What Is the Point of Universal Basic Income?

Fact: The plan is about replacing you with robots at work so they can rake in more profits. In return you get to go on welfare rebranded as UBI. Look it up UBI is about automation AI replacing humans for profit. (see geordie rose) So your 40k job becomes 10k to 15k welfare. MegaCorps pocket the rest of your wage as reward for selling you out to UBI and AI.

I'm glad we are having this conversation about ubi, but I see a lot of proposals that are basically "just give everyone $X,000 a month and turn off other social services".

My big concern with that approach is that we'd see landlords immediately bump rents, or we'd cut medical support for people (when medical bills can clearly be many multiples of ubi).

But I'm very pro ubi if we can figure out how to protect the people who rely on it (maybe with some sort of rent control?), support it with other social programs like healthcare, and build some educational resources about how to effectively use it.

That's very nice of them. If I had the means towards that end, I wouldn't hand out welfare like that. In fact, I would probably tend towards the future scenario that was painted in Terminator, only with me controlling the AI, while pretending towards humanity that the AI went out of control. More profits that way.

Seriously, if you have that kind of power, what's the incentive to let everyone else live?

Is this AI revolution ever going to happen? Siri and Alexa still hear the wrong thing half the time, even when I speak and enunciate very clearly. What jobs have been eliminated by this revolution that I’ve been hearing about for the past decade? The self driving cars are not picking me up and not delivering my packages.

I have a better solution than airdropping everyone welfare money so we can laze around all day - make it easier to start businesses. It’s extremely easy for me to create a tech company that scales to millions of users. It’s extremely difficult for me to give massages, cut hair, sell retail products in a physical location, and innumerable useful services that require licenses, bureaucracy, tax forms, inspectors, and on and on.

Even worse is that whatever the poor saves is immediately lost to inflation - education, healthcare, housing, and literal inflation to the fed printing money.

Rather than bandaid government-created problems with more government and a disincentive to create value for society, I wish we would let people other than CS majors become entrepreneurs organically.

Its all nice and hand holdy to think about utopias but utopias don’t have the best track record for the human race