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What Is the Point of Universal Basic Income?

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Re: What Is the Point of Universal Basic Income?

#11

Post by alipang »

foolzcrow wrote: post #2

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.

"MegaCorps" in any kind of healthy market will still compete on price, so simply stating that they will "pocket the rest" of AI-related productivity improvements is ridiculous.

The more likely outcome is that prices on a whole lot of things are about to drop drastically. Of course this does nothing to help the people who are left out of a job and can no longer contribute as they are no longer cost-effective. UBI is one option to address this, at least partially. Do you have a better one? Ban AI? Do you happen to be an anti-capitalist, and your convenient solution is (big surprise) to remove capitalism as an economic system?

I'm not saying the effect of more people being outcompeted from the job market will never be a problem. Perhaps parts of it will be solved with income redistribution being increased. Perhaps part of the effort will be in creating new jobs where humans can not be replaced. Some cookie cutter "anti megacorp" rhetoric ain't likely to help much.

Re: What Is the Point of Universal Basic Income?

#12

Post by RivieraKid »

The prevailing view seems to be: robots will take our jobs, therefore we will need UBI, which allows people to live without work.

The way I see it, the main problem that UBI is solving is inequality, it's a rich to poor transfer. Excessive inequality is bad because the aggregate utility goes down (rich people don't gain much from an additional dollar, so it's more effectively used by a poor person).

Transfering cash directly is the most efficient way of decreasing inequality, so UBI is the right approach. At this time, the amount of UBI should be below what allows a comfortable life, because it would lead to a feedback loop in which people would be increasingly demotivated to work.

And what about robots? There is a danger that automation will further exacerbate income inequality, so redistribution is a natural response, because it would increase the effective wages of low income jobs. It seems unlikely that robots will literally take our jobs, you can probably always be someone's slave (not literally) for $5 / hour.

Re: What Is the Point of Universal Basic Income?

#13

Post by deepsun »

foolzcrow wrote: post #2

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.

Well MegaCorps still need customers who can pay.

Otherwise we have Great Depression again, when there was a lot of production, but public simply didn't have any money to buy it.

The solution last time was to basically distribute money to poor, e.g. fund mega-projects with tax money. I feel like UBI sounds pretty much like that as well.

Re: What Is the Point of Universal Basic Income?

#14

Post by Kaiyou »

Pfhreak wrote: post #4

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 peop…

You've pointed out why UBI makes no sense. As the saying goes, if everyone is a millionaire, nobody is. Likewise, if you give everyone $X that amount becomes the new baseline.

This is also the reason why it makes no sense to fight wealth inequality. Without wealth inequality, there wouldn't be wealth, only a baseline.

What UBI tries to solve isn't a bug, but a feature.

Re: What Is the Point of Universal Basic Income?

#15

Post by ZhuanXia »

If automation will truly do all jobs, then by definition we have human-level AI. As labour supply enormously limits economic growth, we would have economic growth that is unimaginably large in this scenario. Imagine how quickly a startup could scale if they could clone their best engineer. Now imagine that applied to the economy as a whole. We would get economic doubling times on the order of months. If we truly get automation as flexible as any human, economic growth would be truly insane. Even mild redistribution would be effective in such a scenerio.

Absent human-level AI, there will remain tasks that only humans can do. Hence we will have jobs.

But truly, if we do get human-level AI, it seems to me we will have bigger problems than unemployment. I hate to get all Nick Bostrom, but it really does seem like the objective functions of the machines would be all that matters in this scenerio. As it is their objective functions, not laws, that would decide our fate. Either human-level AI is far off, in which case technological unemployment is not a worry, or it is not in which case technological unemployment is the least of our worries.

Re: What Is the Point of Universal Basic Income?

#16

Post by naveen99 »

Imagine a mandatory allowance for your kids... like you are required to feed them and cloth them. Add a requirement to give them some cash too... otherwise the state takes them away for negligence. (Not actually suggesting we do this..., just a shower thought).

Re: What Is the Point of Universal Basic Income?

#17

Post by austincheney »

That article isn’t about UBI in much the same way that capitalism isn’t about money. Capitalism is primarily about obtaining advantage and money is one measure among many.

The supposed goals of capitalism are great: competition, innovation, refinement, transformation, and others. The problem is that those are goals they teach school children. They aren’t the primary goal that actually matters in practice. If capitalism could be refocused to these more ideal goals it would be better, perhaps more utopian. The difference is that the primary goal is highly exclusive while the ideal goals are highly inclusive.

Re: What Is the Point of Universal Basic Income?

#18

Post by Kaiyou »

deepsun wrote: post #13
foolzcrow wrote: post #2

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.

Well MegaCorps still need customers who can pay. Otherwise we have Great Depression again, when there was a lot of production, but public simply didn't have any money to buy it. The solution last time was to basically distribute money to poor, e.g. fund mega-projects with tax money. I feel like UBI sounds pretty much like that as well.

You're stranded on an uninhabited island and got a robot army fulfilling your every wish.

...why again do you need customers?

Re: What Is the Point of Universal Basic Income?

#19

Post by Jupe »

foolzcrow wrote: post #2

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.

Doesn't your 40K job become a 30K salary + 10K UBI?

I never thought UBI meant communism. If you want more out of life, get a job that pays over-and-above UBI.

Re: What Is the Point of Universal Basic Income?

#20

Post by nightski »

RivieraKid wrote: post #12

The prevailing view seems to be: robots will take our jobs, therefore we will need UBI, which allows people to live without work. The way I see it, the main problem that UBI is solving is inequality, it's a rich to poor transfer. Excessive inequality is bad because the aggregate utility goes down (rich people don't gain much from an additional dollar, so it's more effectively used by a poor person). Transfering cash…

I find it hard to believe that it would be effective at reducing inequality. It would make the lives of the poor better for sure, but it will not reduce inequality. When Jeff Bezos' net worth can swing $9B in a day as it did this past Friday, giving the poor enough money to purchase food and bare essentials isn't going to make much of a dent in their net worth. I'm not saying it won't help them out, just that it really won't tip the scales as far as inequality is concerned. It's a more fundamental issue with how the current state of capitalism is structured in the U.S.
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