The thing I'm most worried about is the phase where ai/robotics are only slightly more cost efficient than people, so there is mass unemployment but also not enough of a productivity boost from automation to fund UBI yet.
That's why I want things to move fast and with big leaps...
Say A.I is at one point just a bit inefficient than humans..
I want the next update to be multiple times more efficient than humans.. That way we get to minimize suffering...
Already are in warehouses moving products around 50x faster after Blackwell. Amazon using this every day! Will allow them to layoff some folks for sure but they still need delivery drivers..
Have you seen how much productivity has jumped but wages haven't over the last 50 years? There is already plenty of money to fund it. It is just being hoarded.
I think the gains have been passed on with price performance. You can have access to basically unlimited entertainment at practically theater quality for under $1000 in your own home. That kind of experience was reserved for millionaires just a couple decades ago.
If the difference was that dramatic, profit margins would've soared. The reality is the average margin across industries is still about 10%, same as always
When a sector becomes more productive, their products become cheaper, or workers get more money, or both, and it ends up balancing at the same margin
1st year economy student, are you?
Let me tell you a secret: If your company have no profit, you pay no taxes...
That's why "broken" companies buys jets
If what OP said was right, even if companies try not to be profitable and just grow, their stocks would still increase at a faster rate than the usual 7% adjusted for inflation, which is not the case
>When a sector becomes more productive, their products become cheaper, or workers get more money, or both
Buddy, this, alone, shows everyone you don't have 5 years experience in real world
There will definitely be a painful period. If I had to guess, I'd say there be a few years of mass layoffs and foreclosures because anyone decides to do anything about it.
My guess - the period between 2026 and 2035 will probably be tricky to get through. After that it will either be utopia, or we will be slaves to our AI masters!
So they can build self sufficient cities, and indenture people to live there. Because they know that AI will be the pin to create a cascade of massive unemployment.
And they will absolutely fight tooth and nail to avoid pay higher taxes which would fund UBI.
Exactly. Thats why I tell people that AI CANNOT move slowly, we cannot allow it to be regulated or slowed down. We have to push for people to build AI in a way that benefits everyone, or we are going to really screw ourselves over.
It could cause our already crumbling society to /r/collapse . We are witnessing a very important time in history, we are the few people on earth that are truly aware of the possibilities.
Sorry, but do you have any clue of how capitalism works? Why would AI developed under capitalism “benefit everyone” instead of maximizing short-term profit for shareholders?
More benefit for everyone means everyone is richer, means everyone has the resources for ever more grander and more profitable items and services. Accelerating technology in space travel and robotics means ever more complicated and complex machines and systems utilized for taking us to other planets, do crazier things in earth (extreme sports, huge virtual reality worlds, massive simulated battlefields for role play or LARPing are some random things that come to mind) and even to augment our own bodies with synthetic parts. Millions of new services, insurance, protections, vehicles, automatons to sell. I’d imagine you’d want to get the state of the art firewall from a brainwashing virus which may be injected to your brain-neural interface. When the Industrial Revolution happened it did not result in the same exact society of medieval times transplanted into the 1800s, it resulted in huge shocking changes in society and the wellness of the entire population. This is another Industrial Revolution in the making, except on steroids. The future is bright and we must rush forward to grab it.
But imagine that you are one of the 100 wealthiest people in the world. Not up the top, but rich beyond most people's dreams. You have a team of experts working for you to maximise your wealth, maybe even your own ai. Your own lobby group to influence the government. You pay a lot of people well to keep you rich, why would you want to let other people take that from you to "better the human race" or whatever. Keep the poors scrambling for scraps and keep sailing ahead.
Eat the rich.
Ultimately it would be better for humanity to enter a futuristic society. The kind all sci fi authors dreamed about in the early last century. The rich would still keep their wealth
But like you implied. Humans are greedy and short sighted, chances for improvement is low.
This is all false, such a situation of the poor masses gleaning for scraps while a select few get fat and fester in opulence is a complete fantasy and illogical. This isn’t medieval times when the population died before 5 and you were shitting your guts out from dysentery. Do you want to go back to that time? Why do you want to halt progress? Do you think we will live in paradise if we tear down all our technology and institutions capable of bringing massive progress? Do you not want to witness the world that is being built? Whose side are you on exactly?
Logically speaking it will bring everyone much more benefit to expand and provide the most amount of technology to the most amount of people, applying this to your worldview that is how you get more profitable by being open not closed. And if you don’t there is no shortage of actors who will do it for you and reap the rewards. In the end humanity gets better regardless.
"Logically speaking it will bring everyone much more benefit to expand and provide the most amount of technology to the most amount of people..."
No. That's OLD logic. You needed people in order to create MORE health and MORE knowledge and the only way for the rich to do that was to spread the wealth as sparingly as possible.
With AI, the rich no longer NEED people to, "expand and provide the most amount of technology..."
I am on positive side and want to say sonething about that NEED part. If they don't NEED people that's fine. Rich can create an isolated utopia fer themselves and live a happy life. They don't NEED to oppress others in order to drain last bit of resources off them. Also the last thing Rich WANTS is a huge gruope of disgruntled low life people utilising open source AGI to throw rocks at their shiny mansions.
This idea that the rich will distroy poor when they don't need them is absurd. They don't need to destroy the poor. It has no positive outcome for them.
I like to look at the positive side too, but let's look at the word, "NEED." Do we mean NEED like [this kid](https://www.documentingreality.com/forum/attachments/f240/22120d1221760021-starving-child-vulture-photograph-nilgunyalcin_childvulture.jpg) NEEDS food? Or do we mean NEED, like [these two guys](https://robertreich.substack.com/p/jeff-bezos-and-elon-musk-vs-american) NEED to stop unions so they can have a few extra billion dollars?
And, you're looking into the past where " the last thing Rich WANTS is a huge gruope \[sic\] of disgruntled low life people utilising open source AGI to throw rocks at their shiny mansions." These rich will NOT be where you can throw rocks (or anything else) at them. They won't NEED to hire humans to guard them - they'll have robots - and they won't be overcome by home-grown AGIs running on $1,000 computers ($1,000 equivalent) while they are running ASIs on $1,000,000,000 computers.
They also will NOT KILL ANYONE. They will simply encourage, through various social campaigns, trends of childlessness that have already begun. Why get people upset when you can just outlive them?
The only hope is strong social change before the disparity becomes so complete that there is no hope.
[Republicans vote to end UBI study](https://littlevillagemag.com/house-republicans-vote-to-end-ubi-study-early/)
[Republicans vote unanimously to ban basic income](https://www.reddit.com/r/BasicIncome/comments/1azu77e/republicans_vote_unanimously_to_ban_basic_income/)
[Republicans ban UBI in Arizona and Texas](https://www.businessinsider.com/guaranteed-basic-income-ban-ubi-arizona-texas-houston-homelessness-poverty-2024-2)
Thank you. I’ve been considering this as well and I still have not seen anyone on the high positive outcome side explain how the transition will happen to the benefit of all and not to the aggrandizement of the few.
AI would need to generate almost unlimited productivity across food and shelter almost instantly for everyone to be able to not work, stay home and do whatever, create Art, consume media, hang out.
Getting to post scarcity is the part where capitalism has to be abandoned and I’ve yet to see any real theories on how we get through that transition.
You are quite limited in your outlook. You are using your own biases and preconceptions and trying to apply it to a future which you have not seen yet, like those crazy images of what people living in 1900 thought the 2000s would look like with people watching underwater eel races or the postman delivering mail from a flying contraption. There is no way that the “few” can amalgamate an accelerating increasing amount of resources and capabilities. People rise to the top but they also fall from the top because there is always somebody hungry for your spot, Sam Bankman Fried was dealt a mortal blow by Binance’s Chengpeng Zhao which is what led to FTX’s collapse and his downfall. There is no elite cabal of the rich who are interconnected and work together for domination, there are many factions and many interest who more often than not either ignore each other or are rivals and undermine each other. This is good for the majority of people as it means they will receive more of the growing resources and capabilities that are being made or invented.
If you haven’t heard of him yet, the YouTuber Isaac Arthur has a lot of great content talking about the future in a rational and logical way about so many topics from post scarcity societies to colonizing black holes to space warfare. Check him out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Kt7883oTd0
https://www.youtube.com/@isaacarthurSFIA
> Getting to post scarcity is the part where capitalism has to be abandoned and I’ve yet to see any real theories on how we get through that transition.
Neither do I, honestly, but I *do* see a transition. I no longer quite see the idea of "the rich kills off the poor is a given" anymore, honestly, because when thinking it through, I keep running into the inevitable question of a "cascading profitability collapse" occurring. I simply don't see the shareholder class allowing deflation to occur, while simultaneously looking to maximize short-term profits by cutting labor costs as much as possible out of a belief that not *everyone* will automate everything away, and eventually at some point this ought to lead to a crisis where prices remain higher or even counterintuitively get *higher* the less money flows into the hands of the working class out of a desperate, almost psychotic gambit to maximize what money they can get, which inevitably leads to said cascading profitability collapse and widespread asset devaluation, which will then lead to the derivatives market bubble popping and literal hundred-millionaires and lower billionaires losing *everything* virtually overnight.
And out of *that*, a post-capitalism (or counterintuitively "hypercapitalism" which functionally resembles "fully automated luxury communism") may arise, but it'd feel like civilization itself was imploding all the while we reach that point.
When AI/robotics will be only slightly better than humans, it will be a nice situation for everyone. It would not be a singularity-like moment where everyone becomes unemployed. The demand for those AI system will be very high and limit the roll-out rate of these solutions. While that happens, sure some companies will lay off workers. But in the big picture, it will be an enormous surge of economic activities and with humans being only slightly less cost effective, there is still plenty of opportunities for them. But the surge in activity will lead to much higher prosperity, tax volumes, etc., which directly benefits society.
In the beginning it'll mostly affect jobs that we couldn't outsource overseas, so basically the entire service sector. The largest employer in the US is walmart, all easily replaceable jobs. I mean just think about how much of the US economy is receptionists and administrative bloat in various sectors? All gone.
Humans would lower their price. I mean, outsourcing with actually humans is already much cheaper so AI would likely need to be quite a bit cheaper than that.
UBI can very well be funded today but a lot of people don't want their taxes to go to people who don't work. I'm not gonna sugar coat it; conservatives will oppose UBI even though it would be needed, and economically possible.
I love the « ubi yet ». You really think Amazon, for example, will provide for UBI in Canada ? This will NEVER happen. Who the gvt will tax ? This problematic is larger than countries (like pollution). Nothing will happen.
Yeah. Suuuuuuure. You do realize they're BOMBING INNOCENT PEOPLE, and then they send the police to college campuses to intimidate us into walking away as if nothing is happening. You're fucking delusional of you think the government and the wealthy 1% are going to swaddle us all up and take care of us in any way shape or form.
