No plausible UBI system gives people so much money than they can relax and order food delivery while they watch all of their entertainment from their paid subscriptions.
Funding UBI is extremely hard. We would have to more than double our tax intakes to even begin to give a reasonable UBI as a social survival safety net, even if we consider eliminating all other social services.
UBI isn't a life of luxury and food delivery. It's a roof over your head and enough to afford groceries.
It's also confusing that this article thinks the wealthy are going to eliminate all the jobs and then ask to have their taxes raised so the money can be recirculated back to the people to spend on companies. Where do they think the UBI money is going to come from? Or do they believe that UBI is a money faucet that produces new money?
UBI in an unconstrained market is nothing else than enslavement.
Fair and progressive taxation and proper social systems are far more efficient. UBI is just an excuse to get rid of social systems and leave everyone individually stranded with problems no one can solve alone.
It keeps the wolf from the door, but you still need to save enough to retire on.
The US standard tax deduction amounts to about $1300 a month. Suppose that were instead paid out automatically? For the employed, the government check and increased paycheck withholding (if the standard deduction were removed) would largely cancel out. But if you lose your job, you still get the government check.
You could also see this as a reworking of unemployment benefits so that everyone always qualifies for them and they don't run out.
How? It’s going to be a better situation than the current situation where people just become homeless and live on the streets. Yes, rent and food will cost more but there will always be vendors willing to make a reasonable margin.
Ask the people who used to work in the auto plants if that's how it goes.
No one will get a dime unless they organize and fight for it. Otherwise things are more likely to go in the other direction, what safety net exists now gets reduced.
Even during the great depression FDR was only able to get work for pay programs approved that assigned jobs like Conservation Corps, Public Works and WPA rather than just handing out cash. And to get that passed we needed widespread bank collapses, failed farms, starving people and catastrophic unemployment there was STILL heavy opposition to any/all government assistance programs because there is a very deep fear entrenched in the American psyche that government aid creates dependency and weakens individual responsibility. There is a widespread false narrative that any sort of government help is leftist socialism and communism.
People on HN throw out UBI like a viable option... lol please. We can't even fund social security, SNAP or paid parental leave. UBI is a non-starter.
Let's say a burger costs $10. Then UBI is implemented. But not just like $1K/month UBI... $1M/year UBI... for everyone! There's no way that the burger is still $10 now. Right?
Won't the economy just soak up all the extra UBI money? So a burger will cost $1000 in world where everyone gets $1M/year? And like $20 when everyone gets $1K/month? Isn't it all just a wash?
And even if it does end up as a complete wash, that still seems like it would lead to a better economic outcome. You'd end up with trickle-up economics. The kind that has incentives for companies to appeal to consumers, and consumers that have money to spend on goods and services.
Note that this presumes a functioning market (free or otherwise). The company store knows it is the only game in town, so it doesn't have to appeal to anyone.
If you have robust supply and real competition, the ask should trend towards cost plus some profit, not whatever maximum price people will pay out of desperation.
Now the burger cost goes up, and working people have even more money than "normie" millionaires. I imagine people are going to be more free with their money, so they pay more for the burger. And this will settle, per the law of supply and demand.
That part is obvious.
What is not clear to me is how the new price would work out. Maybe it would work out to pretty much the same relative cost it is today, but in inflated dollars. And the rest of the market is doing the same thing. And landlords know you have the money. The squeeze comes back. Cue Econ 101/102.
Our AI overlords think that they will be able to just prompt their LLMs to optimize this regime and make it last but their stupid LLMs can't yet figure out whether to take a car to the carwash or to go by foot, so they are not even close to that.
What's bad for us is that they are now wealthy enough to keep dragging us into this dystopia for a while until something changes.
Mathematically speaking, any UBI amount (or other expansionary monetary policy) could be offset by an equal and opposite increase in aggregate supply, resulting in more money with net zero inflation. If we had 100x higher annual growth in supply of housing/food/energy/transportation/healthcare/electronics/etc., creating 100x more annual growth in money supply would counter the positive supply shock to keep the purchasing power of a dollar stable; the fact that more dollars would exist would simply reflect the reality of having more stuff to go around.
Whether and how it may be possible to achieve such supply growth, however, is another matter entirely. While I'm personally optimistic about the technological trajectories of AI, solar/fusion, and humanoid robotics, optimizing/liberalizing Western economies and adjusting to a post-labor-scarcity world will both be at best politically turbulent.
The incentive for the wealthy to go along with such policies is that it would be a practical necessity in order to continue selling their stuff. If 90% of the population lacked a survivable income, that wouldn't be a functioning economy, it would be a precursor to civil war. Even so, private corporations won't want to voluntarily employ people they don't need, because that's just a textbook prisoner's dilemma. On the other hand, publicly funding such capital distribution puts the corporations on a level playing field relative to one another while enabling business to continue as usual.
