We'll need a universal basic income (UBI) in an AI-driven world

Sure. Where does the money come from if nobody is working?

I 100% agree with this sentiment, though its not clear to me at all how close we are.

In general though, advanced automation like AI will disrupt jobs, and unlike previous times, you cannot educate yourself out of a superior intelligence taking your job.

This is not about moving your manual work to another segment where different manual work is not viable to automate economically: its about your mental abilities being insufficient to produce value in the economy, full stop.

If that doesn't scare you, I'm not sure what will. However, its not clear to me yet if all this coding LLM hype will end up destroying coding jobs, or creating debugging jobs.

We might need one eventually. If we really see a population decline in a couple decades, it's possible they could offset each other to an extent.

It’s a start but not good enough. We also need a sense of accomplishment, like what do we live for. I know it’s mostly a luxury these days but in an AI powered world, it might be essential to keep people going.

We should have a wealth tax that is distributed to everyone, instead of taxing consumption. It's the most progressive tax possible, only taxing those with actual excess. It would work in an AI world, easing into everyone having the same amount of power instead of creating AI powered Oligarchs.

UBI is a dystopian hellscape. If you think otherwise you haven’t thought it through.

Ubi is an unrealistic utopia on mutiple levels (from basic math to social dynamics). Go educate yourself please.

Pre AI, we are already in a hyper-capitalistic world. In an AI driven world coupled with robotics and possibly clean renewable energy, capitalism(Value and Value creation) is going to be broken. I envision that there will be violence when one system is overtaken by another. Hopefully, a post economic society. UBI assumes that money$ and its value, would be that unit to be exchanged in the future. No, its not going to be bitcoin either. Of course I wouldn't know what it is, but I'm looking forward to the future +

Sam Altman had been pushing hard for UBI back in his VC days [0] He also pushed hard for AI governance, which people probably just laughed off [1][2]. Shortly after those blogs on the dangers of AI, he decides to set up OpenAI.

Dude doesn't go to the trouble of convincing people of his political stances. He just sells the poison and waits for people to manufacture the antidote he's been preaching for all along.

[0] https://blog.samaltman.com/technology-and-wealth-inequality [1] https://blog.samaltman.com/machine-intelligence-part-1 [2] https://blog.samaltman.com/machine-intelligence-part-2

A program similar to the 1930s WPA seems far more likely and logical than UBI. There is and will continue to be work that an AI bot on a computer can’t do, and frankly the public sympathy for highly-paid white collar employees losing their jobs isn’t high.

I get where you’re coming from. I don’t think UBI is just an “AI future” thing though. Even without AI, we’ve already got a system where wealth is concentrating at the top, and AI just puts that process on fast-forward.

I’ve been lucky enough to use AI daily since ChatGPT went viral, and even from that position of privilege it’s hard not to notice how uneven the benefits are. The people who can adapt quickly or are already in high paying roles will figure out how to use it to make more money. Meanwhile, a lot of folks who could really use a safety net won’t even get the chance to learn the tools before they’re left behind.

And honestly, even AI fluent people are struggling. I know people who use AI fluently for job hunting and still can’t find work, let alone a well paying role. Even I was struggling to find a job in tech a few months ago. If that’s the situation in AI heavy markets, can't even imagine what it’s like in parts of the world where most people haven’t even heard of AI.

So yeah, I agree with you that UBI won’t happen anytime soon. But I also think that if the big players wait until AI has already “disrupted everything” to start talking seriously about it, the gap will be so wide by then that it’ll be almost impossible to close.

Nontech human is destroyed soon. To add more context, the futuristic human is the programmer who can just program everything he wants to replace current manual systems. Human is then the architect, ai is the labor.

Everybody forgets that AI is just a computer.

AI cannot dig ditches. AI cannot harvest crops. AI cannot frame a house, fix a car, or do anything else in the real, physical world. It will never do these things, not because of technical limitations, but because human labor is cheap and versatile.

AI can only really take the jobs of those who sit at a computer all day. Even then, I suspect that the only people who really need to worry over the long term are middle management. And good riddance to them.

But either way, there will be no UBI, so don't hold your breath. Our leadership will let us all starve in the streets the second we are no longer required.