wealth was generated mostly by being the neutral and untouchable sanctuary for money laundering and illegal money making for centuries. See the 1934 Banking Act, among many things.
Why wouldn't it work if Switzerland was poorer? Are poor people dumber and make stupid decisions if you give them direct democracy, or what do you mean?
I don't see what would break if for example Netherlands copied Swiss direct democracy.
Fwiw that article isn't really the creme-de-la-creme of Wikipedia now is it? It suggests that a two-party system is typical of liberal democracies whereas in fact only a small number of democracies have systems like that, and even there many have recently turned into multi-party systems (eg France and the UK).
> We have to think now about how to reduce job losses so that everyone can share in the prosperity that AI creates.
And I thought he is a smart man. This is so last century thinking. We need to prepare that there will definitely be no jobs for everyone and that will be falling all the time, it’s not a one-time event you should “prepare for”.
There’s nothing to prepare, we already have funds and productivity to feed and shelter everyone. UBI is not a privilege, previous generations were slaving 9 to 5 all their lives so we can have it. This is it, arrived, and now, enter a few decades of historical period when all of us waiting for government bureaucrats to realise that UBI is a right.
I support UBI and wealth taxes, but I also think generally that will be a difficult transition in terms of social upheaval. There are so many people I know who are financially well-off but completely fall apart when there is no visible professional hierarchy to give them meaning.
One would hope that this would still go down better than destituting large percentages of the world population, but I wonder.
Based in your first two sentences, I think your understanding of UBI is mistaken. You seem to be under the impression that people don't or can't have a job when there is UBI. This is not the case. If you don't believe me, just look at Alaska.
Everyone enjoys some sort of benefit, tax break, subsidy, etc. from the government. UBI is the same thing in the form of a regular, universal transfer payment. Nothing more, nothing less.
I do understand UBI. I was referring to the previous context that AI would introduce mass loss of jobs and overall reduced employment, not specifically to UBI being a replacement for jobs.
And self-employment. Lots of people would like to go their own way in business, but don't have the capital to do it long enough (i.e. endure enough failed risks) to be successful.
“If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.”
Wonder if there should be a "UBI reservation" set up where everyone gets it, and very basic needs like housing and food are taken care of in a self-sustaining manner with machines. (which is the whole premise, everything is automated so nobody needs to work). Then people who don't like the freeloading can opt out and live as usual, and those who like it can move to the reservation.
Weird and cute how you think you're one of the good, special ones that wont have their value or status affected by whats coming. Im sure you 'll come out on top, thats always what happens for the "industrious"...
Their wealth is more contingent on our consumption than employment status. If that goes, then you're looking at a zero-sum society where no new wealth is generated.
Ultimately people will remain enterprising status-seekers. Rich people can already sit around with their wealth doing fuck-all excepting consuming, and they don't.
> Their wealth is more contingent on our consumption than employment status.
Is it? Or is it dependent on the consumption of someone much greater than you.
For example: I was reading something the other day about dining experiences in Las Vegas. Really though, the video was about how recently Vegas has abandoned the traditional middle class patrons in favor of providing experiences to a smaller, but much wealthier clientele. This seems to be a trend across many industries. In some cases your consumption is even a cost center to be eliminated in favor of a more successful customer base.
lol well the majority of the top 1% globally didn't make their fortune serving food, to other wealthy patrons no less (how's that for circular reasoning). We're in a consumer society, B2B sales is a thing but it's a side-effect of that.
They wealthy will be buying islands (as big as Australia) get high on cocaine and do safari, shooting humans there as the ultimate fun [1]. The prey underestimates how the mind of predator works, and that's why it is a prey.
In a post-scarcity society, having a meagre policy to keep people alive and not-unruly is cheap. It's also getting way ahead of ourselves, since it's nowhere in sight. Software hiring was up this year.
Not really. The planet is crowded, currently with mostly productive members of society.
For the ultra rich psychos who run the show, do you really think they want poor people hanging around? When we can be wiped out in a few months?
Consider the pure greed Donald Trump is displaying. Now imagine that the 1000 most powerful people are the same, except they are smart enough to at least not rub it in peoples faces on live television.
> do you really think they want poor people hanging around?
Which by your rationale would include everyone who isn't rich (and tautologically would mean "no one is rich anymore"). They do not care whether we're hanging around, the same way they do not care now whether poor people exist. It has no bearing. All that does is whether they remain rich and powerful, and last I checked, that's relative. Being the only one left on the planet won't make you feel rich, and there being poors on a piece of land won't have any bearing on you.
> When we can be wiped out in a few months?
Lol
Also, on the population front, growth is poised to completely stall in less than 100 years. The fertility rate is terrible in developed countries, and falling quickly in developing ones as they get richer
want to believe it? mon ami have you looked at any labor history?
they used to send 9 year olds to the mines. mortality rates were as high as 50% before they turned 20.
why do you think the AI robber barons are any nicer? it is painfully obvious they're not. and all of this is set to a backdrop of global ecological collapse.
Yeah, at the advent of the industrial revolution. And prior to that 80% of people had to work the land, with no ammonia, just horses and manure.
Labor conditions from over a century ago, before the laws were written, have no bearing on whether wealthy people would try their best to kill you "just because". That's nonsensical.