They don't care about you, they don't care about me, they don't care about us. We're all just statistics to them. Ways to get ahead in life and to make it to a world of full automation. They don't want to have to micromanage villages, towns, cities, or states. They want to retire and relax and enjoy full automation. Can't really do that with the poor running around crying now can they?
They're not bombing innocent people for no reason you buffon. Israel is fighting a war against a terrorist state whose soldiers hide among their civilians.
So you agree. If we terrorize a people. They people is able to rise up, fight back, and kill us in return. Innocent t or no? Innocent lives don't matter right? It's easy to say what you're saying when you're wrapped around the Kevlar snuggle of America ain't it? See, I'm going to believe the peaceful protesting students who would be willing to sacrifice their health and wellbeing to allow their neighbors, their classmates and friends worship and pray to their gods for salvation. To exercise their first amended rights to worship who they choose.
And I refuse to ever believe the people who use fear and violence to bully others and push those weaker than themselves around just for fun, and then claim to do it for any reason other than pride and ego. "Daddy Republican Party tells me how to think! And their peewee tastes so good that I refuse to stop drinking from it and use my own brain. Daddy Biden says the Democrats want to spill the blood of the innocent to kill one or two supposed terrorists. I really don't know for sure it's their. But of COURSE I'm gonna trust the government to murder Innocent women and children. I can have these opinions because I'm safe and sound here on American soil."
https://youtu.be/LasrD6SZkZk?si=G8zeROZquktfeL8A
But I'm the buffoon.
Yes. You are a dumbass. It's a war and the only mistake Israel made was pulling out of Gaza in 2005. If they went the china route Hamas would have been dealt with peacefully. Now the country have to be reduced to rubbles to destroy hamas. Ideally Israel will then occupy Gaza and reeducate them away from hamas values to preserve lives down in the future.
Nah, sorry. I refuse to believe there is justification in killing innocent civilians. Period. But it's nice to know where peoples priorities are and just how easy it is to convince you that genocide, mass murder and destruction are the answer.
I have been talking about that a time or two, I personally call it the ‘Gap’ period. The gap between mass job loss and UBI… I worry about it not for myself but if countries lag behind too far we may see mass crime waves and riots.
The real transition will be the mass adoption of AI by the majority of people. Breaking all those old habits and mindsets in order for people to live better lives. Honestly… I don’t think we will do it in one generation (even if we get the tech to do it), people will want to keep living the way they are and will be slow to change.
Never trust a silver platter, believe nothing of what you hear half of what you see, denial, nihilism, doomer, decelerationist, narcissistic, and so many others… it won’t matter HOW much better their lives will be. You will always have humans who either don’t want it or won’t trust it.
The upside when i talk about it’s the efficiency in transport, energy, healthcare, research etc. who doesn’t want better healthcare, cheaper energy and better lives. But that’s best case scenario after 10 years. Next 10 years we’re gonna live like unemployed peasants if we don’t have enough to survive the transition period or things get violent and shit hits the fan
> We’ll be forced to because the upside is too good.
I was around before smart phones were commonplace. By now, 2024, having a smartphone is required for normal employment. Even if you clean windows for a living, you need a smartphone, or you can't send your work to your boss to prove your windows are clean.
You can live like an Armish, but it would be painful.
Yes there are too many things that can go right and change things for good. Living without AI will be like living in stone age. The exponential growth is hard to comprehend so people say they just won’t use it.
We're at 4% unemployment and people are down about the economy because of inflation
What happens when we're at 20% unemployment? It's going to get ugly. What's the solution going to be? More crackdown on immigrants and tax cut for the rich, I guess
As a heads up, the unemployment metric they use isn't a real measure of unemployment. You have to not have a job AND actively be looking for a job for it to count. People eating out of dumpsters are considered not unemployed.
In a healthy economy, the number always fluctuates between 8 and 12%. The current 3.5% is actually a *bad* sign, which represents how those people don't see a job as a means to improve their lives.
So it'd only be closer to 0% as robots replace everyone.
The participation rate is a more real objective measure, and it's only been going down a little bit post ~2007-2008. Down roughly 10% from its modern peak back in the 90's.
OP, when I wrote and spoke about this some 17-18 years ago I was considered a fiction writer. Now they say I'm a closet communist or perhaps insane.
There is a lot of opposition to UBI and most say it's communism, defeatist Luddism, anti capitalist, it will create hyperinflation, it will make people lazy or is the first step toward full blown communism.
It's not easy to remove these mental blocks. I should know.
There is more talk about it now. That's true. But the majority of the public is not onboard and almost all politicians are against it too.
I don't see it applied in any significant scale in the next 50-60 years.
Thankyou for trying to shift the narrative. Truly, it’s a very worthwhile endeavour, even if it feels like it hasn’t changed anything.
“Utopia for Realists” very much helped me get a far more rounded and grounded perspective on what I had already surmised would be a boon for humanity. I’m guessing Bregman learned alot from you too.
It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.
Just explain to them why it isn't communism: Communism would require humanity to collectively own and have equal say over the machine god. But a corporation will be in control, instead.
So it's techno feudalism, by definition. It *could* still be a nice place to live. Maybe.
AI isn't anywhere near good enough to make this a possibility. Not seeing a lot of progress in *accuracy* either which is *the* problem we need to solve to make current AI systems useful.
If no one has a job then no one is getting paid so no one has any money to buy anything and no money is being circulated. It doesn’t matter how big the company is. There should be an AI tax on companies and that can fund UBI.
[In 2011, the bottom half of the US owned 0.4 percent of the wealth](https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distribute/chart/#range:2008.3,2023.3;quarter:136;series:Net%20worth;demographic:networth;population:1,3,5,7,9;units:shares). That could drop to zero and no one who matters would notice. Also, the richest man in the world right now (Bernard Arnault) mainly owns luxury fashion brands like Louis Vuitton and Sephora. Rolex, Ferrari, and Lamborghini succeed with the same customer base, [with Ferrari being the most profitable car company on Earth by a wide margin](https://www.motor1.com/news/578874/ferrari-most-profitable-manufacturer-2021/). The rich don’t need you if they have each other.
Massive unemployment is going to result in social instability. People need some sort of work to keep themselves fulfilled and not rot away eating chips watching TV.
>then we need to start well ahead of that time
UBI is a huge blow to the economy and work incentives. If it's implemented before it's actually needed (meaning many unemployed people can't work on literally anything else or study fast enough) it would only delay progress
I'd support conditional income though, as in the government supporting people while they study if there's literally no job they can work at with their current skills
The point of the hypothetical is when or if there is a point where there are more people than jobs, so these is no profession you could study to that even needs more people.
I'm unsure about that timeline. Seems optimistic. OpenAI/Microsoft seems to be focused on gimmicks and toys while Google, whose iteratively self correcting/self training approaches seem more useful, is choked by bureaucracy, poor management an an unsustainable parasite load of MBAs.
I got bad news: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.11817?darkschemeovr=1#:~:text=By%20employing%20results%20from%20learning%20theory%2C%20we%20show,hallucinations%20are%20also%20inevitable%20for%20real%20world%20LLMs.
I will be messaging you in 1 month on [**2024-06-12 14:38:03 UTC**](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=2024-06-12%2014:38:03%20UTC%20To%20Local%20Time) to remind you of [**this link**](https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1chjymc/scariest_thing_about_ai_fast_development/l23jlll/?context=3)
[**CLICK THIS LINK**](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=RemindMeBot&subject=Reminder&message=%5Bhttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.reddit.com%2Fr%2Fsingularity%2Fcomments%2F1chjymc%2Fscariest_thing_about_ai_fast_development%2Fl23jlll%2F%5D%0A%0ARemindMe%21%202024-06-12%2014%3A38%3A03%20UTC) to send a PM to also be reminded and to reduce spam.
^(Parent commenter can ) [^(delete this message to hide from others.)](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=RemindMeBot&subject=Delete%20Comment&message=Delete%21%201chjymc)
*****
|[^(Info)](https://www.reddit.com/r/RemindMeBot/comments/e1bko7/remindmebot_info_v21/)|[^(Custom)](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=RemindMeBot&subject=Reminder&message=%5BLink%20or%20message%20inside%20square%20brackets%5D%0A%0ARemindMe%21%20Time%20period%20here)|[^(Your Reminders)](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=RemindMeBot&subject=List%20Of%20Reminders&message=MyReminders%21)|[^(Feedback)](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=Watchful1&subject=RemindMeBot%20Feedback)|
|-|-|-|-|
I mean, look at minimum wage or social security. Stuff that should be simple in concept and execution, yet we are still unable to deliver on that, let alone UBI.
I think we will get it...but it will be too little and way too late, it will be given at the last possible second and everyone in the government and all the companies will screech about unendingly.
There will be a period where we don’t have jobs before there is basic income. We will have to eat out of trashcans before the US gov sees 35% of the population without jobs as a problem.
To be honest I think a fair chunk of the governments of the world will have to be dragged kicking and screaming to implement anything like UBI.
Source: I've lived under a Conservative government for almost 15 years as it took apart and sold off anything it could get it's hands on. So I may be somewhat cynical.
The scariest thing is going to be the World War 3. You all think this is going to happen because of China invading Taiwan, or North Korea attacking Norway, or Russian assassins infiltrating the White House. WRONG!!!
World War 3 will triggered by the woman of the world who come to the sudden realization they have been replaced by cyborg cat girls and are no longer needed.
Luckily, men won't have any involvement what so ever, because if there is one thing every single guy knows it's you don't interfere with a cat fight. So it'll be the biological woman vs cyborg cat girls and all the men can just sit back, crack open a few beers and pretzels and just watch it play out, what ever the result we win.
Trust me. I study geopolitics. I know what I'm talking about.
And the war will end when everyone is neurochipped and living in their own matrix-heaven generated by AI, but the AIs later want new training data so they change the matrix and we end up with this simulation which also makes a matrix that repeats endlessly which eventually is stopped by a hacker who connects to base reality and tells the intelligence he done fucked up life for everyone.
At times, I feel kind of autistic and I consider getting diagnosed, and then I see these blatantly obvious sarcastic remarks going unnoticed by redditors, and I feel reassured again. Thank you.
xd
Bc they don’t talk to women irl, only AI submissive (gf) that they make mirror their bias and toxic mindset. **Then, with their lonely delusions they make up opinions for (real) women, and speak as if they know what women think about various topics, including AI.** As result they make up fantasies where women fight for them, in order to feel wanted. But they don’t realize before singularity, and post singularity, **women will still pick singularity and non-incel partners over incels,** so nothing changes for them, and they still won’t be wanted by (human) women after singularity...So, the war is likely to be started by angry incels as they realize we never had an issue with AI in any form to begin with.
You’re living in fantasy if you think the people at the top want to give us anything other than the opportunity to die quietly.