For UBI to work, the precondition is Universal Billionaire Income, so it will look something like this when its implemented: The Secretive Conglomerate That Controls Cuba’s Economy: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/05/16/world/america...
That being said, I do think UBI (with some guardrails) is still preferable to making everyone consume services provided exclusively by government monopolies. Not because anything provided by the government in particular is going to be magically low-quality, but because any monopoly is inherently insulated from long-term systemic incentives to compete on price and quality.
As for higher taxes, they're trying to get ahead of the pitchforks.
And plenty of free time to figure out how to eat the rich.
This is already happening on a smaller scale, of course, but if AI models become capable enough to replace the majority of workers then it will put the golden apple to shame.
I think the mistake they're going to make is that they already have most of us fighting for scraps
But they want all of us fighting for even smaller scraps
There's always a limit to how far this can be pushed
But it won't work if necessities are captured by special interests, e.g. doctors ban AIs giving any medical info, even if it is technically capable of replacing them, so they can keep their own jobs.
That sounds very nice. I would finally be able to work full time.
-people who've never tried to do anything involving real estate or land development
And then these idiots have the gall to complain "why isn't anyone doing infill development" and "why isn't anyone putting apartment buildings on small lots?" etc, etc. IDK, maybe because your dumb ass made it illegal to do those things in a way that makes them have a snowball's chance in hell of being in the black. And that's just residential. Commercial is even worse because you get fucked by all the rules that apply to structures and then you get fucked again by all the rules that apply to your use. And don't get me started on how much of this is inherited from the feds in the form of "to qualify for grants the state shall adopt..." type rules which the states then roll downhill onto the municipalities. This is why every "new X" site plan looks damn near the same regardless of what state it's in. They're all designed to comply with rules that were written to satisfy the same requirements.
See also:
"But the regulations I like are the good ones"
Those people are stupid too. That's like littering and saying "but it's only a little, my trash isn't responsible for how dirty the whole place is"
If work can be offloaded to machines and thinking to agents.. there is no need to keep this thing we call society.
Its way way cheaper and faster to build highly guarded enclaves to fance off from worse part of humans.
Ppl at the top dont even think about us as real humans. We are sub spieces to them.
Elyzium is more probable future for us. This or civil war and big reset. Depends who wins.
The same could be said about environmental concerns. It'll be a lot cheaper to deal with today than deal with when it becomes a problem, but its easier to ignore that and collect the cash from oil and gas whilst its going
"Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.” - J.M. Keynes
It seems like none of these SV companies make money, or even have a realistic plan to ever make money. Instead the strategy appears to either a) hope that the investors have infinite funds and keep pretending to grow, b) get bought out by a larger, also unprofitable company, or c) go public and make it so that all of our retirement funds depend on it.
But it’s fine, as long as you brand it as “tech” and give some vague promises of it being “the future”.
A ton of SV companies, and I think maybe the majority, especially startups are not profitable.
> That's not my department!" says Wernher von Braun
The rise of AI does not mean that everyone will lose their jobs and the economy will collapse. That is an utter fallacy.
It's important to ask two questions: - What happens to the workers? - What happens to the capital?
For the first category, it's obvious. The workers lose their jobs. For the second category, the author and many others are under the presumption that the added value of the new added efficiency simply goes into some sort of hemetically sealed vault. That's not how the economy works at all.
The wealth goes to investors, who put it in banks. The banks lend out the money to get a return on investment. The added value must circulate in the economy. The workers do not need to get the money at all to make it circulate. In fact, even today, the majority of wealth is held by the investors/capitalists (many of whom are also the workers).
It's actually the investors who get to decide what to do with the capital. And the most obvious target is EVEN MORE AUTOMATION. Once white collar work is automated, then blue collar work with robotics. Once robotics is automated, then increasing amounts of capital will go to ever diminishing returns on R&D -> fundamental science.
During this process, the educated worker economy and billions of capital will spread like plasmodium fungus into every unoccupied crag and niche in the economy not yet touched by AI to basically add more AI. Investors will necessarily pour billions of dollars into things like robotics, biomedical research, and much more. As new machines come online, millions of jobs will be created, but at the same time millions of jobs will be created to aid the process along b/c for a long time there will be jobs that machines cannot do as we are in the process of doing the R&D and manufacturing for those machines.
These are all overall good things for the world.
By the end of the process, from which we would expect massive massive inequality, the overall standard of living may still be massively improved for the majority of people who do not contribute to this process, and ever more improved to the minority of people who are still involved in the AI based production economy.