The only reason any of us can read is because industrialists a long time ago decided we would be more productive if we would. The labour standards in the US today established by FDR and the New Deal were done under duress, with a very popular effectively holding a gun to the ownership class's head. They've been working to claw it all back ever since.
The whole reason trillions are being spent on AI and not making thing better for little people is because we don't want to have to depend on them anymore for anything... you know, so we can get rid of them. Having 8 billion people alive at once is a huge liability.
“Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work together for the benefit of all.” —- John Maynard Keynes
What does the data and observations tell us so far, in this context?
That’s certainly a component, but I think the biggest issue is that people have this religious fervor that capitalism is the only way to structure a socioeconomic system, even when the data shows it is exceptionally bad at ensuring a good quality of life for the majority of citizens.
It’s changing in the US with Democratic Socialists over performing, and with high support for them with the under 35 cohort, the question is if this momentum can be sustained for years through various election cycles (as ~2M 55+ voters age out every year, and ~3M voters turn 18 and age into the electorate every year).
“Progress occurs one funeral at a time.” — Max Planck
Are you going to strike? Are we going to take on the government by force?
People need to understand there is no democracy in a post-AGI world.
The power of human collectives comes from a combination of our collective economic power and our physical power. Without either leaders would be smart to just do what the companies paying all the bills ask if they don't want their families to starve too.
> all of us waiting for government bureaucrats to realise that UBI is a right
You'll be waiting forever, then. This isn't something that you can wait to be given to you, it must be taken.
Or, put much more eloquently by one of the greatest Americans:
"This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress"
Then they are in for a very rude awakening, given that the same God says "You must not wrong the widow and the orphan; wronged, they will cry out to me for redress, and their cry will be heard. My anger will blaze out against you, and I will smite you with the sword, making widows of your own wives, orphans of your own children." (Exodus 22:22-24).
It's funny, because extreme poverty rates as defined by the UN have been decimated in the last century, and continue to drop, because of growth qua capitalism.
You're reflecting the populist notion that wealth is zero-sum. If that were true we'd still be in caves fighting over sticks. The average quality of life has skyrocketed in the last century alongside growth, and there's no non-capitalist country now or in history that's been an enviable place for average people to live.
A prosperous middle class is not a requirement for capitalism to work, and there are more capitalist systems where that's not the case than where there is.
The upper class live in walled neighborhoods with private guards. There's a small merchant class, and then the majority of the population are working class. Much of Central and South America live like this.
There was no middle class to speak of while living under communism here in Eastern Europe. We were all queueing for food equally. Except the nomenklatura, of course.
> How do the gears of capitalism keep turning without UBI in such a scenario?
The part you've got wrong here is thinking that Capitalism is equivalent to innovation and growth, which it is not.
Capitalism simply serves capital, and with less and less of its constraints being physically bound to resources, there is very much a plausible world in which only a small handful of consolidated bank accounts exist so long as those bank accounts can reasonably control the monopoly of violence.
There is a point historically in which Capitalism absolutely served to provide widespread innovation and prosperity at scale, but this is not a feature of capitalism inherently but rather a consequence of it when run within the existing system of labor mechanics at the time.
Capitalism can still very much exist within a Feudal structure of governance, its contributions to society will be much lesser, but it can still very much exist.
> there is very much a plausible world in which only a small handful of consolidated bank accounts exist so long as those bank accounts can reasonably control the monopoly of violence.
Capitalism means separation of violence from capital, if capital controls violence then its not capitalism because there can only be a free market when guns that can't be bribed with money protects it.
For example in communism capital control violence, that is why its so bad, since when capital controls violence it no longer need to produce good results to thrive, it can just use force, which is how every communist regime acted.
In anarchy capital also control violence, so its not capitalism, since without a state to prevent capital from hiring thugs to force others into submission you don't have a free market, whoever has the most thugs wins.
You can build livable domiciles for a few grand in bulk, recycle waste via composting to reduce infrastructure needs, shared batteries and solar, etc. There are plenty of people on youtube demonstrating the permie off grid lifestyle. Grains are cheap and we have a wild boar and deer problem in a lot of the country so food wouldn't be too expensive either.
For the record, I'm into permaculture/regenerative agriculture and enjoy the lifestyle, all I need is shared satellite internet. If my choice was between working 60 hours a week at 3 jobs to barely keep my head above water, or live in an agricultural commune, I would take the commune every time.
It doesn't matter if its cheap, the economy requires monetary exchange. What work are people doing that would balance out the work to build composting systems, infrastructure needs, batteries, solar, wheat, 'wild boar' (protip, there isnt enough without farming, I hunt). All of these things you've stated require a long chain of manufacturing, none of which are free. The systems themselves are incredibly complex and require hard human work.
Can you explain to me how any of this is possible under the constraints you've made. I can only see regression not an evolution or an improvement.
There's a productive capacity of the economy, and there's allocation. Currently we allocate a large portion of the economy to dog bowls shaped like toilets that flush when your dog eats out of it, billy bass singing wall tchotchkies, etc. We need a functional economy to produce a lot of the things you mention, but we can absolutely afford to shift resources away from plastic capitalist garbage.
I've known enough permies that have made it work to know that it's possible to have an off grid lifestyle that's quite decent if you value time and relaxation over material abundance. You talk about regression, but what about the regression of people working 3 jobs, 60 hours a week in shit jobs and barely clearing every month? Those same people could have a hay bale house, composting toilet, a permaculture garden and work 15 hours a week to pay for internet/food you can't grow/farming inputs (limited in permaculture setups).