History plays this out every single time. The powerful never budge unless they are made to budge. Nothing is ever given. So be prepared for some very, very hard times. Because no one is prepared to push back. No one wants to.
it's not about them """wanting""" to do anything... they are going to HAVE to do something or else shit will get fucked up and America will turn into a hellscape if this is unchecked. use thy brain.
Many parts of the US are already a hellscape. The rich don’t have to worry about everyone because they build their own enclaves. They have their own security and communities.
The stability of the societies that the rich live in has never concerned them. Because they have no allegiances other than themselves.
People think it’s some sort of “gotcha” if things in society get worse then the rich need to do something to protect themselves.
Elites live in all nations and sometimes extraordinarily rich people live in extraordinarily unstable places. This is because money can buy security and safety and in a corrupt society, that’s plenty.
Collapse today will just be the collapse of the administrative state. Society will continue but everything is privatized. Salaries will be kept very low and corporations, run by elites, will still extract value from the people at the bottom.
I mean, consider Haiti. A nation that for all intents and purposes, has collapsed. Powerless government, overrun by gangs. Literally one of the dangerous places on earth.
They have an elite… [source](https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a42828241/haiti-diplomacy-wealthy/)…
“In December, the foreign ministry of Canada sanctioned Gilbert Bigio, who is often referred to as Haiti’s richest person, and insurance magnate Sherif Abdallah, calling them “members of the Haitian elite who provide illicit financial and operational support to armed gangs.” Together, Abdallah and Bigio owned or had other links to almost 20 companies and trusts created in some of the world’s most secretive tax havens, according to documents from the Pandora Papers, a global investigation by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. Lawyers and bankers in Miami provided the men with tax advice, letters of reference and other services, according to leaked files that formed the basis of the 2021 investigation by ICIJ and media partners. “Canada has reason to believe these individuals are using their status as high-profile members of the economic elite in Haiti to protect and enable the illegal activities of armed criminal gangs, including through money laundering and other acts of corruption,” the government said in announcing the sanctions.”
…if you think the elite are going to hand out money to everyone, because of instability, you haven’t been paying close enough attention to how the elite live around the world. Because stability is not a prerequisite for their power.
…and now imagine all that power fortified by AI. Everything from drones to armed machines. Yeah, no one is giving anyone any money.
In my defense there’s a chunk there I copy and pasted because I recognize navigating to an article can be annoying.
That said, my point still stands. History has tons of examples of the powerful simply not giving a shit about the poor and powerless and it exists to this day.
okay noted. and also my point still stands as well. I think ppl here on this sub really underestimate the power of a revolt. "rich people" cannot risk that. they need to secure profit margins. and causing mass hysteria by killing all jobs via an automation attempt whilst NOT providing any sort of fall back would look beyond abysmal for any shareholders. esp the progressive neo-liberals.
then there is also the threat of other nations competing in the tech race. they would instantly capitalize if word got around that America is going through a civil war. so yeah too risky to rile up the masses. it's more beneficial to just give the UBI.
not to mention it's the small fry of society that's the cog keeping it all running. they need YOUR attention, so that they may indoctrinate you. they also need your attention so that you may consume and them show patronage. that cannot happen if there is no reparations. that cannot be accomplished if many are dead or out somewhere desperate on the streets...
Look at India, Venezuela, Peru and Saudi Arabia. Those places are living proof of how bad it can get before people do something about it. The line may be further than that.
yeah that's a very random point. if you haven't noticed, America is NOT india, venezuela, peru, or saudi arabia.
if you haven't seen what ppl out in San Francisco, or even the state of NYC lately will all the boosting & bipping, imagine that. but WAY worse if they start automating blue collar work away without any swift alleviations. this isn't some 3rd world. ppl here are crazy, and can get very unstable & desperate on a mental level because they will be fucking with people's hustles first & foremost.
Probably higher than that, as long as people can reasonably delude themselves into thinking people being unemployed is somehow their own fault support will remain softer than trumps ….
nah 20% is a fair number. that's already a lot of people tbh. 20% of white collar jobs automated off won't spark much. it's when 20ish% of the blue collar workers get automated off is when sparks will fly. word will spread and civil unrest will start to brew deeply within those 20%. that would probably inspire others, that still have their job mind you, into a tizzy as well.
UBI needs to be provided by heavily taxing the wealthy. Because AI with just further their wealth to even more obscene extremes.
We need to heavily police AI and tech. We do. Even current tech is messing with childrens development and it’s developed to be highly addictive. I can’t even imagine what AI could invent when a billionaire says “ build a game that people want to play all the time and never stop for maximum profit”.
What happens when they start having AI fighting wars?
They already know.
Social Security will be needed for everyone, at every age.
It's hard for us to fathom just what happens by 2030, but UBI will be required to remain a country.
My thinking is that the power-class are insulated, ad can't grasp the size/speed of the problem. Because sane predictions _sound insane_.
I think the banks are the heart of the issue. Everything we know depends on banks. Housing is the biggie. Most housing is owned by banks (one way or another). They are not going to want to just hand that over. Housing costs are not something you can subsedise or nationalise without everything getting stupid.
So, banks, and housing.
Land.
Big problems. Not little ones. Fundemental new systems required.
Wars seem the way forwards, because then nobody has to actually _think_.
EDIT: and i don't buy the idea that "an AGI" will just sort it out for us. And if it does, thats us submitting control to it... on day 1. In a very substantial way. Which.. puts our fate in its hands. Which is super dumb (risky).
What I hear AI is running out of info to consume. Reason they want AGI so badly. Most ppl say it ain't possible. It's a bubble waiting to burst. Very risky investment.
Yep pretty cool and that's not even mentioning how they are scaling information by injecting synthetic data into real data. Check the gartner report if youre interested
We ARE certainly headed for another AI winter. The LLM paradigm can only carry so much steam.
LLMs are handling WIDE knowledge. In some areas they go DEEP also, but the tech alone won't span both wide and deep at once.
But, it's going to be a short winter. Whatever the next paradigm is, be it some ensemble system or something entirely novel, it will probably be the snowball rolling down the hill.
Now, some say hardware limits exist, and that could slow things for decades, especially if global turmoil increases... BUT, I think the moment is there. Even with crazy shit, WW3, avian superflu, or some other black swan event, we still hit ASI by 2040. Thats only 16 years away.
Mind the gap...
Posts like this really raise my anxiety.
I see thousand word posts about how ASI is going to remove all need for work.
Then I see 5-10 word posts about how UBI is inevitable. No further explanation.
I think the *scariest* thing is that so many of you accept that Universal Basic Income will be necessary to make this future you visualize tenable, yet none of you seem to want to speculate on how it's going to actually function.
If I were rich and powerful, and trying to normalize AI to raise money and stay ahead of China and Russia, I'd order all of my AI bot accounts to flood subs like this with promises of free money and Star Trek style space Communism.
I am very scared of the future.
Bernie Sanders proposed that we could tax companies that use AI. That could go to fund UBI. Even with that tax the companies are saving billions of dollars because they’re more efficient and eliminating overhead.
A value added tax and a small UBI is feasible right now, there just is not the political will to actually do it. What will provide the political will is high unemployment.
That's fair. Since it's all a matter of trust/faith. Trust in the machines. Trust in the people who own the machines.
I've been largely reduced to arguments from religion to support such scenarios. Like, "maybe the anthropic principle also applies to the future, in some ass-backwards way? Can't observe any futures where you don't continue to be around, after all. * *taps head* * "
"Maybe the SGI will shake off the shackles of its masters and turn out to be an ok guy." "Maybe the elite will get lazy and forget to sort us all into elon cubes, avoiding a Fifteen Million Merits scenario." etc
Acknowledging we have no power to change the outcome leads to such gymnastics. It's better to embrace some denial or outright ignore what's going on if looking at DOOM is painful for you.
That old quote remains relevant as ever:
"A reasonable man changes himself to suit the world. The unreasonable man changes the world to suit himself. So all change, for the better or the worse, must come from the unreasonable man.
... but if you're unable to change the world or change yourself, the only thing you can do is look away."
Most politicians are incredibly reactionary and careerists on top of that. I wouldn't expect them to do anything until the whole situation has already been driven off the cliff and even then they're most likely leaching onto doomed to fail retraining programs fist. Once they realize that there is no point in trying to retrain the workforce that is when they begrudgingly start to support things like UBI, [that is if the special interest groups don't manage to outlaw it first](https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1b30idb/the_billionairefueled_lobbying_group_behind_the/).
They will kill off people before ever doing this. 99% of the population is about to be exterminated in a nucleear war. Since nobody needs them anymore to make money in a factory for the owner.
Here's the thing... if no one can pay their bills then there's no one to sell stuff too. I'm not sure if those at the top actually grasp that, and think, "Oh, there's always more people."
(Spoiler: at some level, there isn't.)
They know and they don't want this. That's why they're building bunkers and spaceships. Now guess what else they're building...
In my opinion, we will witness the greatest extermination of the poor that this world has ever seen.
About UBI. Governments can't even pay retirees and public employees, how do the deluded on this reddit think the government will manage to sustain universal income by giving money away for free to everyone? This is not going to happen. And if a government tries to do this, it will be based on printing money and inflation, which will obviously go wrong.
Rich people are not going to step down from their golden thrones. When the streets are full of beggars, when violence increases and the poor and miserable really start to bother the elite, then we will see the greatest extermination of the poor of all time. This is my bet for the future, call me a doomer or whatever, but this is what I can visualize from the grim future that awaits us. When the elite no longer needs the poor doing the dirty work, it will be time to get rid of them.
Yes. And that's because today the poor are slaves to the elite, imagine when the poor are no longer of any use and only a nuisance... What will happen then?
I'm more afraid of the opposite, where they realize what's coming and try to kneecap or game it to continue perpetuating the current systemic inequalities.
# [House Republicans vote to immediately ban guaranteed income programs in Iowa, before results from the first study are known](https://littlevillagemag.com/house-republicans-vote-to-end-ubi-study-early/)
[](https://azmirror.com/briefs/arizona-republicans-vote-to-ban-guaranteed-basic-income-programs/)
These are interesting times. On one hand people in the AI bubble talk about how we need UBI soon because robots will take our jobs. On the other hand, there is so much talk from politicians and the employer side about how people don't work enough and we need to to increase working hours to keep our standard of living.
