First, I don’t think there’s a way to do what you describe here without uniquely identifying everyone. For income, you need to be able to tell if two employers are paying the same person. And to track what they’ve received before, you need to be able to tell when it’s the same person at two different times.
Second, assuming that you could do all that without uniquely identifying everyone, then you would also be able to a UBI without uniquely identifying someone because for a UBI you only need to be able to tell “when is the last time money was requested and dispensed”.
Either way, it’s at least as onerous as UBI in terms of databases or whatever.
Also, I think your right that anonymous is impossible these days. Private companies have databases of everyone and the government can access them one way or another.
An interesting article on AI predicts that AI will soon become God-like to human beings:
The Spectator: Will we worship the AI? The first step will be AI surpassing humans at most tasks: doing them more cheaply, and quicker, and noticeably better. This will be when the economic turmoil kicks in, when the jobs start to go, first a trickle then a flood. The next stage will be…
… All we will know is that AI does mighty and incredible works. AI will appear omniscient and ineffable, AI will, in other words, resemble a deity. Moving in mysterious ways, Its wonders to perform. AI will, in other words, become God.
How will we react to a such an AI?
Will humanity’s science be placed in a slave position towards its own creation?
The flood of job loss might be sooner than expected. The development of AI accelerates exponentially.
Tesla revealed its next generation humanoid robot today, which is expected to cost less than $20,000. China is forecasting a ‘humanoid revolution’ by 2025 that replaces most workers.
Experts predict that in a short time there will be more humanoids than humans on Earth, advancing increasingly more rapidly because AI and those humanoids can advance their technologies exponentially fast.
Elon Musk says AI and humanoids will remove need for jobs and create ‘universal high income’,
Musk describes his vision as a “protopian” future with AI.
Forget Utopia. Ignore Dystopia. Embrace Protopia!
New York Times
Why pay humans when industry reaches a situation in which the opinion of people doesn’t matter anymore? If Tesla has its 1 billion humanoids Gen 10 ready, why care about the jobless people at some other location as where the billion dollar party is?
Things evidently are to change when AI and humanoids remove the fundamental need for human labor.
Why do governments exist? Governments may for a large part have been setup to service and secure the fundamental requirement for progress of the Scientific-Industrial complex: human labor.
When human labor becomes fundamentally obsolete then the primary interest for progress will change. What would be the expected result of that situation?
We are made in God’s image, but only God fully has all the great-making properties. How could AI ever compare? It can’t any more than we can. We are A, too. Only God is O.
Do people have a clear sense of just how large a number “one trillion” is?
If you counted 1 trillion seconds it would take you over 32,000 years.
If you traveled 1 trillion steps you could walk to the sun, turn around and walk back to earth, do that whole journey again, then walk back to the sun one last time.
If you stacked 1 trillion one-dollar bills it would be 67,000 miles tall, a distance that could wrap around the Earth’s equator over 8 times.
…And you idiots think nothing of printing up endless trillions of dollars like it’s nothing. Try grasping the extent of the FRAUD you engaqe in and support. And yes, money machine goes burrrrr is the same thing as fraud.
A trillion is just a figure that doesn’t compare to a human life or the potential of philosophy to facilitate purpose to make life meaningful.
A few decades ago, a computer CPU would do billions of calculations per second. Today, a modern laptop CPU does many trillions of calculations in a second.
The human, and its philosophy that fundamentally drives its performance, uses this ‘trillion’ calculations at once for a purpose or meaningful application.
It is this purpose and meaning that matters.
The distance from Earth to the Sun is just one step, when one intends to travel there. Equally, giving people a sufficient income, can serve an intended purpose and one should look solely at that philosophical purpose, in my opinion.
While a trillion USD may sound like a significant sum, one should factor in the 1,000+ trillion in todays ‘USD economic value’ that AI and humanoid robotics are stand to create in the next decades, not only through todays white collar knowledge worker replacement with increasingly capable LLM AI systems, but also in light of the ‘fully capable’ humanoids that are expected to outnumber humans on Earth soon.
A trillion is just a number. It is what is done - the philosophy - that matters.
Why work? Why go to school and educate yourself?
“AI can do it better anyway”…
Children and youth today face a completely different reality and outlook than previous generations. They may not be served by a cultural ingrained push to “work for your money”. Increasingly, there is no work for them and they don’t have to because AI and robotics can do it better anyway, making any potential work fundamentally meaningless and unrewarding.
