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zzq1015 | 3 months ago

What if we implement UBI in a way that:

1. Companies not participating in UBI: they have to hire people, even for nothing, but all the staff have to be paid.

2. The others: they are focused on making money without hiring people ("efficient money-making machines"), so they are forced to participate in UBI, and therefore distribute their wealth towards society.

So long with "efficient money-making machines".

discuss

order

mrshadowgoose|3 months ago

Unfun thought experiment: In an AGI scenario, what lever of power do the UBI recipients have to force what you've described?

Historically, humanity's biological monopoly on the fundamental resource of "general intelligence" has always been that lever. Looking at the world today, it's pretty clear that democracies are just a temporary balance between the general contempt of the powerful towards commoners, and the fact that the powerful begrudgingly need our economic utility, which is ultimately based on our general intellect. Even callous dictatorships had to exercise partial restraint on violence and murder, to retain a pool of general intellect.

AGI will be a multiple-whammy here:

- most people will become economically worse-than-useless, they will be a total liability on the rich and powerful

- those same people are unlikely to be given access to any levers of power or influence, because they no longer have anything of value to provide to the rich and powerful

- AGI in combination with robotic platforms, after a certain threshold, will permit for insurmountable policing. The "rise up against the robots" cliches we see in film simply become impossible after a certain point.

I desperately hope we end up wielding AI to usher in a post-scarcity utopia, but looking at the types of people who own the world...we'll get what we're allowed to get.

randerson|3 months ago

The people in power (whether a government/king, or company) will have the incentive to shrink the population. In the past, the economy grew with the number of people, but now only the costs would grow. There is basically a non-zero chance that our future contains laws limiting who is allowed to have kids or how many. And that's not even the worst action they could take.

dvsfish|3 months ago

Excellent comment. From a pure resource allocation perspective, walking the current path is like looking down the barrel so to speak. I guess our fate is already in the hands of the decision makers. Hopefully theres enough conscience up there. That said, I would expect that if such a position were taken, it would be accomplished via a mass sterilisation campaign rather than direct extermination. More justifiable amongst other decision makers. Less moral burden.

__MatrixMan__|3 months ago

The lever is that whenever somebody tries to give you a scarcity-only token like USD or BTC you say "that's no good here, come back with something that proves to me that you didn't make it by making life worse for the people around you". We (the masses) still control consensus on what counts as valuable, and if were going to break from scarcity as the basis for that (and we should) then it has to be a proper break.

Play by rules that have something to do with our collective values or we're not going to acknowledge your stores of "value". "I got this from my grandpa who was a successful swindler" needs to stop being a source of money that you can expect the children of the swindled to accept. We need to drop the idea that scarcity implicitly creates meritocracy and instead deal in verifications of merit.

If they're really ready to go it alone in their bunkers with robots for friends then I guess we won't be seeing each other anymore, but I kinda doubt that'll work for them in the long run.

neom|3 months ago

In scenario 1, why would I ever start a business?

This is interesting thinking but I can quit understand how the incentives play.

zzq1015|3 months ago

I mean, when your business is big enough, you'll naturally start to hire more people. Small businesses don't require a large staff and typically don't generate a substantial amount of revenue. The size of a company (i.e., its revenue) generally needs to be in proportion to the number of staff it has, with some flexibility, but not too much.