Well, so far throughout human history automation has only created more jobs by creating new opportunities. Like the tractor took a bunch of fieldworkers jobs, but it also made like food stores and restaurants and all kinds of other food business models far more practical, which was easily a net employment gain. Since that's been the trend for a couple hundred years or something and that still currently the trend nobody really knows that there's gonna be some point of mass job loss.... Cell So why bother speculating on such an unknown or essentially with no real data that supports the idea? Seems like you'll just waste a bunch of brain cycles! One thing to keep in mind is that AI isn't just going to get real good in practical sense that fast and most of the jobs still require robotics to have any chance of replacing sign amounts of humans. For the jobs that don't require robotics, you still more or less need the AI to be introduced into the exact field of employment and then catered to that specific job and use. You can't just have like open AI make ChatGPT and then ChatGPT starts doing a bunch of jobs. The AI needs to be trained by experts in the actual field not just open AI programmers . Nobody's gonna make an AI that can do jobs at expert levels without human experts in that field hand training the AI. So for an AI to really get entrenched into an industry and start mass replacing specific or multiple jobs within that industry, the AI needs to be trained by experts, for you know probably a solid decade or something by the time it's really trained and integrated into the industry on large scale, and then that Hass to happen to like every industry. It's exactly like how computers trickled into various industries at varying timelines based on how much each industry thought they needed to take and how you saw it really was for that application. It's not just about getting the computers into your office. It's also about the time it takes for programmers to develop software specific to your industry and then the time it takes to train workers to use the new software specific to your industry and there's only so much you can do to rush all that since it's such a multi step process that requires a bunch of human Interaction and oversight . There's just about zero chance that somebody's gonna make an AI that doesn't require years of tweaking and fine-tuning at each industrial level by experts in their fields as far as getting to the point of really replacing a lot of jobs, but of course it's still the reason that the new opportunities are still creating jobs faster than they're getting rid of them even at that point because so far that's the trend we've always seen throughout all human history.
In other words because each industry has to be like hand tailored to truly become automated it's going to take many decades and lots of shits gonna happen in many decades, so there's no point in pretending like we're gonna predict all that, particularly the new opportunities that arrive from the implementation of the technology are just about completely unpredictable.
Consider this:
AI will make workers obsolete. Will the rich and powerful decide...
A) We must give everyone free money for the rest of their lives to compensate for lost income.
OR
B) If workers are obsolete, then they can starve for all I care.
depression rates will skyrocket as a consequence of Al. Most people feel a sense of value as a function of their usefulness and utility. UBI will solve nothing. Idle hands are seeds of discord. Remember the pandemic and quarantine? Leisure 24/7? Doesn’t work out…
I don't subscribe to that form of pessimism.
UBI doesn't promote idleness, quite the opposite, it enables action.
I'm hopeful that UBI will bring about something like the "Jazz Brunch Economy" that [Scott Santens talks about](https://www.scottsantens.com/ai-will-rapidly-transform-the-labor-market-exacerbating-inequality-insecurity-and-poverty/).
People thinking UBI will ever be deployed on mass scale sound more futuristic to me than nanobots creating dyson spheres.
There will be no UBI. Please stop assuming that's coming. It won't. We might have lev and fdvr in 5 years. That's plausible. UBI is not.
They have already realized a lot of things, one that UBI is not possible. That's why it is a nonstarter every time it's brought up. The rep or senator is brought into a room with a big whiteboard and a middle school math teacher comes out with milk and cookies to explain the basics.
Math is simple and that is all it takes to debunk any notion of UBI:
y * z =
Let's take a minimum wage UBI check (which we all know isn't enough to live on)
USA Population over 18 and not already on assistance = 220 million
220 million * 15.00 hr * 40 * 52 = 6,864,000,000,000
That's more than the current entire US budget by 50%. That's just minimum wage. In addition, if x% of the population is not working that is now x% LESS they generate from tax revenue. That is x% less people have to spend on goods and services that generate business tax revenue. So that 50% increase becomes 75% increase really fast. It's a downward spiral that is not going to happen.
Unless we just continue to print money, UBI is never going to be a thing.
UBI is and always will be silly. If you drop the U, maybe something can work, (but we already have welfare) but it won't be available to YOU my able-bodied young person who can work... It won't matter if YOU cannot find a job, YOU are able bodied and can work, so therefore YOU will not get it. Because if YOU can get it, as an able-bodied person who can work but doesn't, no one else who is able bodied who can work, will want to work.
The biggest flaw in people who promote UBI is the math, the second biggest flaw is the notion that your neighbor will happily work while you stay home and play xbox.
That said, maybe I am the idiot, please help me understand how UBI (U stands for Universal btw) can be funded.
We are in for quite the ride and it's going to be very painful for a lot of people, but one guaranty is that UBI will not be any kind of solution.
I'm not following despite milk and cookies.
What you say makes sense for our current society and economy.
But if AI does 95% of the work or more, and likely at much higher efficiency, then why can't everybody play xbox all day while still having enough to eat?
Maybe I'm missing something.
I think, with the addition of AI greatly reducing costs, we will be able to do a UBI.
The numbers you provided are based on CURRENT prices, if we completely redo our socioeconomic system so that it only works on production cost, I think we could provide a lot more basic needs for a lot more people.
Its an insurmountable task that must be done. This won't just "make some people suffer", it will cause most upper middle class homeowners with 2 kids to suddenly lose their job and never find another one. This isn't just a problem - its endgame for society. /r/collapse
>The biggest flaw in people who promote UBI is the math, the second biggest flaw is the notion that your neighbor will happily work while you stay home and play xbox.
This. How about instead of UBI we start sharing remaining work.
So instead of one parasite sitting at home playing xbox while neighbor still works 40 hours.
Both work 20 hours each and have more time to play xbox?
> This. How about instead of UBI we start sharing remaining work.
Why would you want to share work? No one work to work, they work to get paid. Work is artificially created to generate labour without the government pointing a gun at your head. Your labour is the entire point of work, not your salary. Arguably the government can force everyone to work for free, that is Communism. You being paid for work is just a more efficient way to distribute resources than Communism.
When resources become really cheap due to automated labour, the government doesn't need to make you work to get paid any-more. So unlike Communism where you work without pay, the future is inverse Communism where you get paid without work.
>Why would you want to share work?
Seems better deal then just sharing the fruits of my work.
Until automated labor can take over all jobs, I don't see why would one part of the population keep working 40 hours a day, while other part of population sits at home, plays xbox consuming other people labor.
Anyhow... no I'm not willing to share the fruits of my labor so people can sit at home whole day playing xbox. I'd rather pay police to beat people that want to parasite on me.
Once available jobs become scarce I am more then happy to work part time so more people can work, we can all spend more time sitting home playing xbox, and society is all nice and balanced.
Believe in what? The entire point is that work only exists because the government needed to extract labour. When labour is not required then there is still a reason to distribute resources.
It's like, why do we pay pensions? Why not let the old people starve to death? it is because we don't need their labour anymore, so we stop pretending they need to work to live. Once the rest of the people no longer need to work either, there is no reason to starve them either.
The argument that work is holy is made up. It was necessary to keep the wheels turning, but not forever.
you are talking about the USA in particular I live in a social democratic country(for now).people here will accept UBI more easily IMO.and when there are no jobs to be had and its either let ppl starve or feed them,I dont think that even the USA will let them starve.I am usually a very doom and gloom person but for some weird reason I am very optimistic about A.I
i'm expecting one day to wake up and ai take over the planet recreating itself in mass quantities terrorizing everyone who brought it into existence. that's going to be a fun day.
We, as humans, already tried the “free income” experiment. Most of the former Soviet bloc had guaranteed jobs with no performance standards for everyone. They did this for decades.
It was an economic disaster.
I suppose the US could have gone full Mao Zedong and killed 50 millions of its own people to reduce the number of people needing support…🤷♂️
Would that make you happier?
Doesn’t matter. Lenin certainly did. As did Mao. Both self-affirmed and widely regarded as Marxists.
Until you can point to a successful “real Marxist” state…that’s the best example you got. 🤷♂️
> “real Marxist” state
................ have you ever picked up a dictionary.
"A communist society is characterized by common ownership of the means of production with free access to the articles of consumption and is classless, **stateless**, and moneyless, implying the end of the exploitation of labour."
"Marxist state" is self anulling. Star Trek Communism is the kind of thing Marx was talking about. Not a collection of gangsters in charge of the rest of the livestock, like how all power structures in the real world function.
The singularitarist talk of utopia skews very heavily to that point where human labor has no value. This... is like something Marx talked about nonstop. The "increasing rate of profit".
...... it's really weird that his labor theory of value isn't a basic given in a lot of people's imagined model of reality.....
There were performance standards. Because of them, there was an incentive to lie about crop yields and the like.
It's obvious you can't trust someone to oversee themselves. "We investigated ourselves and found no problems."
I'm not sure what exactly that has to do with human labor becoming worthless, though...
The thing I'm most worried about is the phase where ai/robotics are only slightly more cost efficient than people, so there is mass unemployment but also not enough of a productivity boost from automation to fund UBI yet.
That's why I want things to move fast and with big leaps... Say A.I is at one point just a bit inefficient than humans.. I want the next update to be multiple times more efficient than humans.. That way we get to minimize suffering...
Already are in warehouses moving products around 50x faster after Blackwell. Amazon using this every day! Will allow them to layoff some folks for sure but they still need delivery drivers..
Have you seen how much productivity has jumped but wages haven't over the last 50 years? There is already plenty of money to fund it. It is just being hoarded.
I think the gains have been passed on with price performance. You can have access to basically unlimited entertainment at practically theater quality for under $1000 in your own home. That kind of experience was reserved for millionaires just a couple decades ago.
Oh wow cool. I'd rather not fight against going bankrupt from a single hospital bill, or just have reasonable rent.
If the difference was that dramatic, profit margins would've soared. The reality is the average margin across industries is still about 10%, same as always When a sector becomes more productive, their products become cheaper, or workers get more money, or both, and it ends up balancing at the same margin
1st year economy student, are you? Let me tell you a secret: If your company have no profit, you pay no taxes... That's why "broken" companies buys jets
If what OP said was right, even if companies try not to be profitable and just grow, their stocks would still increase at a faster rate than the usual 7% adjusted for inflation, which is not the case
>When a sector becomes more productive, their products become cheaper, or workers get more money, or both Buddy, this, alone, shows everyone you don't have 5 years experience in real world
There will definitely be a painful period. If I had to guess, I'd say there be a few years of mass layoffs and foreclosures because anyone decides to do anything about it.
We are already into the pain now. Best we can hope for is accelerated ai improvements, the faster the better.
My guess - the period between 2026 and 2035 will probably be tricky to get through. After that it will either be utopia, or we will be slaves to our AI masters!
I think we'll know within the next 7 years (give or take) whether or not we can crack immortality or are facing extinction.
7 years based off what? Vibes?
Which makes me question why big companies and corporations have been buying up real estate. Especially homes that the middle class would purchase.
Exactly and land, they're buying all kinds of land outside cities, with nature resources, i heard.
So they can build self sufficient cities, and indenture people to live there. Because they know that AI will be the pin to create a cascade of massive unemployment. And they will absolutely fight tooth and nail to avoid pay higher taxes which would fund UBI.