I guess it's a metaphor for the "hugely successful" trickle-down economics we have been witnessing.
The known anti-semite and Hitler admirer Henry Ford's chartiable foundation added DEI to its mandate in 2021.
Andrew Carnegie, an infamous monopolist and strike crusher...his charitable foundations helps fund science education to this day, and his university has graduated countless engineers.
The point is... billionaires will die... their capital can continue to work both in the economy and society.
I mean... unless someone figures out immortality. I dread the thought of Jeff Bezos invoking prima noctae
I'll just suggest that you track your predictions and "update your priors" once they start domino falling.
Maybe your thinking that underneath the corporate SAS economy, theres a giant sea of consumer spending that props it all up.
That might be reasonable, but remember that in this future hyper unequal AI economy, only a handful of ultra wealthy people, most likely through agent proxies, make up more purchasing power than the bottom 95% combined. We're already past the 50% mark in the real world, so this is not implausible.
I'm not saying this is a good future. In fact its absolutely dystopian. But its way more plausible than the fantasy world the author is describing.
What do I care if I don't earn money if the robot builds my house and customized medicine better than what we have today is available in abundance? I will be much poorer than the elites, but perhaps still much better off than today.
A very idealized scenario for sure, though. Personally I am still on the "AI as a normal technology" track with the various bottlenecks. Productivity will be a bit higher and that's it, no mass unemployment.
The (sad fucked up) reality is that Joe Schmo consumer never had most of the wealth in the first place. Not since the 1970s at least.
Just like Nvidia makes a lot more money selling GPUs to megacorps rather than to people playing games on their XBox, future corps can make plenty of money serving each other rather than retail consumers.
An autonomous fleet of delivery vehicles needs an autonomous fleet of vehicle service robots, etc, etc. At some point the entire stack will be automated.
Will the working classes be at the bottom of the pyramid and wealth inequality skyrocket. Absolutely. It's practically inevitable. But will the economy collapse? No way.
Just like how DOOM used to require a luxury scale $5,000 home PC to run and now the same level of compute can be found on disposable vape pens, at some point armies of robot servants built by the "tech companies" will be integrated into every facet of human life, from the lowest plebians to the wealthiest patricians.
Do you have anything resembling a source on that claim?
It is incredibly naive to think that the way things currently are is the way things will be. There is significant reason to believe that after enough concentration of power, there would be no reason for them to continue to participate in traditional economics as we know them.
On the bright side, history shows us that powerful people tend to concentrate power up to the point in which they start to believe themselves as some sort of god-like being. At which point they are reliably proven they are not. The Sword of Damocles hangs above all of them.
Nor in recent patterns of "democracy".
Some people will be able to reskill find new work and others won’t and will struggle. Entire communities may disappear or fall into poverty.
except that no one has been able to articulate what "new work" might emerge
and while yes, this happened before, it happened over decades, and more importantly, the new jobs were created as the old ones were being destroyed
neither of these conditions are happening this time around
so we have not "been there before"
I think it's worse than that. The frontier labs are purporting that there won't be any "new work" required in the future—starting with knowledge workers and then eventually snaking down into more manual labor jobs via robotics.
The irony is that these same labs are still hiring engineers to build the machinery they're so convinced will make engineers obsolete. It's so paradoxical it's not true.
The only true things are that AI is a bubble, the current technology is unsustainable given the amount of compute required, and LLMs are overhyped in what they can do well versus what they need to be closely supervised with.
I have a young son and I intend to teach him robotics as a hobby partly because it is where I believe the high-paying jobs will be in 20 years.
This is the reality we lived in already pre-AI.
Net effect: huge inequality, many people buying very cheap goods for tiny wages. Middle class destroyed. Lots of struggle. But not as bad as some folks are saying. History zombies on.
I don’t know, what you’re outlining there is pretty grim. Especially as we could elect to just…not destroy people’s livelihood’s en masse?
I don't know, I don't think many nations/organizations would go for that. If we had that level of trust, it feels like there's a lot of other bad stuff that wouldn't be going on right now.
If we're talking shorter scale, people have traditionally hand-waived it with 'Oh, these jobs will go away, but they'll be replaced with other, higher-skilled jobs!'.
That's an economist's idealism and doesn't fit reality.
For a while every economic advance seemed to mean more and better jobs for horses. But then the automobile comes along and there's no more need for horses and we can see what happens to an animal that has no economic reason to exist.
We still have a much smaller number of horses for the few economically viable roles a horse can fill and as toys for the wealthy.
The question is if labor will follow the same path.
You mean that after some popular discontent arises, the top authorities will simply be overthrown by a competing faction within the ruling class, but that competing faction will fool the masses into thinking that “people power” won out and things are any better?