I'm not doubting that it can be done on the small scale. I just dont think it can be done on any large scale. You kinda skipped over what I stated.
There isnt a way to distribution of shelter, food and storage on the scale required with the collapsing tech tree that will happen when UBI is across the board.
The same factory that creates the plastic extrusions for the dog bowl are the ones that make it for the compost toilet. (Yes, Ive used a real outback dunny), even that has a tech tree that is outside of the basic requirements you've understood.
This doesn't go into the issues that will happen when the tech and delivery tree of things as simple as insulin happen. Every parent I know is going to get back into those three jobs to save their kid, its not even a question.
I have serious concern that the "UBI will work" attitude will be successful, it sounds great short term and if we as a society adopt it, and it fails (it will) we've fucked humanity for the rest of time.
Unless every citizen in every country adopts it, those who maintain their military machine will dominate the rest of the planet so easily it would be finished up in a year.
This passive position is a luxury that certain western countries have.
The resources exist, it's just a matter of allocating them properly. We have lumber and concrete to build houses. We have fertilizer and land and trucks to grow and ship food. And apparently all of this will be immensely cheaper (practically free) within a decade thanks to robotics and AI (according to the trillionaire half this place worships.)
With that said I doubt that reallocation will happen in any meaningful way, and as the elites eliminate more people from the economy we'll descend further into violence and chaos. If the parasite class was generous, they wouldn't be parasites.
I keep hearing these, but i find it so hard to connect reality to what you're saying.
All of your ideas sound great, I doubt they work. I fear you misunderstand the complexity tech tree required to deliver this utopia you desire. There is too much work required that won't be being done, "with ai" and "with robotics" , of which they have thier own tech and resource trees of dependencies.
If people are not paying for the resources (and how will they, since on ubi there is no requirement to deliver value) robots wont be made, and you're back to caveman development.
I'm happy to debate this, but I just feel the whole arguement of -it will just happen- is incredible wishful thinking.
Worker protections have almost never been granted by the profiteers... not child labor laws, not weekends, not overtime, not safety regulations, not minimum wage, not workers comp... the working class is not what it is today because of "sharing prosperity" and there's been a lot of prosperity — it's all a series of fights.
This is all well known, but I recently visited an old coal mine in Pennsylvania, and much of the tour was talking about the labor conditions, and the generational "trap" of working there. If a worker died, the family had little time to leave the company-provided house without providing someone to work. What often happened is that one of the children would work to maintain the household.
>[0]the "rights and interests of the laboring man will be protected and cared for—not by the labor agitators, but by the Christian men to whom God in His infinite wisdom has given the control of the property interests of the country."
He’s saying the same thing as you. I don’t think UBI will magically appear. If people lose their jobs, what guarantee do you give that they can survive? Thats his point - prepare for this event so that the guarantee can be made sooner.
He is a smart man -- with an enormous $100B vested interest in the capital side of this equation. It is (meager) progress to hear any acknowledgement from capital at all that we might conceivably need to do something other than pump aggregate labor supply and dump aggregate demand.
This is a baby step, but it's a baby step in the right direction.
there was a professor in SoCal who was a big fan of what he called Libertarian UBI -- we have an insane amount of qaulification for programs -- must be a certain age, certain condition, must prove that condition consistently, etc. etc.
abandon that entire apperatus and just cut people a check.
even glenn beck called it out w/ obamacare -- "if total spending is $3million per person [it wasn't, btw], then why not just cut every person a check?"
I really don't think UBI can ever happen in the US. There is a moral imperative of "industriousness". Keynes' prediction (or maybe desire) ~100 years ago of the 15 hour workweek never panned out.
More people work. Keynes died in 1946 - meaning they had grand depression in his lifetime. Moreover, women employment went up by significant amounts - middle and upper class women would not work back then.
In the US, you're at least as likely to have half the population vote that anyone who cannot find a job should be exterminated, despite a large proportion of those voting for it being the very people most likely to become jobless, because Fox News will convince them it will mostly affect immigrants and/or some other group they're supposed to hate.
The funny thing is that the wealthy and powerful don't realise that a collapse of that scale means that every switches to professional guillotine builder over night.
There is no preparing for that.
I doubt we get there to be honest, they all have wealth and power because there are consumers with money. No more consumers, no more wealth and power.
P.S. remember my guy Bill didn't write a nice blog post about any of the allegations around his involvement with Epstein. So, you know, this is basically just marketing more than Bill's thoughts.
The funny thing is that the wealthy and powerful don't realise that a collapse of that scale means that every switches to professional guillotine builder over night.
Even during the Great Depression ,a period of record wealth inequality and much worse economic conditions, this did not happen.
UBI as a concept does not add up. It assumes an even production of all goods that people might need, but there isn't, you are giving everyone fiat currency that is not inherently tied to any physical good.
Very fast you will descend into either plan economy where you get food stamps, or an economy where people are trading goods that are actually tied to value.
For example, you go to the store to get eggs, since everyone has UBI, they decide to also get eggs, the eggs either run out, or the store raises the price, at which either you will get food queues like in the USSR, or everyone will need more UBI to afford eggs.
The solution to this is to increase egg production, but this is not instant, and not necessarily a priority, while money transfers are instant.