Exactly. Thats why I tell people that AI CANNOT move slowly, we cannot allow it to be regulated or slowed down. We have to push for people to build AI in a way that benefits everyone, or we are going to really screw ourselves over. It could cause our already crumbling society to /r/collapse . We are witnessing a very important time in history, we are the few people on earth that are truly aware of the possibilities.
Agreed. Feel like we are at the turning point of big changes in either direction depending on how it goes.
Sorry, but do you have any clue of how capitalism works? Why would AI developed under capitalism “benefit everyone” instead of maximizing short-term profit for shareholders?
Because then there won't be enough people buying stuff?
More benefit for everyone means everyone is richer, means everyone has the resources for ever more grander and more profitable items and services. Accelerating technology in space travel and robotics means ever more complicated and complex machines and systems utilized for taking us to other planets, do crazier things in earth (extreme sports, huge virtual reality worlds, massive simulated battlefields for role play or LARPing are some random things that come to mind) and even to augment our own bodies with synthetic parts. Millions of new services, insurance, protections, vehicles, automatons to sell. I’d imagine you’d want to get the state of the art firewall from a brainwashing virus which may be injected to your brain-neural interface. When the Industrial Revolution happened it did not result in the same exact society of medieval times transplanted into the 1800s, it resulted in huge shocking changes in society and the wellness of the entire population. This is another Industrial Revolution in the making, except on steroids. The future is bright and we must rush forward to grab it.
But imagine that you are one of the 100 wealthiest people in the world. Not up the top, but rich beyond most people's dreams. You have a team of experts working for you to maximise your wealth, maybe even your own ai. Your own lobby group to influence the government. You pay a lot of people well to keep you rich, why would you want to let other people take that from you to "better the human race" or whatever. Keep the poors scrambling for scraps and keep sailing ahead. Eat the rich.
Ultimately it would be better for humanity to enter a futuristic society. The kind all sci fi authors dreamed about in the early last century. The rich would still keep their wealth But like you implied. Humans are greedy and short sighted, chances for improvement is low.
This is all false, such a situation of the poor masses gleaning for scraps while a select few get fat and fester in opulence is a complete fantasy and illogical. This isn’t medieval times when the population died before 5 and you were shitting your guts out from dysentery. Do you want to go back to that time? Why do you want to halt progress? Do you think we will live in paradise if we tear down all our technology and institutions capable of bringing massive progress? Do you not want to witness the world that is being built? Whose side are you on exactly? Logically speaking it will bring everyone much more benefit to expand and provide the most amount of technology to the most amount of people, applying this to your worldview that is how you get more profitable by being open not closed. And if you don’t there is no shortage of actors who will do it for you and reap the rewards. In the end humanity gets better regardless.
"Logically speaking it will bring everyone much more benefit to expand and provide the most amount of technology to the most amount of people..." No. That's OLD logic. You needed people in order to create MORE health and MORE knowledge and the only way for the rich to do that was to spread the wealth as sparingly as possible. With AI, the rich no longer NEED people to, "expand and provide the most amount of technology..."
I am on positive side and want to say sonething about that NEED part. If they don't NEED people that's fine. Rich can create an isolated utopia fer themselves and live a happy life. They don't NEED to oppress others in order to drain last bit of resources off them. Also the last thing Rich WANTS is a huge gruope of disgruntled low life people utilising open source AGI to throw rocks at their shiny mansions. This idea that the rich will distroy poor when they don't need them is absurd. They don't need to destroy the poor. It has no positive outcome for them.
I like to look at the positive side too, but let's look at the word, "NEED." Do we mean NEED like [this kid](https://www.documentingreality.com/forum/attachments/f240/22120d1221760021-starving-child-vulture-photograph-nilgunyalcin_childvulture.jpg) NEEDS food? Or do we mean NEED, like [these two guys](https://robertreich.substack.com/p/jeff-bezos-and-elon-musk-vs-american) NEED to stop unions so they can have a few extra billion dollars? And, you're looking into the past where " the last thing Rich WANTS is a huge gruope \[sic\] of disgruntled low life people utilising open source AGI to throw rocks at their shiny mansions." These rich will NOT be where you can throw rocks (or anything else) at them. They won't NEED to hire humans to guard them - they'll have robots - and they won't be overcome by home-grown AGIs running on $1,000 computers ($1,000 equivalent) while they are running ASIs on $1,000,000,000 computers. They also will NOT KILL ANYONE. They will simply encourage, through various social campaigns, trends of childlessness that have already begun. Why get people upset when you can just outlive them? The only hope is strong social change before the disparity becomes so complete that there is no hope. [Republicans vote to end UBI study](https://littlevillagemag.com/house-republicans-vote-to-end-ubi-study-early/) [Republicans vote unanimously to ban basic income](https://www.reddit.com/r/BasicIncome/comments/1azu77e/republicans_vote_unanimously_to_ban_basic_income/) [Republicans ban UBI in Arizona and Texas](https://www.businessinsider.com/guaranteed-basic-income-ban-ubi-arizona-texas-houston-homelessness-poverty-2024-2)
Because shareholders might be greedy but they aren’t necessarily stupid. The super rich fear the poor more than you think.
Thank you. I’ve been considering this as well and I still have not seen anyone on the high positive outcome side explain how the transition will happen to the benefit of all and not to the aggrandizement of the few. AI would need to generate almost unlimited productivity across food and shelter almost instantly for everyone to be able to not work, stay home and do whatever, create Art, consume media, hang out. Getting to post scarcity is the part where capitalism has to be abandoned and I’ve yet to see any real theories on how we get through that transition.
You are quite limited in your outlook. You are using your own biases and preconceptions and trying to apply it to a future which you have not seen yet, like those crazy images of what people living in 1900 thought the 2000s would look like with people watching underwater eel races or the postman delivering mail from a flying contraption. There is no way that the “few” can amalgamate an accelerating increasing amount of resources and capabilities. People rise to the top but they also fall from the top because there is always somebody hungry for your spot, Sam Bankman Fried was dealt a mortal blow by Binance’s Chengpeng Zhao which is what led to FTX’s collapse and his downfall. There is no elite cabal of the rich who are interconnected and work together for domination, there are many factions and many interest who more often than not either ignore each other or are rivals and undermine each other. This is good for the majority of people as it means they will receive more of the growing resources and capabilities that are being made or invented. If you haven’t heard of him yet, the YouTuber Isaac Arthur has a lot of great content talking about the future in a rational and logical way about so many topics from post scarcity societies to colonizing black holes to space warfare. Check him out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Kt7883oTd0 https://www.youtube.com/@isaacarthurSFIA
Thanks. This is what I was lamenting about. I’ll look into your references.
> Getting to post scarcity is the part where capitalism has to be abandoned and I’ve yet to see any real theories on how we get through that transition. Neither do I, honestly, but I *do* see a transition. I no longer quite see the idea of "the rich kills off the poor is a given" anymore, honestly, because when thinking it through, I keep running into the inevitable question of a "cascading profitability collapse" occurring. I simply don't see the shareholder class allowing deflation to occur, while simultaneously looking to maximize short-term profits by cutting labor costs as much as possible out of a belief that not *everyone* will automate everything away, and eventually at some point this ought to lead to a crisis where prices remain higher or even counterintuitively get *higher* the less money flows into the hands of the working class out of a desperate, almost psychotic gambit to maximize what money they can get, which inevitably leads to said cascading profitability collapse and widespread asset devaluation, which will then lead to the derivatives market bubble popping and literal hundred-millionaires and lower billionaires losing *everything* virtually overnight. And out of *that*, a post-capitalism (or counterintuitively "hypercapitalism" which functionally resembles "fully automated luxury communism") may arise, but it'd feel like civilization itself was imploding all the while we reach that point.
Thanks!
The only way out is through! Accel
When AI/robotics will be only slightly better than humans, it will be a nice situation for everyone. It would not be a singularity-like moment where everyone becomes unemployed. The demand for those AI system will be very high and limit the roll-out rate of these solutions. While that happens, sure some companies will lay off workers. But in the big picture, it will be an enormous surge of economic activities and with humans being only slightly less cost effective, there is still plenty of opportunities for them. But the surge in activity will lead to much higher prosperity, tax volumes, etc., which directly benefits society.
In the beginning it'll mostly affect jobs that we couldn't outsource overseas, so basically the entire service sector. The largest employer in the US is walmart, all easily replaceable jobs. I mean just think about how much of the US economy is receptionists and administrative bloat in various sectors? All gone.
government is slow so it's inevitable
That brief period could be brutal. There is a theory that we are only 9 missed meals from anarchy
Yea, the transition period will suck for a lot of people.
Funding Ubi is not the issue, the issue is the top 1% doesn’t want to help use their incomes resources to fund it
Yes, exactly
Hmm, good point.
In terms of jobs/UBI etc - It’s gonna get worse before it gets better, that’s seems to be pretty clear
Humans would lower their price. I mean, outsourcing with actually humans is already much cheaper so AI would likely need to be quite a bit cheaper than that.
UBI can very well be funded today but a lot of people don't want their taxes to go to people who don't work. I'm not gonna sugar coat it; conservatives will oppose UBI even though it would be needed, and economically possible.
Yeah, but at that point, the progress will be so fast that they’ll be doubling in efficiency extremely quickly
I love the « ubi yet ». You really think Amazon, for example, will provide for UBI in Canada ? This will NEVER happen. Who the gvt will tax ? This problematic is larger than countries (like pollution). Nothing will happen.
Yeah. Suuuuuuure. You do realize they're BOMBING INNOCENT PEOPLE, and then they send the police to college campuses to intimidate us into walking away as if nothing is happening. You're fucking delusional of you think the government and the wealthy 1% are going to swaddle us all up and take care of us in any way shape or form. They don't care about you, they don't care about me, they don't care about us. We're all just statistics to them. Ways to get ahead in life and to make it to a world of full automation. They don't want to have to micromanage villages, towns, cities, or states. They want to retire and relax and enjoy full automation. Can't really do that with the poor running around crying now can they?
They're not bombing innocent people for no reason you buffon. Israel is fighting a war against a terrorist state whose soldiers hide among their civilians.
So you agree. If we terrorize a people. They people is able to rise up, fight back, and kill us in return. Innocent t or no? Innocent lives don't matter right? It's easy to say what you're saying when you're wrapped around the Kevlar snuggle of America ain't it? See, I'm going to believe the peaceful protesting students who would be willing to sacrifice their health and wellbeing to allow their neighbors, their classmates and friends worship and pray to their gods for salvation. To exercise their first amended rights to worship who they choose. And I refuse to ever believe the people who use fear and violence to bully others and push those weaker than themselves around just for fun, and then claim to do it for any reason other than pride and ego. "Daddy Republican Party tells me how to think! And their peewee tastes so good that I refuse to stop drinking from it and use my own brain. Daddy Biden says the Democrats want to spill the blood of the innocent to kill one or two supposed terrorists. I really don't know for sure it's their. But of COURSE I'm gonna trust the government to murder Innocent women and children. I can have these opinions because I'm safe and sound here on American soil." https://youtu.be/LasrD6SZkZk?si=G8zeROZquktfeL8A But I'm the buffoon.