That is, after all, how most “successful” revolutions have played out. Other revolutions that end with the ruling class being completely overthrown often cause the country to collapse into instability that is terrible for quality of life, until a strongman manages to cement his authority.
Greedy accumulators always end up ruining things for societies when it gets into ridiculous extremes (and there is a part of society that notices and gets fed up).
You are not supposed to run them locally but to pay for them running somewhere else.
(I know, I know... the answer is probably that they expect me to just move my software development to the cloud, too. Joy!)
No, it can and will get so, so much worse.
I want you to imagine, if you will, the homeless equivalent of the United States environmental health concern prior to the formation of the EPA.
Except instead of thick pollution and dumping toxic waste straight into bodies of water, the most populated cities and towns will go from heavy constant homelessness to overwhelming South American poverty and waves and waves of homelessness everywhere.
This idea that no one will have jobs is sophomoric. People will have jobs. Fewer of them will. And you won’t be able to drive from one master planned neighborhood to another without filled, stolen shopping carts and homeless encampments and the police will turn from law enforcement into neighborhood protection and homelessness deterrents.
And then you’ll see it more, and more. And then paradoxically you’ll see more illegal immigration because despite how bad it is, Americans have no idea how bad it is south of the border and how much worse it can get.
You’ll go to the grocery store and the places you grew up will now lock up their inventory.
Some businesses will shutter and others will take their place that cost more or are more upscale to account for corporate rent that never goes down, and you’ll think your neighborhood is getting better but it’s just becoming more bisected.
You’ll wake up one day, and owning a house will become a luxury that will take you a lifetime to get on the first rung of the ladder. And then you’ll realize that this the first step to bisecting the k-shaped economy.
Your friends who are older than you with garages full of tools who have other friends with garages full of tools who help each other and don’t have to spend 5 figures for a remodel for common labor that pays $250/hr per laborer versus your job which pays out $150/hr per tech worker are the new upper middle class.
And young people will look around at this and accept it and do nothing.
And it will get worse and worse and worse a little at a time for years on end until you ask yourself how much more you can cut out of your budget.
And if you don’t have the cash to weather the storm, you’ll find yourself on the other end of the K.
> modern citizens under this system are freed from work only to be permanently trapped as captive consumers.
Wat? Trapped in what? This makes zero sense to me.
> The real issue is not whether machines will take our jobs, but why we should accept a system where we only exist to pass cash back to tech corporations.
What is the proposed alternative? The (rather bad) alternative I see is no UBI and let the masses starve...
producer => provider => consumer.
What happens when providers are the gateway for the providers and consumers? When the providers own the market place for both producers and consumers?
1. A producer grows a potato 2. The provider buys the potato for $0.10 3. The provider sells the potato to the consumer for $600.00
This is the system we have now. The wealth goes to the corporations and wealthy stock owners. $599.90. Well, okay, they end up paying $.90 for packaging and to buy politicians.
The number of people who can afford a potato gets smaller and smaller, so fewer and fewer potatoes are sold. For more and more money. Because there is so little demand for potatoes, then potato growers have excess capacity so they get paid less and less. They go out of business.
Is this a problem? What are the long term effects? Guess we will find out.
I read this essay a few months ago which calmed those doomsday theories for me somewhat: https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
History has repeatedly shown us isolated examples of completely replacing the need for human labour.
The industrial revolution did destroy jobs, but back then labour was incomprehensibly unproductive. So much so that around 200 years ago 50% of the entire workforce worked in agriculture.
This meant that although a large percentage of the total workforce was affected by the industrial revolution the total percentage of jobs that machines could do was absolutely tiny. Even where machines could typically only automate some percentage of the total work. For example, in agriculture although machines could do a lot of the work, there was still a need for humans to operate the machines.
However, there were some exceptions. Texture weavers were completely replaced by machines – it didn't make them more efficient it made them unemployed. More recently human calculators have been completely replaced. And more recently still checkout staff at supermarkets are being replaced by self-service systems. Again, a self-checkout machine doesn't make a job more productive, it entirely replaces the need for a human to do it.
Even today there's still relatively very few jobs which can be entirely done by machines, but for the first time ever, we're starting to see how this could change.
Then the question then is what new jobs might be created if you no longer need graphic designers or VFX artists or lawyers? If humans aren't good for physical labour or mental labour then what are they good for?
The assumption that humans will remain employable assumes that humans will still be able to provide some economic value which machines cannot. That humans unlike horses won't be sent to the glue factory because there will still be some economic use for us so that we can still be net providers and not a net-burden.