Without a workforce there is no consumption, and therefore capitalism cannot exist. Yes, we would require a planned economy. Call it communism or whatever you like, but free market economics literally cannot exist in such an environment.
Capitalism is based on two simple, fundamental assumptions about the world:
- everyone works
- everyone consumes
1. Turned out not to be true. We have disabled people, elderly people. We patch it with legislation like SSI. That only works because everyone else is still working.
Our monkey patch solutions have held up well for a long time. But, if either of those two assumptions are broken in a large way, the entire system collapses. UBI is yet another monkey patch. As you know, it won’t hold if we bend the invariants of the system enough.
Eventually, a fully planned economy will not be optional.
Try to convince the majority of the western world that are consuming the equal of 4-6 globes that they are eligible for:
(1) National Park visit a year
(3) RoboTaxi rides this week
(2) Eggs for the week
Who will do the planning? Why would the population accept this planning?
You will in practice need full surveillance and control of your population and an agreement between every country that this is how we are going to do things.
At that point you can also ask the question what value humans provide at all. Why upkeep all of this when you can just expand compute, perform resource extraction instead of managing your cattle.
There will be a workforce, it just won't be human-based. Capitalism has always existed without 100% employment, in every example someone needs to work to support others who cannot. Humans have done this under capitalism to support their families and communities, but now we will need to find incentives for robots to do this. It might be as simple as just telling them.
Right but then the robots would produce wealth, but they cannot own it. So you need to redistribute the wealth. Which is, decidedly, not capitalism.
A little bit of wealth distribution exists within American capitalism, through monkey-patches like I mentioned. But full wealth distribution is a new economic system altogether.
Right I guess that was your main point. This would be a pivot away from capitalism. But it’s unclear what would be a capitalism-based proposal which addresses the issues. Has anyone seriously proposed one?
> It assumes an even production of all goods that people might need, but there isn't, you are giving everyone fiat currency that is not inherently tied to any physical good.
Is what you're saying that since UBI would disconnect someone's production from their income, then this will cause shortages of goods? I think UBI only works if the income generated by it is tied to production. That production would not be generated by human labor, but instead by robot labor. I think if you disconnect that then the system would not work, but why would you need to?
I'm no economist but here is how I think of it. In an ideal world let's assume every worker is replaced by one AI / robot that is an exact clone of them. Then let's say there is an ideal government that taxes all the income each person's clone makes and hands it directly to them. In such an economy nothing would change, things would go on as they always have.
Now some will be unlucky and end up with a clone that makes them way less than average. So to fix this the salaries of all the clones are put into one pot and redistributed as "UBI". Given the wealth disparity, most people would end up better off than before, the high earners of the past will be a bit worse off though.
But of course we are not in a perfect world, in reality there are many inefficiencies, and no company would accept a 100% AI worker tax. However, these AIs are presumably not just our clones, but 100x better. So we are in a position of abundance not scarcity. There's enough eggs for everyone. It becomes a question of distribution and policy
Where do you live? Do all houseowners get kicked out of their homes? Do you raze all houses and build similar apartments and resettle people? If not, there will be inequalities. How does someone who is born into a shit house at a polluted street move up to a nice house in a forest? You still need full control and acceptance of inequality from all sides.
"This implies that the price of housing will become dominated by the price of the land (as opposed to the cost of building housing), so dense housing (e.g. skyscrapers) will become relatively much cheaper than sparse housing"
There's a later bit that talks about keeping earth as a reserve too.
There is really a more fundamental problem related to housing/real estate.
You can't arbitrage the real estate market to add to your UBI savings by living on the street.
Maybe a tougher problem is any solution here would have to collapse real estate prices nationally. You would have to undo the massive inequality that the real estate market would represent at the start of UBI. You would have to ban the owning of more than one home and have a force liquidation for the people owning second homes. Whatever is attempted would create all kinds of loopholes that would just be gamed unless now we are talking about all apartment buildings being government ran.
Any time UBI comes up the economic discussion is just so hopelessly naive. It isn't even at the level of homo economicus stupidity. It is the level of a teenager who has read that back of Capital at Barnes and Noble then thought about solutions after stopping at the dispensary.
I don't understand why people always spring for UBI. I don't want free money; I want to earn my living. I want to work.
Why do we not push for labor reform, as we did a century ago? Depending on the actual productivity gains from AI broadly, set a new standard of 4-hour workdays. Or 3-day work weeks.
Cool. You can work three days a week and earn a fraction of what you make now - far less than a living wage - because the market value of your labor has been reduced to nil by AI. You aren't going to be paid more because you're more productive, that isn't how it has ever worked.
The rest of us want to be able to eat once capitalism decides we aren't worth the cost to keep alive.
Labor reform worked in a natural system where capital needed the labor, just had problems with abusing it.
New paradigm is a push for no workers at all which sounds a lot messier to fix as you start regulating how many employees a business has. How do contractors work? And if the contractors are robots?
You are right, it is tricky. But the assumption is that AGI is going to get here before employment becomes difficult to obtain. If AGI is here, then we have the problem you speak about. If not, then AI is a tool which enables workers to be more productive. If workers with this new tool are more productive to the point that employment across a broad spectrum of possible jobs is hit hard, then we need to talk about labor reform of the sort I spoke about. It would increase the amount of people needed in the workforce across the board.