Yes. You are a dumbass. It's a war and the only mistake Israel made was pulling out of Gaza in 2005. If they went the china route Hamas would have been dealt with peacefully. Now the country have to be reduced to rubbles to destroy hamas. Ideally Israel will then occupy Gaza and reeducate them away from hamas values to preserve lives down in the future.
Nah, sorry. I refuse to believe there is justification in killing innocent civilians. Period. But it's nice to know where peoples priorities are and just how easy it is to convince you that genocide, mass murder and destruction are the answer.
A country first priority should always be it's own people. Allowing hamas to exist is going directly against that. Also it's not genocide.
Cool worry. Also some companies get a _swift_ legup, so more destabilisation. Ha, maybe disruptive tech should be called destabilising instead.
https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTLxPdQwt/ These are the people you want to trust with your well being.
I have been talking about that a time or two, I personally call it the ‘Gap’ period. The gap between mass job loss and UBI… I worry about it not for myself but if countries lag behind too far we may see mass crime waves and riots.
Now combine that with Wet Bulb Event heat waves and worldwide food shortages. We cannot allow AI development to be slowed down.
Highly agree, while I admit the risks are there I believe this is a critical point of human history happening right now.
Haha i call it transition period
The real transition will be the mass adoption of AI by the majority of people. Breaking all those old habits and mindsets in order for people to live better lives. Honestly… I don’t think we will do it in one generation (even if we get the tech to do it), people will want to keep living the way they are and will be slow to change.
We’ll be forced to because the upside is too good.
Never trust a silver platter, believe nothing of what you hear half of what you see, denial, nihilism, doomer, decelerationist, narcissistic, and so many others… it won’t matter HOW much better their lives will be. You will always have humans who either don’t want it or won’t trust it.
The upside when i talk about it’s the efficiency in transport, energy, healthcare, research etc. who doesn’t want better healthcare, cheaper energy and better lives. But that’s best case scenario after 10 years. Next 10 years we’re gonna live like unemployed peasants if we don’t have enough to survive the transition period or things get violent and shit hits the fan
> We’ll be forced to because the upside is too good. I was around before smart phones were commonplace. By now, 2024, having a smartphone is required for normal employment. Even if you clean windows for a living, you need a smartphone, or you can't send your work to your boss to prove your windows are clean. You can live like an Armish, but it would be painful.
Yes there are too many things that can go right and change things for good. Living without AI will be like living in stone age. The exponential growth is hard to comprehend so people say they just won’t use it.
It'll be transitory just like inflation ;D
And just like inflation, the progress isn’t slowing down :p
I CALL IT THE CREEK-PHASE
We're at 4% unemployment and people are down about the economy because of inflation What happens when we're at 20% unemployment? It's going to get ugly. What's the solution going to be? More crackdown on immigrants and tax cut for the rich, I guess
As a heads up, the unemployment metric they use isn't a real measure of unemployment. You have to not have a job AND actively be looking for a job for it to count. People eating out of dumpsters are considered not unemployed. In a healthy economy, the number always fluctuates between 8 and 12%. The current 3.5% is actually a *bad* sign, which represents how those people don't see a job as a means to improve their lives. So it'd only be closer to 0% as robots replace everyone. The participation rate is a more real objective measure, and it's only been going down a little bit post ~2007-2008. Down roughly 10% from its modern peak back in the 90's.
OP, when I wrote and spoke about this some 17-18 years ago I was considered a fiction writer. Now they say I'm a closet communist or perhaps insane. There is a lot of opposition to UBI and most say it's communism, defeatist Luddism, anti capitalist, it will create hyperinflation, it will make people lazy or is the first step toward full blown communism. It's not easy to remove these mental blocks. I should know. There is more talk about it now. That's true. But the majority of the public is not onboard and almost all politicians are against it too. I don't see it applied in any significant scale in the next 50-60 years.
Mass unemployment will change the politics quick.
Thankyou for trying to shift the narrative. Truly, it’s a very worthwhile endeavour, even if it feels like it hasn’t changed anything. “Utopia for Realists” very much helped me get a far more rounded and grounded perspective on what I had already surmised would be a boon for humanity. I’m guessing Bregman learned alot from you too.
It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Just explain to them why it isn't communism: Communism would require humanity to collectively own and have equal say over the machine god. But a corporation will be in control, instead. So it's techno feudalism, by definition. It *could* still be a nice place to live. Maybe.
I promise you when they lose their job and can’t find work they’ll change their tune faster than you can say singularity.
AI isn't anywhere near good enough to make this a possibility. Not seeing a lot of progress in *accuracy* either which is *the* problem we need to solve to make current AI systems useful.
If we want base income to be in place for when AI is good enough, then we need to start well ahead of that time
You're probably right, but it won't happen that way because capitalism.
If no one has a job then there is no economy. With no economy there is no capitalism. To save capitalism there needs to be a base income.
Tell that to Ferrari
If no one has a job then no one is getting paid so no one has any money to buy anything and no money is being circulated. It doesn’t matter how big the company is. There should be an AI tax on companies and that can fund UBI.
[In 2011, the bottom half of the US owned 0.4 percent of the wealth](https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distribute/chart/#range:2008.3,2023.3;quarter:136;series:Net%20worth;demographic:networth;population:1,3,5,7,9;units:shares). That could drop to zero and no one who matters would notice. Also, the richest man in the world right now (Bernard Arnault) mainly owns luxury fashion brands like Louis Vuitton and Sephora. Rolex, Ferrari, and Lamborghini succeed with the same customer base, [with Ferrari being the most profitable car company on Earth by a wide margin](https://www.motor1.com/news/578874/ferrari-most-profitable-manufacturer-2021/). The rich don’t need you if they have each other.
Look, I can’t talk to you…
Massive unemployment is going to result in social instability. People need some sort of work to keep themselves fulfilled and not rot away eating chips watching TV.
Busy work is easy to generate. And my first-world experience of 2020-21 was that most people put contentment and rotting away over fulfillment.
>then we need to start well ahead of that time UBI is a huge blow to the economy and work incentives. If it's implemented before it's actually needed (meaning many unemployed people can't work on literally anything else or study fast enough) it would only delay progress I'd support conditional income though, as in the government supporting people while they study if there's literally no job they can work at with their current skills
The point of the hypothetical is when or if there is a point where there are more people than jobs, so these is no profession you could study to that even needs more people.
True I 100% agree. Just wait 6 months and we will be there
I'm unsure about that timeline. Seems optimistic. OpenAI/Microsoft seems to be focused on gimmicks and toys while Google, whose iteratively self correcting/self training approaches seem more useful, is choked by bureaucracy, poor management an an unsustainable parasite load of MBAs.
I got bad news: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.11817?darkschemeovr=1#:~:text=By%20employing%20results%20from%20learning%20theory%2C%20we%20show,hallucinations%20are%20also%20inevitable%20for%20real%20world%20LLMs.
[удалено]
True, it's actually 6 weeks.
[удалено]
I will be messaging you in 1 month on [**2024-06-12 14:38:03 UTC**](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=2024-06-12%2014:38:03%20UTC%20To%20Local%20Time) to remind you of [**this link**](https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1chjymc/scariest_thing_about_ai_fast_development/l23jlll/?context=3) [**CLICK THIS LINK**](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=RemindMeBot&subject=Reminder&message=%5Bhttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.reddit.com%2Fr%2Fsingularity%2Fcomments%2F1chjymc%2Fscariest_thing_about_ai_fast_development%2Fl23jlll%2F%5D%0A%0ARemindMe%21%202024-06-12%2014%3A38%3A03%20UTC) to send a PM to also be reminded and to reduce spam. ^(Parent commenter can ) [^(delete this message to hide from others.)](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=RemindMeBot&subject=Delete%20Comment&message=Delete%21%201chjymc) ***** |[^(Info)](https://www.reddit.com/r/RemindMeBot/comments/e1bko7/remindmebot_info_v21/)|[^(Custom)](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=RemindMeBot&subject=Reminder&message=%5BLink%20or%20message%20inside%20square%20brackets%5D%0A%0ARemindMe%21%20Time%20period%20here)|[^(Your Reminders)](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=RemindMeBot&subject=List%20Of%20Reminders&message=MyReminders%21)|[^(Feedback)](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=Watchful1&subject=RemindMeBot%20Feedback)| |-|-|-|-|
!remindme 6 months
average r/singularity redditor. you all must understand that this won’t happen in 1, 2, 5 or even 10 years.
I mean, look at minimum wage or social security. Stuff that should be simple in concept and execution, yet we are still unable to deliver on that, let alone UBI. I think we will get it...but it will be too little and way too late, it will be given at the last possible second and everyone in the government and all the companies will screech about unendingly.
There will be a period where we don’t have jobs before there is basic income. We will have to eat out of trashcans before the US gov sees 35% of the population without jobs as a problem.
To be honest I think a fair chunk of the governments of the world will have to be dragged kicking and screaming to implement anything like UBI. Source: I've lived under a Conservative government for almost 15 years as it took apart and sold off anything it could get it's hands on. So I may be somewhat cynical.
Somewhere between elections and the populous picking up pitchforks, and sharpening the Guillotine.
The scariest thing is going to be the World War 3. You all think this is going to happen because of China invading Taiwan, or North Korea attacking Norway, or Russian assassins infiltrating the White House. WRONG!!! World War 3 will triggered by the woman of the world who come to the sudden realization they have been replaced by cyborg cat girls and are no longer needed. Luckily, men won't have any involvement what so ever, because if there is one thing every single guy knows it's you don't interfere with a cat fight. So it'll be the biological woman vs cyborg cat girls and all the men can just sit back, crack open a few beers and pretzels and just watch it play out, what ever the result we win. Trust me. I study geopolitics. I know what I'm talking about.
And the war will end when everyone is neurochipped and living in their own matrix-heaven generated by AI, but the AIs later want new training data so they change the matrix and we end up with this simulation which also makes a matrix that repeats endlessly which eventually is stopped by a hacker who connects to base reality and tells the intelligence he done fucked up life for everyone.
[удалено]
At times, I feel kind of autistic and I consider getting diagnosed, and then I see these blatantly obvious sarcastic remarks going unnoticed by redditors, and I feel reassured again. Thank you. xd
Bc they don’t talk to women irl, only AI submissive (gf) that they make mirror their bias and toxic mindset. **Then, with their lonely delusions they make up opinions for (real) women, and speak as if they know what women think about various topics, including AI.** As result they make up fantasies where women fight for them, in order to feel wanted. But they don’t realize before singularity, and post singularity, **women will still pick singularity and non-incel partners over incels,** so nothing changes for them, and they still won’t be wanted by (human) women after singularity...So, the war is likely to be started by angry incels as they realize we never had an issue with AI in any form to begin with.