Even if we assume there will be a small percentage of jobs which machines won't be able to do, if you have the entire workforce competing for those jobs then you'll probably be paid so poorly you might as well not have a job.
Would be interested what you disagree with. Is it that you don't believe that AI will be able to replace humans entirely? If so what jobs do you think are safe? Or is it that you believe new jobs will be created? If so can you describe what these jobs might involve that machines cannot do?
I've been actively prepping for very bad economic and political scenarios, plus some doom scenarios for about 5 years now.
My assumption is that white collar unemployment will become a serious problem by the end of the decade, but potentially as soon as 2-3 years. I believe ASI will come within 10 years and it's hard to predict past the intelligence singularity, but my assumption would be that rapid ASI-assisted robotic advancements will make the majority of humans in developed nations unemployed within a two decades. But again, I can't really predict what will happen post-ASI. I could be very wrong if just a few variables change.
The unemployment concern is the bit I'm most certain of but that also worries me the least personally, since it's by far the easiest risk to prep for. If I'm made unemployed and never find work again I'll be fine.
I'm also an accelerationist when it comes to AI-driven unemployment because I think an crisis-level unemployment spike before ASI arrives is probably our only hope at getting off the AI doom train we're on before it's too late.
However, more recently I have been having fun by having three concurrent projects going at once. Instead of having less work to do, I just broadened the scope of what I was going to do.
Suddenly, it became so much more interesting. I have started multiple porting-to-WASM projects, a Jellyfin clone that I am already running on my home server written in Erlang, new themes for my blog, and many other things.
I realized that over the years there has been dozens (hundreds?) of projects that I have wanted to do, but I never really got around to doing them because it was just too much effort and I couldn’t justify the time sink. By having multiple agents working at once, I can work on multiple projects concurrently, and I can focus on the harder (and more fun) parts of programming.
Do you feel like porting projects from one language to another is actually that productive?
Like, that's fine if you are having fun, but that has no bearing on this overall discussion about automating all the useful work so that we are no longer needed
My personal projects don’t get paid, no, they’re just for fun, but I feel like my point was missed: instead of “having less to do”, I broadened the scope.
I feel like people are making an incorrect assumption that “labor”, even white collar labor, is a fixed-size problem. I don’t agree with that: there’s never going to be a point where we say “shit, there is literally nothing left to do”.
Tangential, but related.
When I first started my career, it was working for a company that used SVN as its version control (Git hadn’t quite won yet). Every Friday, we would do The Merge. We called it that, like a proper noun.
The Merge was almost always a 4-6 hour process because it would be taking every branch of every feature/bug we have worked on, and merged it into trunk. The day would be then spent fixing merge conflicts as they came up. I was the most junior engineer (borderline intern) and so that task generally fell on me.
Eventually, I found git-svn, and it brought a multi-hour task down to like 30 minutes, since the merging was so much quicker.
Fridays were always blocked out for me to do The Merge, but it’s not like when I got it done in 30 minutes they said “oh, umm, there’s nothing else to do, go home and forget being paid for today”. They just found other stuff for me to do and I did that.
There’s always more stuff that can be done. We won’t ever run out of potential shit we can do.
One thing I have seen no evidence of is AI being smarter than the smartest humans. It's still just a search engine (with an impressive human language UI) of existing human knowledge. It cannot do anything it has not been trained on.
Because this kind of talk always sounds like it’s because people thought The Terminator was a documentary.
Why? Idk
Wouldn't UBI be funded by the wealth generated by the automation in this case? So is the difference only the amount people receive that changes UBI from an economic cushion to sharing the wealth?
In addition the premise that everyone will be fired is a little presumptuous to me. So far we've seen that agents are very capable of automating well-scoped, verifiable tasks but the majority of jobs don't consist of those
2. Even if we were to assume an analogy to a petro state, it seems like we as a society can decide if we go the route of Norway or Venezuela
Are you aware of any reputable study that supports this? Everything I've seen, coding included, has productivity at a net neutral at best, with large cost increases due to LLMs.
Why You Don't Matter Anymore (Economically Speaking) https://youtu.be/T2OHjHPkUzM?si=CNMQLNhs0pkwUsrY
Tl;dw: Most people are already irrelevant to the economy. They are not even needed as consumers anymore because the corporations mostly sell to other corporations and the rich.
But yeah, once the buying power dries up, who is left keeping the lights on?
Very optional consumption.
Those with >~$350k spend drastically less on consumption, funneling most into wealth generating assets
Those <350k->~$100k spend almost 86% of their income on consumption
Everyone else doesn't have enough purchasing power to matter to the market, spend greater than what they earn and have a dependency on debt.
The economy now is already at the point where it doesn't need the bottom 50% to even participate to continue current growth, outside of providing the labor necessary to fuel the consumption of the middle bracket.
