31–40 of 86 posts
The anti-freeloader impulse is one of the easiest ways to spur people to action. Would that go away or be intensified under UBI?
would people cease to be charitable after a tragedy because they expect UBI to handle it?
If AI automates most jobs and UBI becomes the primary source of income for most people, doesn't that imply the means of production eventually have to transfer to government control? Is there a different mechanism that makes this work without that transfer?
I am to the left politically, but I do not think UBI can work in practice for the majority of population due to human nature and the resulting lack of purpose. People do seem to have an innate need for purpose, and most people need one imposed on them by circumstances, it would seem.
The % of people who will flourish and pursue their passions, given the means to pursue any higher purpose.. is stunningly low. They are the same people that are high-agency, intelligent, driven and will hustle in any job anyway.
The best case outcome for the majority is sitting on their couch consuming AI slop entertainment infinitely, and I am not optimistic we'd even land there.
The COVID bubble was the closest we've come in the US in terms of people having more time on their hands with less financial concerns (stimulus checks, employers subsidized to make payroll, unemployment payment increases, unemployment expiration extensions, federal benefit income caps raised, increased healthcare subsidies, student loan payment pauses, eviction moratoriums, etc etc). Unfortunately it seemed the outcome was less of human flourishing and more an increase in general disorder & disaffection.
Likewise, after Capital having financed trillions in investment to deliver AGI is not going to hand over the money to find UBI willingly.
Even people in the middle seem to be easily swayed by allegations of waste/scams in government benefits programs.
My favorite Tech Bro "AI is gonna make money worthless" cognitive dissonance is how Musk keeps saying exactly this. He has been quoted that people won't need to save anymore due to abundance, while also extracting a potential $1T pay package for himself... https://fortune.com/2026/01/12/elon-musk-retirement-savings-...
Money at that level is about power. Unlike what must of us use our money for, power is relative, it's a zero sum game
My favorite Tech Bro "AI is gonna make money worthless" cognitive dissonance is how Musk keeps saying exactly this. He has been quoted that people won't need to save anymore due to abundance, while also extracting a potential $1T pay package for himself... https://fortune.com/2026/01/12/elon-musk-retirement-savings-...
Just a few hundred billion more
We’re so close to interplanetary civilisation bro
Just hundreds of billions more, just one last time
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the means of production are taken from the billionaires and given to the government, how long would their wealth last? Not sure handing the means of production to a government would be a viable solution as politicians and bureaucrats are humans and often very terrible humans at that, but I don't see how billionaires could continue to last very long once they no longer have control over anything other than a declin…
how are the means of production going to be taken? They have direct control of all of the robots.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How are billionaires “hoarders”? They may be a lot of things, but to use hoarders is a gross misunderstanding of wealth, billionaires, how equities work and more. Bezos does not have a castle filled with a scrooge mcduck moneypool. There are not castles filled with grain that could otherwise be used to feed the starving peasants.
They quite literally hoard the profit produced by the people that work for them. If they didn't, they wouldn't be billionaires. Pretending that because the wealth isn't in the form of a pool filled with gold coins that somehow makes it different is just misunderstanding wealth. As far as feeding people, he could single handidly fund SNAP for a year and still have 100 billion plus.
Do you realize jeff bezos was a billionaire long before amazon recorded a profit? So quite literally no, this is not true.
I’m really curious how UBI would interact with the base emotional responses that drove a lot of our politics. The anti-freeloader impulse is one of the easiest ways to spur people to action. Would that go away or be intensified under UBI? would people cease to be charitable after a tragedy because they expect UBI to handle it?
The West has started to destroy itself from the inside: Politicians and activists always focus on increasing incomes (increase wages) and increasing employment (full employment for everyone), while the cost of living (rent/mortgage, health insurance, auto insurance, etc) goes up. Reduce the cost of living as it helps all kinds of people.