Atlas Smug | Alex Payne | Jacobin

> There will be challenges, since many people live paycheque to paycheque, but ultimately a very simple Basic Income (backed on land taxes, ideally) would catch those that would fall in the cracks

1) If they live paycheck to paycheck, they aren't going to have the financial resources to drop $6k on a robot. Even the boldest "Basic Income" proponents don't expect to provide more than basic sustenance to survive. Political realities are in line with that being the level of funding it would provide people.

1b) If basic uneducated labor is valueless due to being replaced with robots, many of those people who live paycheck to paycheck are going to move down to being on the dole and can't afford robots as well. Some people will be too old to have the desire to re-learn, some won't have the ability, etc.

2) Land taxes are simultaneously a tax on renters as well as owners since they aren't based on your ability to pay [profitability]. That means they'll be passed on to renters wholesale who in turn will need a higher amount of basic income to support it.

3) Basic Income has to be funded sustainable in a way that doesn't result in it eating its own tail. That probably will be income taxes on capital + payroll which will cause everyone to scream pretty loudly.

I don't see your utopia working with those assumptions.

I don't think economics works that way.

If the robot can "create enough economic production for his whole life" then either the robot will cost as much as the (present value of the) economic production for his whole life, or the cost of everything else will rise until the production capability of the robot is roughly equivalent to 1/Nth of her life. [Edit: Where 1/N is the proportion of 1/50th the cost of a median house to the current economic production of one life.]

"The rich just want the poor out of the way while they become more rich / powerful. The most effective way of doing that is to just pay the poor people off while they start organizing greater and greater things."

That's not how the psychology of power works, either. Or wealth. (You're not "rich", you are "richer than someone else"---wealth is only a goal when it is relative.) The rich don't have power unless there are poor handy to make do stuff. And historically, "just pay the poor people off" is the last option that anyone tries. Consider the French revolution and the 19th and 20th century class wars that resulted in the 40-hour workweek and unionization. (Hiring mercenaries to break strikes is cheaper than paying off poor people.) What's your opinion of unionization? Satisfactory way of balancing economic inequality issues, or economic atherosclerosis?

"The real thing I'm worried about is actually hard AI."

Actually, that's one thing I'm not particularly concerned about; I am familiar with computational complexity.

"backed on land taxes, ideally"

That is a brilliant idea! The economic value of the property I currently own is essentially nil. So, either my tax burden (such as it is) drops dramatically, or the price of property nearby does, as the skin-of-their-teeth farmers around get taxed out of business. I'd be able to buy my own fiefdom!

What all these anti free-market people are missing (intentionally or not) is that it makes no sense to watch the State create 20000 pages of regulations, and then yell "de-regulation" when they remove 7 of those pages. Especially when 4 years later they turn around and add another 3377292751 pages of regulation and the cycle repeats itself.

It seems to me that I'm not the one who's being disingenuous.