"You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inert, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it." -- Morpheus (The Matrix)
UBI isn't about not being able to work if you want to. It's about being free from being a wage slave.
My interpretation of his point was that people get a ton of meaning out of their work in our current capitalist system, and regardless of whether or not we change our system in the long term, if we don't do something about jobs in the short term, there will be a civil crisis:
> In a capitalist society, employment is the way most people get the money they need to pay for the basics of life as well as being a key source of dignity and social connection.
> When a community has high unemployment, the ripple effects can be pervasive. Research suggests that in some parts of the United States, factory closures contribute to a rise in deaths from opioid overdoses. Now imagine similar pressures on both white-collar and blue-collar workers nationwide.
> Waiting until people are already displaced or underemployed will be too late. AI is a structural challenge to the way our economy is organized, and it requires thinking and action now.
----
I agree he should've addressed UBI directly. When he was asked about it in an AMA a decade ago he basically said he's optimistic it can happen eventually but not yet [1]. And in that same AMA he said he wished to see "computers that can read and understand information like humans do" within his lifetime [2]. Now that the latter has happened I wish we could see how his thoughts have changed on the former.
We are really good at figuring out how to make toys that are in short supply so you have to invest all this time in acquiring the toys, for nothing more than the social signal involved that comes from the circular reason that the toys are hard to acquire.
We will figure new methods of scarce toy production. To believe otherwise seems delusional to me.
There is also this problem with UBI that I don't know how it can be solved. I see it in a certain percentage of people I know. Maybe 15-20%. As soon as they get paid that money is spent and usually spent on bullshit. Any hint of credit worthiness was used up a long time ago because it is the same process. If you gave them a daily morning UBI amount they would be broke by dinner and hungry. It is very hard to explain what causes this. To pretend this doesn't exist also seems completely delusional to me.
9 to 5 isn't slaving. Even in a jungle, you'd be scavenging and hunting all day. See the birds? They're constantly busy. You want to sit around all day? You'd be miserable. A strange perspective to argue that because past generations worked, we should be able to stop working?
But this quote from Bill is a wrong perspective I think. "reduce job losses" is short term reactive thinking. What you need is adapt to what skillsets the modern world needs. If we have a bunch of leatherworkers, you don't "reduce job losses", you get people to understand the new world and pick up the relevant skills. A job isn't a thing, it's an activity (this reads like an AI wrote it, but it's all hand-written). People can do any job and pick up new ones quickly in the right environment.
Just for the context UBI kind of already exists in some countries but in a different form. If you are in Ireland and do not work you get the benefits provided you have somewhere to live and can pick them up in the post office (~200eur/week). The problem is that it solves only part of the issue because people have to live somewhere, and sure the gov will even contribute towards it (they do already) but somehow not enough is being built. The benefit is basically not enough to get the mortgage, nor is there housing available.
It’s a good thoughtful piece. If I may suggest, the main problem and I mean the actual main problem are those people who underestimate the capabilities of AI. The ones who think it hallucinates all the time, unreliable and mostly useless.
The average person thinks this technology is overhyped (like Emily Bender) so how would one even begin to have a conversation with them on the risks?
This is my experience too. Many people in my offline, non-techy life seem to get almost upset when I argue that models are good at many things (and getting better fast).
And I kind of get it! If your primary exposure to AI is Google search summaries (from their cheapest models) and shitty AI graphic design, it makes sense to think it's vastly overhyped.
Unfortunately it’s not just non technical people, it’s also technical people from my experience. They are usually too caught up in “how it always works” so they can’t think outside of it.
I like how Tyler Cowen puts it: "This is the worst they will ever be".
And some people are still stuck on what AI was capable of when GPT-3.5 was SOTA. They don't realize how much they've improved in ~4 years. Even if the rate of improvement slows down, AI will be tremendously more capable in another ~4 years.
Tax profits, it was always the most equitable option.
Personally I think the idea of taxing robots/tokens directly is too narrow an idea.
That's half the battle. The other half is closing all the loopholes and making stuff that used to be illegal, illegal again (e.g. stock buybacks).
Marginal income taxes are regressive now in the sense that folks with more wealth have far more resources to avoid paying them, but otherwise the reasoning seems less regressive than a consumption tax (e.g. VAT)
Sounds great, except it ignores the fact that capital interests have controlled the levers of our faux democracies for decades, with no end in sight.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniparty
https://www.aboutswitzerland.eda.admin.ch/en/direct-democrac...
FWIW I am not from Switzerland, I only live there. Direct democracy works great.
More importantly, even if it did contain the solution, there is no obvious way for a country with an already corrupt government to transition to such a thing.
If someone else hasn't given a thought yet to Liquid Democracy, I propose they give it a couple of minutes of imaginary thought https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy
For some real world data there are some studies about (I think) German branch of the Pirate Party using it in internal decision making and there is interesting insight for those curious.
It be nice if we all where allowed to vote on particular laws if interested, and defer certain topics to our delegated experts. (Chat Control for example, would be a non issue then.)
The technology for that approach has been mature enough since the rise of social media and private crypto currencies (as a means of electronic private vote, particularly around usage of smart contracts for delegation). What about the interest and spreading of these ideas? Pretty limited, to non-existent. Some people like to follow leaders, though naturally wouldn't expect it to be the silent majority.