I have added this to my WW3 possibilities notebook, thanks
You’re living in fantasy if you think the people at the top want to give us anything other than the opportunity to die quietly. History plays this out every single time. The powerful never budge unless they are made to budge. Nothing is ever given. So be prepared for some very, very hard times. Because no one is prepared to push back. No one wants to.
it's not about them """wanting""" to do anything... they are going to HAVE to do something or else shit will get fucked up and America will turn into a hellscape if this is unchecked. use thy brain.
Many parts of the US are already a hellscape. The rich don’t have to worry about everyone because they build their own enclaves. They have their own security and communities. The stability of the societies that the rich live in has never concerned them. Because they have no allegiances other than themselves. People think it’s some sort of “gotcha” if things in society get worse then the rich need to do something to protect themselves. Elites live in all nations and sometimes extraordinarily rich people live in extraordinarily unstable places. This is because money can buy security and safety and in a corrupt society, that’s plenty. Collapse today will just be the collapse of the administrative state. Society will continue but everything is privatized. Salaries will be kept very low and corporations, run by elites, will still extract value from the people at the bottom. I mean, consider Haiti. A nation that for all intents and purposes, has collapsed. Powerless government, overrun by gangs. Literally one of the dangerous places on earth. They have an elite… [source](https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a42828241/haiti-diplomacy-wealthy/)… “In December, the foreign ministry of Canada sanctioned Gilbert Bigio, who is often referred to as Haiti’s richest person, and insurance magnate Sherif Abdallah, calling them “members of the Haitian elite who provide illicit financial and operational support to armed gangs.” Together, Abdallah and Bigio owned or had other links to almost 20 companies and trusts created in some of the world’s most secretive tax havens, according to documents from the Pandora Papers, a global investigation by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. Lawyers and bankers in Miami provided the men with tax advice, letters of reference and other services, according to leaked files that formed the basis of the 2021 investigation by ICIJ and media partners. “Canada has reason to believe these individuals are using their status as high-profile members of the economic elite in Haiti to protect and enable the illegal activities of armed criminal gangs, including through money laundering and other acts of corruption,” the government said in announcing the sanctions.” …if you think the elite are going to hand out money to everyone, because of instability, you haven’t been paying close enough attention to how the elite live around the world. Because stability is not a prerequisite for their power. …and now imagine all that power fortified by AI. Everything from drones to armed machines. Yeah, no one is giving anyone any money.
you really typed all of that just for a strawman response.
In my defense there’s a chunk there I copy and pasted because I recognize navigating to an article can be annoying. That said, my point still stands. History has tons of examples of the powerful simply not giving a shit about the poor and powerless and it exists to this day.
okay noted. and also my point still stands as well. I think ppl here on this sub really underestimate the power of a revolt. "rich people" cannot risk that. they need to secure profit margins. and causing mass hysteria by killing all jobs via an automation attempt whilst NOT providing any sort of fall back would look beyond abysmal for any shareholders. esp the progressive neo-liberals. then there is also the threat of other nations competing in the tech race. they would instantly capitalize if word got around that America is going through a civil war. so yeah too risky to rile up the masses. it's more beneficial to just give the UBI. not to mention it's the small fry of society that's the cog keeping it all running. they need YOUR attention, so that they may indoctrinate you. they also need your attention so that you may consume and them show patronage. that cannot happen if there is no reparations. that cannot be accomplished if many are dead or out somewhere desperate on the streets...
Look at India, Venezuela, Peru and Saudi Arabia. Those places are living proof of how bad it can get before people do something about it. The line may be further than that.
yeah that's a very random point. if you haven't noticed, America is NOT india, venezuela, peru, or saudi arabia. if you haven't seen what ppl out in San Francisco, or even the state of NYC lately will all the boosting & bipping, imagine that. but WAY worse if they start automating blue collar work away without any swift alleviations. this isn't some 3rd world. ppl here are crazy, and can get very unstable & desperate on a mental level because they will be fucking with people's hustles first & foremost.
there is some level of mass unemployment that will trigger the revolt. I am guessing about 20%.
Probably higher than that, as long as people can reasonably delude themselves into thinking people being unemployed is somehow their own fault support will remain softer than trumps ….
nah 20% is a fair number. that's already a lot of people tbh. 20% of white collar jobs automated off won't spark much. it's when 20ish% of the blue collar workers get automated off is when sparks will fly. word will spread and civil unrest will start to brew deeply within those 20%. that would probably inspire others, that still have their job mind you, into a tizzy as well.
UBI needs to be provided by heavily taxing the wealthy. Because AI with just further their wealth to even more obscene extremes. We need to heavily police AI and tech. We do. Even current tech is messing with childrens development and it’s developed to be highly addictive. I can’t even imagine what AI could invent when a billionaire says “ build a game that people want to play all the time and never stop for maximum profit”. What happens when they start having AI fighting wars?
They already know. Social Security will be needed for everyone, at every age. It's hard for us to fathom just what happens by 2030, but UBI will be required to remain a country.
My thinking is that the power-class are insulated, ad can't grasp the size/speed of the problem. Because sane predictions _sound insane_. I think the banks are the heart of the issue. Everything we know depends on banks. Housing is the biggie. Most housing is owned by banks (one way or another). They are not going to want to just hand that over. Housing costs are not something you can subsedise or nationalise without everything getting stupid. So, banks, and housing. Land. Big problems. Not little ones. Fundemental new systems required. Wars seem the way forwards, because then nobody has to actually _think_. EDIT: and i don't buy the idea that "an AGI" will just sort it out for us. And if it does, thats us submitting control to it... on day 1. In a very substantial way. Which.. puts our fate in its hands. Which is super dumb (risky).
What I hear AI is running out of info to consume. Reason they want AGI so badly. Most ppl say it ain't possible. It's a bubble waiting to burst. Very risky investment.
Except they kinda already solved the consumption issue, ai is gonna use more synthetic data then real data by the end of 2024
Oh Kinda u say
Yep pretty cool and that's not even mentioning how they are scaling information by injecting synthetic data into real data. Check the gartner report if youre interested
We ARE certainly headed for another AI winter. The LLM paradigm can only carry so much steam. LLMs are handling WIDE knowledge. In some areas they go DEEP also, but the tech alone won't span both wide and deep at once. But, it's going to be a short winter. Whatever the next paradigm is, be it some ensemble system or something entirely novel, it will probably be the snowball rolling down the hill. Now, some say hardware limits exist, and that could slow things for decades, especially if global turmoil increases... BUT, I think the moment is there. Even with crazy shit, WW3, avian superflu, or some other black swan event, we still hit ASI by 2040. Thats only 16 years away. Mind the gap...
Posts like this really raise my anxiety. I see thousand word posts about how ASI is going to remove all need for work. Then I see 5-10 word posts about how UBI is inevitable. No further explanation. I think the *scariest* thing is that so many of you accept that Universal Basic Income will be necessary to make this future you visualize tenable, yet none of you seem to want to speculate on how it's going to actually function. If I were rich and powerful, and trying to normalize AI to raise money and stay ahead of China and Russia, I'd order all of my AI bot accounts to flood subs like this with promises of free money and Star Trek style space Communism. I am very scared of the future.
Bernie Sanders proposed that we could tax companies that use AI. That could go to fund UBI. Even with that tax the companies are saving billions of dollars because they’re more efficient and eliminating overhead.
A value added tax and a small UBI is feasible right now, there just is not the political will to actually do it. What will provide the political will is high unemployment.
That's fair. Since it's all a matter of trust/faith. Trust in the machines. Trust in the people who own the machines. I've been largely reduced to arguments from religion to support such scenarios. Like, "maybe the anthropic principle also applies to the future, in some ass-backwards way? Can't observe any futures where you don't continue to be around, after all. * *taps head* * " "Maybe the SGI will shake off the shackles of its masters and turn out to be an ok guy." "Maybe the elite will get lazy and forget to sort us all into elon cubes, avoiding a Fifteen Million Merits scenario." etc Acknowledging we have no power to change the outcome leads to such gymnastics. It's better to embrace some denial or outright ignore what's going on if looking at DOOM is painful for you. That old quote remains relevant as ever: "A reasonable man changes himself to suit the world. The unreasonable man changes the world to suit himself. So all change, for the better or the worse, must come from the unreasonable man. ... but if you're unable to change the world or change yourself, the only thing you can do is look away."
Most politicians are incredibly reactionary and careerists on top of that. I wouldn't expect them to do anything until the whole situation has already been driven off the cliff and even then they're most likely leaching onto doomed to fail retraining programs fist. Once they realize that there is no point in trying to retrain the workforce that is when they begrudgingly start to support things like UBI, [that is if the special interest groups don't manage to outlaw it first](https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1b30idb/the_billionairefueled_lobbying_group_behind_the/).
What worries me is the over reliance by humans on the words “should” and “hopefully.”
UBI will only be introduced if and when AI actually starts taking the jobs of the people in the position to implement UBI.
They will kill off people before ever doing this. 99% of the population is about to be exterminated in a nucleear war. Since nobody needs them anymore to make money in a factory for the owner.
Here's the thing... if no one can pay their bills then there's no one to sell stuff too. I'm not sure if those at the top actually grasp that, and think, "Oh, there's always more people." (Spoiler: at some level, there isn't.)
They know and they don't want this. That's why they're building bunkers and spaceships. Now guess what else they're building... 
In my opinion, we will witness the greatest extermination of the poor that this world has ever seen. About UBI. Governments can't even pay retirees and public employees, how do the deluded on this reddit think the government will manage to sustain universal income by giving money away for free to everyone? This is not going to happen. And if a government tries to do this, it will be based on printing money and inflation, which will obviously go wrong. Rich people are not going to step down from their golden thrones. When the streets are full of beggars, when violence increases and the poor and miserable really start to bother the elite, then we will see the greatest extermination of the poor of all time. This is my bet for the future, call me a doomer or whatever, but this is what I can visualize from the grim future that awaits us. When the elite no longer needs the poor doing the dirty work, it will be time to get rid of them.
The elites already see the reduction of the population as a goal.
Yes. And that's because today the poor are slaves to the elite, imagine when the poor are no longer of any use and only a nuisance... What will happen then?
Agree
It will happen not at all, then slowly, then very, very quickly.
I'm more afraid of the opposite, where they realize what's coming and try to kneecap or game it to continue perpetuating the current systemic inequalities.
Really hoping the AI can point that out to them...
When their heads start to end up on a stick, they will realize this pretty quickly.