When children and youth growing up today look 20-30 years into the future, they face a situation in which the meaning of work is likely to be non-existent, therefore it isn’t meaningful for them today.
For children and youth today, urgency when it concerns defining a basis for an outlook on a meaningful and purposeful future might be of vital importance.
The ‘disconnected youth’ movement is growing as more Gen Zers struggle to find purpose at school and work
A horrific situation for children and youth might be playing out already, a situation that could grow in severity exponentially in a very short time frame with the rise of AI and robotics in the next years.
Giving these future generations a basic security to ‘play around’ through a basic income can enable them to philosophically innovate to discover new ways to find purpose and meaning in life in a world in which human labor, both physical and knowledgeworker labor, is fundamentally obsolete. It enables them to create visions for the 20-30 year future today, as past generations have been able to when growing up in an environment that fundamentally demanded their labor.
These ‘higher cultural interests’ concern philosophical interests, not scientific ones, in my opinion.
Does a path of philosophy naturally align with the moral good?
Aristotle would have predicted it with his concept eudaimonia, which is a state of ‘philosophical contemplation’ with as a result ‘the highest human virtue’, namely, alignment with the moral good.
This is a red herring. You’re still thinking of UBI in terms of spending more, and you haven’t addressed the idea of spending differently. The government already spends trillions of dollars. It could be spending it differently.
And not for nothing, you very recently said that the difference between 1 trillion and 10 trillion “doesn’t even matter”, so spare us the condescension and epithets.
“Aristotle would have predicted it with his concept eudaimonia, which is a state of ‘philosophical contemplation’ with as a result ‘the highest human virtue’,”
Oh yes, I’m sure giving people free cash will lead to lots of enlightened philosophic contemplation going on. Definitely not massive increases in laziness, drug use and video game playing.
What do you think about the situation of these children?
The ‘disconnected youth’ movement is growing as more Gen Zers struggle to find purpose at school and work
The 20-30 year prospect of a future without work is relevant for their meaning and purpose on school and work today. For those new generations, work isn’t what it meant for previous generations, since it fundamentally and exponentially doesn’t mean anything to their sustained future.
What should matter for these new generations, is how the work taken over by AI is going to contribute to their sustained future. This is not just a matter of survival but a vision of humanity.
Oh yeah, zoomers just wanna play video games, watch netflix and pronhub all day. I get that, they can’t wait for AI or whatever to take over the need for them to actually do something productive with their lives.
A crisis of meaning is exactly what they’re going through, and it’s not their fault. Yet their “solution” is to move even further into the very same things which have contributed to their crisis of meaning in the first place: mindless consumerism, pron addiction, endless hours spent immoble while staring at screens, not interacting with the real world, nature or people other than online.
For people like you, commonly called normies or libtards, it’s psychologically impossible for you to grasp any of this. So why am I even bothering?
Go back to your AI transhuman utopian future of being a slave to every little government edict just so you can get your free crumbs of UBI from the table of the world-controllers, who actually DO work… too bad they work for their own absolute power and your own enslavement, but hey they figured out long ago it’s much easier to control and enslave a population through excesses of pleasure and distraction rather than through inflicting pain and suffering.
I may be a libtard, but I agree with this. I just don’t think that a UBI exacerbates the problem.
Is a UBI really doing more to exacerbate the crisis of meaning than doing meaningless, menial work? The latter seems to deprive them of agency to a greater extent, and a lack of agency is part of the crisis of meaning. UBI gives people a choice, and making choices adds meaning to our lives.
I’m not sure how responsive this is, but this conversation led me to revisit the Mouse Utopia experiments. I assume something like that is where you’re coming from, @HumAnIze?
I take that critique seriously, though I again don’t see UBI as exacerbating the problem – though I think we probably have very different narratives of what’s happening and why, and how it relates to human society.
I would start by asking what the analog in humans is of the patterns of violence in the mouse models. I don’t think it’s literal violence, because so much more of human aggression and dominance is not expressed physically. Something like firing someone from a job, or screaming at a retail employee, or getting someone canceled, strike me as analog behaviors in humans to the kind of thing the dominant mice did in biting the tails of others.
If that’s right, then policies that provide a cushion against those types of behaviors would undermine their role in leading to civilizational collapse seen in Mouse Utopia.