If your measure of "success" is women gaining voting rights in 1990 (!) in the last canton, then yeah, Switzerland is doing great.
Switzerland is the land of paranoid hillybillies, by law they need to provide each citizen with 1 square meter of bunker space, every new build has a bunker in the basement.
Regarding ignorance/swayed. I think in much of the EU and especially Germany, the currently ruling parties are completly ignorant about needed changes in the migration approach. The "public" knows this. And its the rulers which need to be nudged by e.g. direct democracy.
Switzerland already voted against immigration once before in 2014, EU punished them for it and they walked it back quickly. No larger catastrophe happened.
I don't see what would break if for example Netherlands copied Swiss direct democracy.
And I thought he is a smart man. This is so last century thinking. We need to prepare that there will definitely be no jobs for everyone and that will be falling all the time, it’s not a one-time event you should “prepare for”. There’s nothing to prepare, we already have funds and productivity to feed and shelter everyone. UBI is not a privilege, previous generations were slaving 9 to 5 all their lives so we can have it. This is it, arrived, and now, enter a few decades of historical period when all of us waiting for government bureaucrats to realise that UBI is a right.
One would hope that this would still go down better than destituting large percentages of the world population, but I wonder.
Everyone enjoys some sort of benefit, tax break, subsidy, etc. from the government. UBI is the same thing in the form of a regular, universal transfer payment. Nothing more, nothing less.
This reminds me of white people in the American south that didn't personally own slaves, but fought in the civil war anyway to maintain their place in the social hierarchy https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/67fvaf/comme...
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/f9j6hg/why_d...
“If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.”
― Lyndon B. Johnson
Ultimately people will remain enterprising status-seekers. Rich people can already sit around with their wealth doing fuck-all excepting consuming, and they don't.
Is it? Or is it dependent on the consumption of someone much greater than you.
For example: I was reading something the other day about dining experiences in Las Vegas. Really though, the video was about how recently Vegas has abandoned the traditional middle class patrons in favor of providing experiences to a smaller, but much wealthier clientele. This seems to be a trend across many industries. In some cases your consumption is even a cost center to be eliminated in favor of a more successful customer base.
[1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3epygq5272o
It can be easy to mistake a parasitic relationship for a predatory one.
For the ultra rich psychos who run the show, do you really think they want poor people hanging around? When we can be wiped out in a few months?
Consider the pure greed Donald Trump is displaying. Now imagine that the 1000 most powerful people are the same, except they are smart enough to at least not rub it in peoples faces on live television.
They hate you, and want you dead.
> do you really think they want poor people hanging around?
Which by your rationale would include everyone who isn't rich (and tautologically would mean "no one is rich anymore"). They do not care whether we're hanging around, the same way they do not care now whether poor people exist. It has no bearing. All that does is whether they remain rich and powerful, and last I checked, that's relative. Being the only one left on the planet won't make you feel rich, and there being poors on a piece of land won't have any bearing on you.
> When we can be wiped out in a few months?
Lol
Also, on the population front, growth is poised to completely stall in less than 100 years. The fertility rate is terrible in developed countries, and falling quickly in developing ones as they get richer
they used to send 9 year olds to the mines. mortality rates were as high as 50% before they turned 20.
why do you think the AI robber barons are any nicer? it is painfully obvious they're not. and all of this is set to a backdrop of global ecological collapse.
Yeah, at the advent of the industrial revolution. And prior to that 80% of people had to work the land, with no ammonia, just horses and manure.
Labor conditions from over a century ago, before the laws were written, have no bearing on whether wealthy people would try their best to kill you "just because". That's nonsensical.
"Nice" has nothing to do with it.
The whole reason trillions are being spent on AI and not making thing better for little people is because we don't want to have to depend on them anymore for anything... you know, so we can get rid of them. Having 8 billion people alive at once is a huge liability.
Oryx and Crake, I think, was the first time I encountered that idea.
What does the data and observations tell us so far, in this context?
It’s changing in the US with Democratic Socialists over performing, and with high support for them with the under 35 cohort, the question is if this momentum can be sustained for years through various election cycles (as ~2M 55+ voters age out every year, and ~3M voters turn 18 and age into the electorate every year).
“Progress occurs one funeral at a time.” — Max Planck
Are you going to strike? Are we going to take on the government by force?
People need to understand there is no democracy in a post-AGI world.
The power of human collectives comes from a combination of our collective economic power and our physical power. Without either leaders would be smart to just do what the companies paying all the bills ask if they don't want their families to starve too.
You'll be waiting forever, then. This isn't something that you can wait to be given to you, it must be taken.
Or, put much more eloquently by one of the greatest Americans:
"This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress"
- Frederick Douglass
UBI is how capitalism keeps going, else a new system will be needed.
UBI will be given but we should take even more control and take a % of ownership.
The top 10% of consumers accounted for half of all spending in the second quarter of 2025.
Capitalism will happily chug along while leaving a massive number of people desperately poor.
There's a reason the AI CEOs have all become obsessed with the concept of a "permanent underclass."
