/r/antiwork: A tragedy of sanewashing and social gentrification

This would not disproportionately harm poor people. In fact, poor people would be significantly better off due to the increased income from UBI + higher wages. Poor people are the ones doing those sh*tty jobs you're complaining about wages rising for. Those at the bottom would have their incomes multiplied.

Actually those at the bottom are homeless, and UBI would virtually eliminate involuntary homelessness, so the idea that UBI makes poor people off is ludicrous and divorced from reality.

Never said anything about abolishing money or supply and demand. Supply and demand would continue to exist.

Look into the vast plethora of research on universal basic income before you dismiss it as "superficial" without even understanding what it even is.

I think the premisr of the proposition is that UBI makes housing assistances superfluous, since UBI should cover basic needs.

I'm all for automation, let's build more of it. But the current state of automation technology is nowhere near the level that UBI proponents naively assume. In the real world that shit it tremendously expensive, not very flexible, and often unreliable.

Increased automation will raise living standards but it generally doesn't free up time for humans to do non-work things. People contine working just as much but on different tasks. And let's be realistic. Most people aren't very creative, and even the ones who try to be creative never produce much of value. If they don't have to work then a lot of them are going to sit around getting high and playing Xbox. I'm not a moralizer, I have nothing against people choosing to spend their time on such activities. But there's no way I'm going to vote to raise my own taxes in order to provide UBI for people who are capable of working but choose not to.

Technology wise, there are a lot of diffrent visions of how it might look like.

I liked the description of the Universal Constructors in Diamond Age, toothed gears that captured atoms and placed them into buckets, sorting the elements out of the ocean water.

That is probably more fantasy though, more likely to like like how it does now with modular rock crushers, moving belts, etc.

Food supply is going to be interesting(read difficult), we can automate harvesting grains(rice, wheat, corn) easily. But things like tomatoes, lettuce, spinach rely heavily on human labor to tend and harvest. One of the things that is noticeable is that as we select foods that ship and store better(which we will be doing more of as we automate more) they are less tasty. Maybe we can engineer foods that are easy to harvest, tasty and transport well but that will necessitate us to get over our fear of GMO.

On the societal front, I would not want the government to have control of the manufacturing systems because the temptation to use control against political adversaries would be to great(See Biden's recent comments on how Spotify should do more about Joe Rogan and how Trump used his influence(Not taking a stance on any issues, just showing the issues exist and would have grave ramifications).

My thought would be that as you have a product more and more automated and vertically integrated, let's say bread. Planting, harvest, milling, mixing, baking are all owned by a handful of companies with minimum human labor. Government should then hold bids to see who gets to supply the market, limiting each supplier to below a 20%(?) share as to keep multiple suppliers in the market but also spread the risk so you don't have a too big to fail.

The companies would be paid via taxes and everyone would get free bread.

Now, you would have to deal with the effects of that; people wasting bread because it's free, health effects of eating more bread because it's free are two that I can think of off the top of my head.

One other thought on the after effects: We will have no way to educate and no way to punish those who commit crime. I like kids but I doubt I would want to spend the majority of my day trying to get a group of them to learn when I don't have to. And honestly, they would also feel like it is a waste of time because it is not needed.

No one will want to spend their time policing ,running prisons, jails or courthouses either. Hell, you have a hard enough time trying to get people to serve jury duty now.

I know we like to that crime will cease to exist if we have plenty, but there is more than the lust for physical items that drives crime. Desire to control others, lust.

The transition to a society where everyone can get what they want, when they want it is fraught with pitfalls and traps. The best cases would end with up something like the Isaac Asimov's utopias or Ian M. Bank's Culture universe. Middle case is dystopias like Snow Crash and Diamond Age. Worst case is that humanity falls into a hedonistic loop, people stop learning and then things break. Probably wouldn't kill everyone but humanity would be reset at that point.

Random tidbit that I didn't work in: If you can't design a system that is 100% perfect and requires no maintenance, you should design one that requires ~yearly maintenance. If the maintenance cycles are too far apart, no one will remember when to do it and how to do it. Later when it breaks, there might not be anyone who knows how to fix it.