The AI Threat Isn’t Skynet – It’s the End of the Middle Class

"ask the makerbot for kilograms of RDX or tabun instead of a gun"

I know the NSA and IoT get a lot of criticism here. But this seems like a good usecase for the always connected, phone home systems, with an all seeing eye. :)

"killers are pre-empted by omniscient benevolent AI oversight"

As someone who used to work in a warehouse, ai which can detect anomalous orders seems incredibly plausible. Considering they have all been storing data for years, you have plenty of training data. Making something that notices when certain substances are shipped to someone who is not a normal customer seems trivial, if it doesnt exist. I mean the conservation of mass means that the explosive has to come from somewhere :)

You don't need to have the skillset of a programmer to do pivot tables, never mind become a social media manager or a salesperson, so I think we can dispense with that straw man. And the "mental" jobs this discussion speculates about being automated out of existence already have learning curves and some level of intellect/education threshold associated with them.

"Disruption" creates and transforms jobs all over the place: sometimes it's the incredibly specialised jobs being augmented by technology that allows them to be replaced with a below-average graduate using a user-friendly GUI app and sometimes it's incredibly specialised jobs being created because the last generation of analysts that did simple calculations aren't as useful as people that can write algorithms to process bigger datasets than before. Net effect: the middle class mental jobs in "finance, insurance, data entry, law" are different rather than disappearing. One thing companies in these industries certainly don't do is conclude their competitive position is such that after automating part of their work there's no further advantages to be gleaned from throwing staff and technology at solving new problems in their domain.

I've no idea why you're bringing up Foxconn labourers (1.3 million people manufacturing things things for which demand didn't exist a generation ago!) and truck drivers (median age 49 and rising) in a discussion about the supposed hollowing out of the middle class?

> Many people can expect to live to 100

Do we have an actual source for this yet? Anecdotally, I still see about 7 out of every 8 deaths in my social circles occurring before 90, with a notable number before 70.

If UBI is garnishable/attachable, credit card companies could simply wait to get paid from a slice of future UBI payments, meaning there might be increased risk of over-extension.

(I haven't thought deeply enough about whether it should or shouldn't be garnishable. I lean towards the idea that it shouldn't, but then that makes it less valuable in certain ways.)

> Existing forms of social assistance in Western countries often are available to non-citizens and are usually more strongly linked to past payments into the system and/or intention to work and contribute to the system when they can.

Most social assistance programs in the US are not linked to past payments, the most notable exception being social security, which pays only retirees.

And limiting benefits to people who have previously paid has the effect you seem to dislike anyway -- new arrivals to the country can't collect benefits because they have no history of paying.

Moreover, redistributive programs can't work that way because their entire premise is to improve the situation of lower income people. If the money had to go to people in proportion to what they've paid then it would have no purpose or effect.

> For obvious practical reasons (a suggested stipend of $10k PPP is well above the median salary internationally) if one destroys the link with work contributions, then numbers must be managed by imposing more onerous restrictions on non-citizens' entitlement to move to a country and claim subsidies higher than they presently earn.

We already have this because the existing programs already work this way. If anyone from an impoverished country could immediately immigrate legally to the US and begin collecting food and housing assistance, an unsustainable number of people would, which is why they aren't allowed to. Even if they could find a job here in e.g. agriculture, because those jobs don't qualify for H1B.

> And however unjust it might already be, the existing systems that mandates employment for foreigners seeking residency generally aren't built on the concept that it's an affront to dignity to impose work requirements on citizens wanting handouts.

Then it's a good thing a UBI isn't built on that, since its purpose is to provide a safety net without creating the poverty trap that existing means-tested programs do by withdrawing benefits at rates approaching or sometimes even exceeding 100% of marginal income for low and middle income people.

> But the wider point is that the "nobody should be forced to suffer the indignity of having to work for their living" rhetoric behind UBI simply doesn't reflect any feasible near-term system that any person has actually proposed, and the "people should not have to work unless they were born elsewhere, in which case their continued labour to produce low cost goods for those who have chosen to become permanent UBI-dependents is fundamental to the system getting close to being affordable" reality is a bit less philosophically appealing.

The idea that one country should have to pay for social assistance for the whole world in order to have it internally is not a philosophy most people are going to mind disregarding.