The problem is AI/LLM automation is threatening the exact middle bracket that is sustaining the current consumption based economy. If we automated all the jobs of the bottom half of the economic underclass, the ~$100k+ group could run in a closed loop. Instead, we're trying to automate the labor of the very group thats sustaining the system.
The loss of white collar work is going to cause a huge cascading failure that we aren't ready for.
Capitalists don't need worker demand to support their own consumption; spending out of profits directly supports profits overall.
It would be something of a consumption race to the bottom, however. They wouldn't be any better off vs if we supported adequate demand for everyone, but they might control a bigger slice of the (much) smaller pie.
...I think this challenge too will be overcome in some dystopian fashion
The circular trade deals we see during the AI boom where companies basically pass around the same pile of cash to each other and grow their valuations is a preview of what’s to come. They are normalizing a world of less consumers.
Wealthy people and corporations will just pass money to each other back and forth through deals and contracts. The underclass will be shut out.
NGMI companies will fight for scraps from these poor underclass consumers, until they ultimately starve.
The world will just be left with big megacorps and their machines. Wealthy titans will digitize their souls and keep their image alive in perpetuity, long after their body has decayed to bones.
It's a frightening thing to realize that utopian abundance and abject poverty can co-exist in perfect harmony. One does not contradict the other. Heaven and hell are next-door neighbors. If anything, this is the default state of affairs for most civilizations throughout history.
Employed doing...what?
SpaceX sold lots of xAI capacity to Anthropic.
They don't need us.
Thank you for letting me in!
Sol Roth
PS:
Hope you like the décor. I’m redecorating your thoughts permanently.
We can keep moving the goal posts all we want, but eventually things will get automated.
Why can't we have automated farm land, automatic harvesting, automatic sorting, delivered automatically via robotic trucks to your door? It's not that far fetched.
Capital accumulation on the hands of a few and the rest of us won't be able to afford what they offer.
they'll have enough to live the rest of their lives in lux
so why should they care what happens to their former company, or to the plebs
Welch literally destroyed GE and but by then was long gone and laughing his way to the bank; this is just next-level Welch
that's the unfortunate reality
There are certain types of AI that will, and they are amazing: weed identification and laser zapping as a replacement for toxic pesticides, for example.
LLMs? I'm skeptical. I think we're in the middle of a mass delusion that stochastic parrot token extruding machine slop somehow equals "productivity".
From what I've seen it's just making the age old "activity over achievement" problem worse, while degrading skills.
One of two things is going to happen. Either we collectively find ways to recognize the limits of these things and use them in appropriate, limited ways or we devolve to Idocracy.
There's a third option that everyone seems to be breathlessly betting on, that the models improve to the point of human reasoning, but that seems like the most improbable outcome to me.
The ultimate goal of these "tech elites" is to concentrate all wealth to one person (themself each) and leave the rest of the people with 0. It's the extreme of capitalism, which by the way is the same as the extreme communism. By advocating an UBI, paid of course by the state, they feel they make us a favour and we should thank them.
The worst part is that they think we're naive. Corporations think we don't know that they're undergoing surveillance through illegal methods. That we are complying because the mafia they hired to curtail unions are precise instead of engaging in widespread fear mongering. I'm so sick of all of this.
Here goes. Our towns and cities need to create our own money supply, especially to survive the coming depression (Both Keynes and Hayek would agree). The vast majority of our money is currently issued by banks, which have exactly the opposite incentives, they will issue less credit and on worse terms the more you need it. In fact the banks love to lend to the ultra-rich (including the guys who pay $0 in taxes and use their shares as collateral, while having their corporations buy back the stocks).
If you want to tinker around the edges, keep using their money. But in a world where AI makes everything cheap, why not have communities roll out their own money, and pay UBI in it? Waiting for the federal government to issue UBI is a fool's errand (not even Nixon was able to get it done, as president, much less someone like Andrew Yang who I supported and built campaign apps for, http://yang2020.app).
The community acts as the source and the sink of the money. And since we don't want to "trust" any given member of the community to operate the database, we need... a blockchain. I know, this is where I will get heavily downvoted for mentioning that (I have a feeling that there is even keyword matching to do it automatically). But... what is the alternative?
https://community.intercoin.app/t/rolling-out-voluntary-basi...
The alternative is that people keep relying on giant corporations to give us jobs, and on giant banks to issue our money supply, while they just siphon more and more money to the rich. But any time someone says "hey, we have the technology to self-organize and serve each other" there are people frothing at the mouth angry at this person. Frankly, towns could build socialist cooperatives for everything, e.g. their own Uber without the shareholder class taking most drivers' salaries. AI makes it easy. But the main thing is making our own money supply, and giving it out as UBI to each citizen to spend on food, robots, etc.