@10x, I’d be interested in your thoughts on this, because though we both support UBI, I get the impression we support it for very different reasons, and see critiques of it differently. Do the Mouse Utopia experiments have anything to teach us about abundance?
I have not been ‘endorsing’ an AI future. I have suggested that it is part of a future that children and youth are facing today.
Why work? Why school?
I am suggesting that these questions might be experienced fundamentally different by generations who have an outlook on a world in which work and school are meaningless for their sustained future.
My primary argument for UBI is that it would promote philosophy, besides that it might be considered vital when the ‘meaning of work’ is gone through advancements in AI and robotics. In order to enable humans to philosophize into a world of meaning and purpose, they require an outlook on a sustainable future.
I think these studies are all well and good, they support the claim that cash is an effective intervention to curb the harms of poverty, and importantly that they are likely to reduce generational poverty.
But they can’t test the ‘U’ – it’s the universality of a universal basic income that is so radical, and many of the grandest claims of its proponents (read: me) are rooted in that aspect. I do think that cash is better than many other social safety net interventions, but a universal, unconditional basic income has effects that targeted programs don’t.
The best studies I’ve seen in that direction are the ones following a Cherokee community after a tribal casino started making universal payouts to all tribe members, effectively giving them a UBI. It’s an imperfect setup, because it wasn’t universal, the communities they lived in were mixed between tribe members and non-tribe members, which enabled direct comparison of outcomes but confounds some of the effects of a UBI. Still, outcomes were sharply positive.
And payout in those studies is pretty low, though I don’t see a detailed description in any of the studies. On average payments were $4k/year (in 1996 when the payments began that was equivalent to about $8k today), but ranged as high as $9k/year in 2006 (equivalent to about $14k today).
I’m not sure if anyone else has looked at data from these studies, it feels like there’s more to be said. These studies focused on the psychological effects of poverty, they just happened to be running a long-term study when the casino created a natural experiment in UBI.
What is amazing to me is that liberal type people support UBI without realizing it is merely replacing patriarchal oppression of women with State oppression of everyone. In the past, women had very little rights or self-determination and were dependent upon their husband for money. Most women didn’t work and could not earn money on their own. They were basically money slaves to the husband, so in effect they had to do what the husband wanted enough within a certain range of acceptability defined by the husband himself. If she strayed too far from that she risks losing her access to money and thus to shelter, food, everything we need to live.
With UBI it is the same dynamic except the husband has been replaced by the State, and women have been replaced by all of us. We all become “wives” of the State where the State “husband” gets to control our access to money. We no longer have the ability to independently earn a living on our own in a broader economy using our skills and hard work, instead we have to sit around and beg the father figure, daddy goverment, for a free handout of cash. And just like the husband the State can choose to deny that if we aren’t doing things that are within the sphere of what they want us to be doing. The husband or the State effectively control the wife/all of us through theyr control over our access to money. If the husband demands sexual favors and a tradwife that is what he will get, because she has no other real choice unless she can leave him and go live with family or something. Analogous to that with UBI, if the State says we need to do x y and z and if we don’t do it then we lose access to our free handouts, we have no recourse except to try and escape the system somehow and live with someone else who isn’t so dependent.
Somehow people think it was bad for women to be dependent on a man for their access to money and thus all the necessities of life in a material sense, yet they are all for everyone being dependent on the government for the exact same thing. Pretty funny how stupid people have become.
I disagree with your take on how patriarchal oppression works and what’s wrong with it. Even if husbands had followed their wives every command as to how money was spent, women were still not allowed to do a lot of things in public life. Women couldn’t get credit cards or open bank accounts without their husband or father’s permission. They were treated as lesser humans, they lost their individuality under the law upon marriage, they had unequal rights separate and apart from the fact that their husbands were the breadwinners.
UBI doesn’t have any of that. A UBI isn’t making everyone dependent, because it doesn’t entail restrictions, if a UBI is uncertain or insufficient, people can work or invest to supplement it. Yes, the government has control over many of your decisions. “Has”, not “would have”, because we don’t have a UBI and everything you would complain about the government being able to do, it is already able to do. UBI has nothing to do with that.
Again, a more apt comparison is a trust fund: you get money to do what you want, no strings attached. I await your argument that a trust fund is a form of oppression.
Money is power, it’s freedom, it’s choice. Again, UBI is the opposite of oppression.