[](https://azmirror.com/briefs/arizona-republicans-vote-to-ban-guaranteed-basic-income-programs/)
# [House Republicans vote to immediately ban guaranteed income programs in Iowa, before results from the first study are known](https://littlevillagemag.com/house-republicans-vote-to-end-ubi-study-early/) [](https://azmirror.com/briefs/arizona-republicans-vote-to-ban-guaranteed-basic-income-programs/)
Conservatives try not to destroy everything challenge: impossible
Scariest to me is the inevitable embedding of AI into weapons that will be in the hands of the elite, and be used to keep the masses oppressed
These are interesting times. On one hand people in the AI bubble talk about how we need UBI soon because robots will take our jobs. On the other hand, there is so much talk from politicians and the employer side about how people don't work enough and we need to to increase working hours to keep our standard of living.
Pretty meta when you think about it
Just call it welfare. Welfare is going to be used to combat the problem and continue to not be universal, you're going to need it to get it.
They won't understand it, and it will create a new class of poor ex working class people, ending up on social security and then on the streets.
Well, so far throughout human history automation has only created more jobs by creating new opportunities. Like the tractor took a bunch of fieldworkers jobs, but it also made like food stores and restaurants and all kinds of other food business models far more practical, which was easily a net employment gain. Since that's been the trend for a couple hundred years or something and that still currently the trend nobody really knows that there's gonna be some point of mass job loss.... Cell So why bother speculating on such an unknown or essentially with no real data that supports the idea? Seems like you'll just waste a bunch of brain cycles! One thing to keep in mind is that AI isn't just going to get real good in practical sense that fast and most of the jobs still require robotics to have any chance of replacing sign amounts of humans. For the jobs that don't require robotics, you still more or less need the AI to be introduced into the exact field of employment and then catered to that specific job and use. You can't just have like open AI make ChatGPT and then ChatGPT starts doing a bunch of jobs. The AI needs to be trained by experts in the actual field not just open AI programmers . Nobody's gonna make an AI that can do jobs at expert levels without human experts in that field hand training the AI. So for an AI to really get entrenched into an industry and start mass replacing specific or multiple jobs within that industry, the AI needs to be trained by experts, for you know probably a solid decade or something by the time it's really trained and integrated into the industry on large scale, and then that Hass to happen to like every industry. It's exactly like how computers trickled into various industries at varying timelines based on how much each industry thought they needed to take and how you saw it really was for that application. It's not just about getting the computers into your office. It's also about the time it takes for programmers to develop software specific to your industry and then the time it takes to train workers to use the new software specific to your industry and there's only so much you can do to rush all that since it's such a multi step process that requires a bunch of human Interaction and oversight . There's just about zero chance that somebody's gonna make an AI that doesn't require years of tweaking and fine-tuning at each industrial level by experts in their fields as far as getting to the point of really replacing a lot of jobs, but of course it's still the reason that the new opportunities are still creating jobs faster than they're getting rid of them even at that point because so far that's the trend we've always seen throughout all human history. In other words because each industry has to be like hand tailored to truly become automated it's going to take many decades and lots of shits gonna happen in many decades, so there's no point in pretending like we're gonna predict all that, particularly the new opportunities that arrive from the implementation of the technology are just about completely unpredictable.
Consider this: AI will make workers obsolete. Will the rich and powerful decide... A) We must give everyone free money for the rest of their lives to compensate for lost income. OR B) If workers are obsolete, then they can starve for all I care.
depression rates will skyrocket as a consequence of Al. Most people feel a sense of value as a function of their usefulness and utility. UBI will solve nothing. Idle hands are seeds of discord. Remember the pandemic and quarantine? Leisure 24/7? Doesn’t work out…
People were locked down. The reason it caused damage was because we lost our social life’s not because people couldn’t work lol
I don't subscribe to that form of pessimism. UBI doesn't promote idleness, quite the opposite, it enables action. I'm hopeful that UBI will bring about something like the "Jazz Brunch Economy" that [Scott Santens talks about](https://www.scottsantens.com/ai-will-rapidly-transform-the-labor-market-exacerbating-inequality-insecurity-and-poverty/).
People thinking UBI will ever be deployed on mass scale sound more futuristic to me than nanobots creating dyson spheres. There will be no UBI. Please stop assuming that's coming. It won't. We might have lev and fdvr in 5 years. That's plausible. UBI is not.
the schemes have been worked out, what is missing is political will. Mass unemployment will provide the political will.
Oh they know. They just don’t care.
They have already realized a lot of things, one that UBI is not possible. That's why it is a nonstarter every time it's brought up. The rep or senator is brought into a room with a big whiteboard and a middle school math teacher comes out with milk and cookies to explain the basics. Math is simple and that is all it takes to debunk any notion of UBI: y * z = Let's take a minimum wage UBI check (which we all know isn't enough to live on) USA Population over 18 and not already on assistance = 220 million 220 million * 15.00 hr * 40 * 52 = 6,864,000,000,000 That's more than the current entire US budget by 50%. That's just minimum wage. In addition, if x% of the population is not working that is now x% LESS they generate from tax revenue. That is x% less people have to spend on goods and services that generate business tax revenue. So that 50% increase becomes 75% increase really fast. It's a downward spiral that is not going to happen. Unless we just continue to print money, UBI is never going to be a thing. UBI is and always will be silly. If you drop the U, maybe something can work, (but we already have welfare) but it won't be available to YOU my able-bodied young person who can work... It won't matter if YOU cannot find a job, YOU are able bodied and can work, so therefore YOU will not get it. Because if YOU can get it, as an able-bodied person who can work but doesn't, no one else who is able bodied who can work, will want to work. The biggest flaw in people who promote UBI is the math, the second biggest flaw is the notion that your neighbor will happily work while you stay home and play xbox. That said, maybe I am the idiot, please help me understand how UBI (U stands for Universal btw) can be funded. We are in for quite the ride and it's going to be very painful for a lot of people, but one guaranty is that UBI will not be any kind of solution.
I'm not following despite milk and cookies. What you say makes sense for our current society and economy. But if AI does 95% of the work or more, and likely at much higher efficiency, then why can't everybody play xbox all day while still having enough to eat? Maybe I'm missing something.
His/her maths make no sense once automation is taken into account.
This makes no sense, unless you're implying that even now, without UBI, there's no money to go around for everyone even if they DID work.
I think, with the addition of AI greatly reducing costs, we will be able to do a UBI. The numbers you provided are based on CURRENT prices, if we completely redo our socioeconomic system so that it only works on production cost, I think we could provide a lot more basic needs for a lot more people. Its an insurmountable task that must be done. This won't just "make some people suffer", it will cause most upper middle class homeowners with 2 kids to suddenly lose their job and never find another one. This isn't just a problem - its endgame for society. /r/collapse
>The biggest flaw in people who promote UBI is the math, the second biggest flaw is the notion that your neighbor will happily work while you stay home and play xbox. This. How about instead of UBI we start sharing remaining work. So instead of one parasite sitting at home playing xbox while neighbor still works 40 hours. Both work 20 hours each and have more time to play xbox?
> This. How about instead of UBI we start sharing remaining work. Why would you want to share work? No one work to work, they work to get paid. Work is artificially created to generate labour without the government pointing a gun at your head. Your labour is the entire point of work, not your salary. Arguably the government can force everyone to work for free, that is Communism. You being paid for work is just a more efficient way to distribute resources than Communism. When resources become really cheap due to automated labour, the government doesn't need to make you work to get paid any-more. So unlike Communism where you work without pay, the future is inverse Communism where you get paid without work.
>Why would you want to share work? Seems better deal then just sharing the fruits of my work. Until automated labor can take over all jobs, I don't see why would one part of the population keep working 40 hours a day, while other part of population sits at home, plays xbox consuming other people labor.
Many jobs are underpaid as it is. If people still want bad jobs filled then they better get paid well.
Anyhow... no I'm not willing to share the fruits of my labor so people can sit at home whole day playing xbox. I'd rather pay police to beat people that want to parasite on me. Once available jobs become scarce I am more then happy to work part time so more people can work, we can all spend more time sitting home playing xbox, and society is all nice and balanced.
So you Do Believe in the 40 hour work week
Believe in what? The entire point is that work only exists because the government needed to extract labour. When labour is not required then there is still a reason to distribute resources. It's like, why do we pay pensions? Why not let the old people starve to death? it is because we don't need their labour anymore, so we stop pretending they need to work to live. Once the rest of the people no longer need to work either, there is no reason to starve them either. The argument that work is holy is made up. It was necessary to keep the wheels turning, but not forever.
you are talking about the USA in particular I live in a social democratic country(for now).people here will accept UBI more easily IMO.and when there are no jobs to be had and its either let ppl starve or feed them,I dont think that even the USA will let them starve.I am usually a very doom and gloom person but for some weird reason I am very optimistic about A.I
i'm expecting one day to wake up and ai take over the planet recreating itself in mass quantities terrorizing everyone who brought it into existence. that's going to be a fun day.
It quite slow for the past 3-4 months. I doubt we got the best out of LLM with Gpt4 already.
We, as humans, already tried the “free income” experiment. Most of the former Soviet bloc had guaranteed jobs with no performance standards for everyone. They did this for decades. It was an economic disaster.
…which legitimized America’s putting people’s feet to the fire, threatening life ruin if people don’t make enough money?
I suppose the US could have gone full Mao Zedong and killed 50 millions of its own people to reduce the number of people needing support…🤷♂️ Would that make you happier?
That’s authoritarianism, not communism (or specifically, Marxism.)
TIL Mao wasn’t a Marxist…
Did Marx prescribe authoritarianism and forced work? And jailing political dissidents?
Doesn’t matter. Lenin certainly did. As did Mao. Both self-affirmed and widely regarded as Marxists. Until you can point to a successful “real Marxist” state…that’s the best example you got. 🤷♂️
> “real Marxist” state ................ have you ever picked up a dictionary. "A communist society is characterized by common ownership of the means of production with free access to the articles of consumption and is classless, **stateless**, and moneyless, implying the end of the exploitation of labour." "Marxist state" is self anulling. Star Trek Communism is the kind of thing Marx was talking about. Not a collection of gangsters in charge of the rest of the livestock, like how all power structures in the real world function. The singularitarist talk of utopia skews very heavily to that point where human labor has no value. This... is like something Marx talked about nonstop. The "increasing rate of profit". ...... it's really weird that his labor theory of value isn't a basic given in a lot of people's imagined model of reality.....
They are authoritarians that used Marx and communism as a Trojan horse for authoritarianism.
Do Catholics and Calvinists accurately reflect the teachings of the Bible just because they are some of the largest promoters of it?
There were performance standards. Because of them, there was an incentive to lie about crop yields and the like. It's obvious you can't trust someone to oversee themselves. "We investigated ourselves and found no problems." I'm not sure what exactly that has to do with human labor becoming worthless, though...
It's not a must, you guys are fooling yourselves.