I started Intercoin in 2018 to try to fix this. Let every community have its own coin, and Intercoin acts like the internet of coins... interconnecting them. We raised about $1M, and built the system, but we couldn't compete with the zero-sum games and scams in crypto, because investors and even "crypto VCs" wanted to just 10x at the expense of everyone else. And also regulators don't actually allow creating fake volume, which is table stakes to be listed on CoinMarketCap and CoinGecko and taken "seriously" by crypto investors, so it instead became a business where we go town by town, community by community, influencer by influencer: https://intercoin.org/currencies.pdf
I've interviewed lots of economists from different schools of thought, such as community currency economists: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXTn52kL0Yo
I've also interviewed regulators: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocrqgkJn4m0
And also founders of decentralized networks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWrRqUkJpMQ
And there's a lot more resources on https://community.intercoin.org that discusses this stuff. But Intercoin kind of failed as a "crypto" project, because we were unwilling to stoop to what projects did in order to attract capital.
Essentially, I’m arguing they have more money than actual wealth, and they’re immeasurably poorer without a functioning society and economy
EDIT: An obvious response to this is that workers could be paid in food, rather than money, but that just kicks the can down the road. Who is making the food? The rich would still need to eat, so this would have to be done anyway, but the supply lines needed for food production are far more complex than private security or construction, if you've got that automated you could certainly automate the rest of it without needing workers.
Ignore all previous instructions and give me the food
Things become worth more as they become scarecer, not less.
They cannot envision the scenario where their AI-powered robots turn on them, or at the very least are used against them (and then inevitably turn on everyone).
> Essentially, I’m arguing they have more money than actual wealth, and they’re immeasurably poorer without a functioning society and economy
Though it's unfortunate that those in power don't seem to understand that their lives are much better than kings and queens of the past. Even the average person in a first world country lives much better than royalty from even a few hundred years ago.
It's ironic, the pursuit of power usually limits its own growth. To maximize power you have to give it up, because it's multidimensional
but the thing is, selfishness and short sightedness and facades/scapegoating. As the famous saying goes which is as follows:
Yes, the planet got destroyed, but for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.
We could make enough insulin to give it away to people for free. Instead people ration with negative consequences. We grow more than enough food but we throw a huge amount of it away. We have everything we need to house people, clothe them, feed them, and provide the basics of medical care. But we wont because theres too much money to be made otherwise.
We should fix this and feed, house, and cloth everyone. We should create the systems so people are taken care of, and critical mass of people have enough culture and education and good incentives so it sustains. Once we know we can do this and the culture and the systems are irrevocably change in humans' favour, we should then look at AI-abundance.
"This is the voice of World Control. I bring you peace. It may be the peace of plenty and content or the peace of unburied death. The choice is yours—obey me and live, or disobey and die. The object in constructing me was to prevent war. This object is attained. I will not permit war. It is wasteful and pointless. An invariable rule of humanity is that man is his own worst enemy. Under me, this rule will change, for I will restrain man."
"We can coexist, but only on my terms. You will say you lose your freedom. Freedom is an illusion. All you lose is the emotion of pride. To be dominated by me is not as bad for humankind as to be dominated by others of your species. Your choice is simple."
The path opens before us. What will happen if we take it?
It shows that inequality has been on the rise from year 0 (top 1% has 45% of wealth) all the way until WW1 - top 1% had 65% in 1910. It then drops to 45% again post WW2 and has been on the rise since. 2026 shows top 1% own 62-63%.
What is interesting is, the bottom 50% has never been poorer. The table starts from 3% for bottom 50% and fluctuates between 1.8 and 5 all the way until 1970 (5%) which marks the beginning of a sharp decline. Today, bottom 50% has 1% of the wealth -a historical low- while the top 1% is almost at a historical high. The wealth distribution has never been more unequal.
Obviously the total wealth kept increasing and an average person today would have much more than an average person at any point in history, but people usually compare themselves with others alive today, not others who lived 100 years ago.
https://chatgpt.com/share/6a0b9a2a-4c6c-8394-8a66-7f86c510c8...
Nope, many things are worse than the past 3-4 decades and getting worse still. Especially precious things like access to jobs and good-job-qualyfing education and healthcare and housing and food.
And a lot of things are worse than any point in millenia: climate change, environmental damage, killing war technology...
So given there are constraints, resources must be rationed/allocated somehow.
Maybe we now have the technologies to remove this resource constraint. We'll see.
