As Our Jobs Are Automated, Some Say We'll Need a Guaranteed Basic Income

UBI I would argue is much more desirable, if you were going to try to legally force 20 hour work weeks. UBI actually lets you absolve a lot of historical regulation that holds industries and growth back, that was all established as an attempt to protect the poor and uneducated from exploitation. When everyone has an easily accessible minimum standard of living, regulations in the workplace can be retired to enable more innovation since the workers can finally negotiate evenly with the employer rather than being exploited to survive. It also lets those workers with the ethic to do so to spend as much time as they want making as much money as they want, knowing they won't starve or go homeless when they stop.

Either you keep cracking up the extreme regulatory machine currently asphyxiating the American corporate sphere (ever wonder why all the innovation is in software? It isn't just because its new, it is also because relative to almost everything else it is extremely unregulated) or you just use increased taxes on unfettered growth to provide for the masses so that the unleashed potential doesn't destroy lives.

One way to make the transition more cleanly is to pair a gradual introduction of basic income, with a commensurate gradual reduction of the minimum wage. The reduced labor costs will spur economic growth and innovation without any paired reduction in consumer spending which would inhibit that growth. A gradual introduction means we have time to notice and address problems as they crop up.

As long as all the work we want to have done is getting done, we are better off having people who enjoy and take satisfaction the work doing it

Are we talking about rats or humans now? Only your fourth assertion is rat specific. All the other observations are true of the human condition. We now have 7.4 billion human beings in the world right now, and it's the developing countries, you know with clan warfare and living in relatively small spaces that have uncontrolled population growth.

> Also, it is incredibly nihilistic to think that human beings need to toil to survive or else life is without meaning or we will collapse society.

Just because it's nihilistic doesn't mean it doesn't hold truth. It seems that your objections are rooted more in your worldview and philosophy rather than objective arguments you're bringing up. They even bring up this point in the experiment, where he mentioned the "beautiful ones", who forgot how to breed and spent all day grooming themselves.

> We already know that in first world countries people reproduce less. That isn't even a function of economic well being directly but a function of education, which relates precisely back to how humans aren't just animals acting on instinct.

I don't think it's a function of education. Do you have a citation? You could easily read this as saying, people in the first world are incented not to have children, as they have seen how children generally make parents unhappier and would prefer against that.

> It is the same mind that elevated mankind above all other animals that can stop us from destroying ourselves as we eliminate survival as a daily concern.

I think that's where the difference lies between our points of view. I think that most people are creatures of instinct, and our conscious mind is constantly trying to justify our actions after the fact with logic. If we really have elevated minds, how come many intelligent and educated people have differing opinions on things? Why are we still debating global warming, and having wars over religion?

All of which can be automated.

Furthermore...

> "highly productive individuals. If you are a high productivity software engineer, trader or doctor"

None of those jobs are safe from automation either. Your personal productivity means diddly squat compared to fast automated interconnected machines that can teach themselves. Engineers and traders are just as expendable as the rest of us.