If a UBI is ever "given" it will be just enough to keep the underclass from rising up and killing the owner class and not one cent more.
it's not for nothin that they've been slipping Zachariah 13:8 into discussions that show up in places like 8chan or ssethtzeentech videos
"Declares the LORD: 'in all the land, two-thirds will be cut off and perish, but one-third will be left alive' "
The marketing and agit-prop types would call this "priming" or "conditioning"
You're reflecting the populist notion that wealth is zero-sum. If that were true we'd still be in caves fighting over sticks. The average quality of life has skyrocketed in the last century alongside growth, and there's no non-capitalist country now or in history that's been an enviable place for average people to live.
The upper class live in walled neighborhoods with private guards. There's a small merchant class, and then the majority of the population are working class. Much of Central and South America live like this.
The part you've got wrong here is thinking that Capitalism is equivalent to innovation and growth, which it is not. Capitalism simply serves capital, and with less and less of its constraints being physically bound to resources, there is very much a plausible world in which only a small handful of consolidated bank accounts exist so long as those bank accounts can reasonably control the monopoly of violence.
There is a point historically in which Capitalism absolutely served to provide widespread innovation and prosperity at scale, but this is not a feature of capitalism inherently but rather a consequence of it when run within the existing system of labor mechanics at the time. Capitalism can still very much exist within a Feudal structure of governance, its contributions to society will be much lesser, but it can still very much exist.
Capitalism means separation of violence from capital, if capital controls violence then its not capitalism because there can only be a free market when guns that can't be bribed with money protects it.
For example in communism capital control violence, that is why its so bad, since when capital controls violence it no longer need to produce good results to thrive, it can just use force, which is how every communist regime acted.
In anarchy capital also control violence, so its not capitalism, since without a state to prevent capital from hiring thugs to force others into submission you don't have a free market, whoever has the most thugs wins.
Where ? who ?
Let’s ask him straight - would he be ok living like that? Lmfao
Lots of looney tunes comments on this thread
Can you explain to me how any of this is possible under the constraints you've made. I can only see regression not an evolution or an improvement.
I've known enough permies that have made it work to know that it's possible to have an off grid lifestyle that's quite decent if you value time and relaxation over material abundance. You talk about regression, but what about the regression of people working 3 jobs, 60 hours a week in shit jobs and barely clearing every month? Those same people could have a hay bale house, composting toilet, a permaculture garden and work 15 hours a week to pay for internet/food you can't grow/farming inputs (limited in permaculture setups).
I'm not doubting that it can be done on the small scale. I just dont think it can be done on any large scale. You kinda skipped over what I stated.
There isnt a way to distribution of shelter, food and storage on the scale required with the collapsing tech tree that will happen when UBI is across the board.
The same factory that creates the plastic extrusions for the dog bowl are the ones that make it for the compost toilet. (Yes, Ive used a real outback dunny), even that has a tech tree that is outside of the basic requirements you've understood.
This doesn't go into the issues that will happen when the tech and delivery tree of things as simple as insulin happen. Every parent I know is going to get back into those three jobs to save their kid, its not even a question.
I have serious concern that the "UBI will work" attitude will be successful, it sounds great short term and if we as a society adopt it, and it fails (it will) we've fucked humanity for the rest of time.
Unless every citizen in every country adopts it, those who maintain their military machine will dominate the rest of the planet so easily it would be finished up in a year.
This passive position is a luxury that certain western countries have.
With that said I doubt that reallocation will happen in any meaningful way, and as the elites eliminate more people from the economy we'll descend further into violence and chaos. If the parasite class was generous, they wouldn't be parasites.
All of your ideas sound great, I doubt they work. I fear you misunderstand the complexity tech tree required to deliver this utopia you desire. There is too much work required that won't be being done, "with ai" and "with robotics" , of which they have thier own tech and resource trees of dependencies.
If people are not paying for the resources (and how will they, since on ubi there is no requirement to deliver value) robots wont be made, and you're back to caveman development.
I'm happy to debate this, but I just feel the whole arguement of -it will just happen- is incredible wishful thinking.
Worker protections have almost never been granted by the profiteers... not child labor laws, not weekends, not overtime, not safety regulations, not minimum wage, not workers comp... the working class is not what it is today because of "sharing prosperity" and there's been a lot of prosperity — it's all a series of fights.
>[0]the "rights and interests of the laboring man will be protected and cared for—not by the labor agitators, but by the Christian men to whom God in His infinite wisdom has given the control of the property interests of the country."
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1902_anthracite_coal_strike
This is a baby step, but it's a baby step in the right direction.
Notice that when you open your mouth, there is no roast chicken that flies in.
abandon that entire apperatus and just cut people a check.
even glenn beck called it out w/ obamacare -- "if total spending is $3million per person [it wasn't, btw], then why not just cut every person a check?"
Instead of everyone working less what happened is less people work. The fact that it took that specific shape is a source of A LOT of problems.
see also: the German far right pending a takeover, or like, half of all politics in India
There is no preparing for that.
I doubt we get there to be honest, they all have wealth and power because there are consumers with money. No more consumers, no more wealth and power.
Even during the Great Depression ,a period of record wealth inequality and much worse economic conditions, this did not happen.
For how long?
For example, you go to the store to get eggs, since everyone has UBI, they decide to also get eggs, the eggs either run out, or the store raises the price, at which either you will get food queues like in the USSR, or everyone will need more UBI to afford eggs. The solution to this is to increase egg production, but this is not instant, and not necessarily a priority, while money transfers are instant.
Capitalism is based on two simple, fundamental assumptions about the world:
- everyone works
- everyone consumes
1. Turned out not to be true. We have disabled people, elderly people. We patch it with legislation like SSI. That only works because everyone else is still working.