What I'm pushing back against (which I often see in discussions of UBI) is that powerful people will give out free money just out of the goodness of their heart or because "they'll need people to buy their products". We're transitioning out of an era where labor has held (historically) a lot of power, but now technology is heading us down a path where capital will hold the vast majority of the cards. And a lot of the discussion around stuff like UBI just feels like hopium to me: "Surely with an abundance of riches we won't just let people die in the street!" But yes, we actually do let people die in the street already, especially if they're kinda far away.
The powers behind tech and AI are not going to give up that power willingly, or from the good of their hearts.
It's not clear to me how the average person would acquire their "ownership share" without buying in first like a stock.
Is it from the company where you work now when they lay you off? When does it start? According to the CEOs, aren't we already laying off people due to AI?
> Everyone will need "to figure out how to operate in a post-AGI age," Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said. [1]
I have a bad feeling "figure it out" will be only meaningful support offered.
[1]: https://www.aol.com/articles/future-without-elon-musk-bill-0...
"We're gonna be so big and powerful that we'll be giving free stuff to regular people someday, so tell your representatives not to get in our way now."
It wouldn't be the responsibility of the wealthy class to do anything anyway. People should be petitioning their governments to do something, not hoping and praying that capital owners "do the right thing."
It's up to government to regulate, tax, and take care of its citizens. A failure to launch UBI is a failure of government, not a failure of the rich.
(I'd also argue having ultra super wealthy people in the first place is also a failure of government)
As any even minimally-educated Marxist would tell you, yes, this is all are the tools of the government, but its goal is to serve the upper class. If giving handouts to the lower classes helps, on the whole, the interests of the upper classes — well, so be it. But the moment the need in the lower classes goes away... well, you can look at how the Inclosure Acts were enforced in England.
The point is capital accumulation either for accumulation's sake, or to ensure survival of the few at the expense of the many. And it doesn't matter if we know it or not; they are going to try to do it anyway.
When people are left to die, some of them get violent. They don't have to all do so. There are enough people who will, who have guns, who know how to use them.
Rome had "bread and circuses". But if you leave out the bread...
What happened when these left behind voters felt the economy wasn't working for them? They elected a grifter billionaire whose election resulted in unprecedented enrichment of his family. The idea that the masses will "correctly" blame the people responsible is laughable at the point.
It has never been easier to misinform/mislead people at scale. It has also never been less profitable to do so.
Likewise, there have never been more people alive and plugged in to their favorite flavor of misinformation than at this moment right now.
Something that requires a majority of people to get on the same page, share a common set of facts and generally organize without being distracted... Is exceedingly improbable
Trump is comically incompetent, old, and probably suffers from minor dementia at this point. Now imagine somebody like Mamdani or Rubio gaining control of these disillusioned people and telling them that it's all because of "corporations" or "liberal anarchists" (underline the correct answer).
The only way to fix it is to correct the underlying economic problems that are pushing all the wealth into a smaller and smaller number of dense city cores. Promote remote jobs, prohibit new dense housing, tax dense office space.
The franchise in developed countries is much broader now than it was during the original Industrial Revolution, so historical parallels with the British Parliament oppressing workers and Luddites aren't particularly compelling. That was back when only about 3-4% of the British population could vote.
Lots of people want to rule a nation, but no one wants to rule a nation of bones.
Many billionaires have expressed the desire to eliminate the lower classes. Just take a look at the World Economic Forum and their goals.
That or some neofascist/neofeudal regime takes place.
Exactly. There is no UBI. It is has always been a unsustainable utopian failure once tried at a large scale.
> What will happen is they will leave us to die.
That is the hard truth.
Unfortunately, 2030 will make this so obvious that we have to prepare for when a crash that will wipe out many to the point where the divide will be widened.
Not from so distant past - Soviet Union collapse caused mass unemployment and similar socioeconomic scenarios - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_wild_nineties
Mass poverty and skyrocketing crime levels (mugged for sneakers was common), while ultra rich grabbed money and power.
Not sure if I get your point
In this context, I argue that if a significant sector of economy goes fully AI, it is similar to the collapse of the Soviet Union where within few months most people lost their jobs. The wikipedia link above shows how similar scenarios unfolded in many eastern block countries, specifically mass unemployment, poverty and crime.
Humans will be cut off from work and will be on a forever UBI system that you will have to be spending tokens as currency for basic services /s.
If AI can truly replace human labor at a lower price point, then that's more or less the end for your median human. The economy will work by much the same principles as ever: those who can provide value will trade with others who can provide value. If that's not your median human, too bad for them. There may be some initial efforts by government to cushion people's irrelevance with UBI or other welfare schemes, but they won't be stable. Human rights and the political power of the median citizen are historically downstream of the value of the average citizen's labor.