Our monkey patch solutions have held up well for a long time. But, if either of those two assumptions are broken in a large way, the entire system collapses. UBI is yet another monkey patch. As you know, it won’t hold if we bend the invariants of the system enough.
Eventually, a fully planned economy will not be optional.
(1) National Park visit a year (3) RoboTaxi rides this week (2) Eggs for the week
Who will do the planning? Why would the population accept this planning?
You will in practice need full surveillance and control of your population and an agreement between every country that this is how we are going to do things.
At that point you can also ask the question what value humans provide at all. Why upkeep all of this when you can just expand compute, perform resource extraction instead of managing your cattle.
A little bit of wealth distribution exists within American capitalism, through monkey-patches like I mentioned. But full wealth distribution is a new economic system altogether.
Is what you're saying that since UBI would disconnect someone's production from their income, then this will cause shortages of goods? I think UBI only works if the income generated by it is tied to production. That production would not be generated by human labor, but instead by robot labor. I think if you disconnect that then the system would not work, but why would you need to?
Now some will be unlucky and end up with a clone that makes them way less than average. So to fix this the salaries of all the clones are put into one pot and redistributed as "UBI". Given the wealth disparity, most people would end up better off than before, the high earners of the past will be a bit worse off though.
But of course we are not in a perfect world, in reality there are many inefficiencies, and no company would accept a 100% AI worker tax. However, these AIs are presumably not just our clones, but 100x better. So we are in a position of abundance not scarcity. There's enough eggs for everyone. It becomes a question of distribution and policy
https://ai-2040.com/supplements/economics-of-plan-a
And yes, moved into skyscrapers:
"This implies that the price of housing will become dominated by the price of the land (as opposed to the cost of building housing), so dense housing (e.g. skyscrapers) will become relatively much cheaper than sparse housing"
There's a later bit that talks about keeping earth as a reserve too.
You can't arbitrage the real estate market to add to your UBI savings by living on the street.
Maybe a tougher problem is any solution here would have to collapse real estate prices nationally. You would have to undo the massive inequality that the real estate market would represent at the start of UBI. You would have to ban the owning of more than one home and have a force liquidation for the people owning second homes. Whatever is attempted would create all kinds of loopholes that would just be gamed unless now we are talking about all apartment buildings being government ran.
Any time UBI comes up the economic discussion is just so hopelessly naive. It isn't even at the level of homo economicus stupidity. It is the level of a teenager who has read that back of Capital at Barnes and Noble then thought about solutions after stopping at the dispensary.
Why do we not push for labor reform, as we did a century ago? Depending on the actual productivity gains from AI broadly, set a new standard of 4-hour workdays. Or 3-day work weeks.
The rest of us want to be able to eat once capitalism decides we aren't worth the cost to keep alive.
New paradigm is a push for no workers at all which sounds a lot messier to fix as you start regulating how many employees a business has. How do contractors work? And if the contractors are robots?
UBI isn't about not being able to work if you want to. It's about being free from being a wage slave.
> In a capitalist society, employment is the way most people get the money they need to pay for the basics of life as well as being a key source of dignity and social connection.
> When a community has high unemployment, the ripple effects can be pervasive. Research suggests that in some parts of the United States, factory closures contribute to a rise in deaths from opioid overdoses. Now imagine similar pressures on both white-collar and blue-collar workers nationwide.
> Waiting until people are already displaced or underemployed will be too late. AI is a structural challenge to the way our economy is organized, and it requires thinking and action now.
----
I agree he should've addressed UBI directly. When he was asked about it in an AMA a decade ago he basically said he's optimistic it can happen eventually but not yet [1]. And in that same AMA he said he wished to see "computers that can read and understand information like humans do" within his lifetime [2]. Now that the latter has happened I wish we could see how his thoughts have changed on the former.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/5whpqs/comment/dea7v1...
[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/5whpqs/comment/dea5fl...
We will figure new methods of scarce toy production. To believe otherwise seems delusional to me.
There is also this problem with UBI that I don't know how it can be solved. I see it in a certain percentage of people I know. Maybe 15-20%. As soon as they get paid that money is spent and usually spent on bullshit. Any hint of credit worthiness was used up a long time ago because it is the same process. If you gave them a daily morning UBI amount they would be broke by dinner and hungry. It is very hard to explain what causes this. To pretend this doesn't exist also seems completely delusional to me.
But this quote from Bill is a wrong perspective I think. "reduce job losses" is short term reactive thinking. What you need is adapt to what skillsets the modern world needs. If we have a bunch of leatherworkers, you don't "reduce job losses", you get people to understand the new world and pick up the relevant skills. A job isn't a thing, it's an activity (this reads like an AI wrote it, but it's all hand-written). People can do any job and pick up new ones quickly in the right environment.
The average person thinks this technology is overhyped (like Emily Bender) so how would one even begin to have a conversation with them on the risks?
And I kind of get it! If your primary exposure to AI is Google search summaries (from their cheapest models) and shitty AI graphic design, it makes sense to think it's vastly overhyped.
And some people are still stuck on what AI was capable of when GPT-3.5 was SOTA. They don't realize how much they've improved in ~4 years. Even if the rate of improvement slows down, AI will be tremendously more capable in another ~4 years.