Elon Musk Predicts Automation Will Lead To A Universal Basic Income (mashable.com) 426
An anonymous reader quotes Mashable's new article about Tesla/SpaceX founder Elon Musk:
Tech innovators in the self-driving car and AI industries talk a lot about how many human jobs will be innovated out of existence, but they rarely explain what will happen to all those newly jobless humans. In an interview with CNBC on Friday, Musk said that he believes the solution to taking care of human workers who are displaced by robots and software is creating a (presumably government-backed) universal basic income for all. "There's a pretty good chance we end up with a universal basic income, or something like that, due to automation," said Musk. "I'm not sure what else one would do. That's what I think would happen."
And what will this world look like? "People will have time to do other things, more complex things, more interesting things," Musk told CNBC's interviewer. "Certainly more leisure time." President Obama has also talked about "redesigning the social compact" with MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito, and in August predicted the question of whether there's support for the Universal Basic Income is "a debate that we'll be having over the next 10 or 20 years."
And what will this world look like? "People will have time to do other things, more complex things, more interesting things," Musk told CNBC's interviewer. "Certainly more leisure time." President Obama has also talked about "redesigning the social compact" with MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito, and in August predicted the question of whether there's support for the Universal Basic Income is "a debate that we'll be having over the next 10 or 20 years."
The value of money (Score:2, Insightful)
Money only has value if you can exchange it for other people's work. I'm not sure if machines will accept it...
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Money only has value if you can exchange it for other people's work. I'm not sure if machines will accept it...
When the machines become citizens who own themselves and the fruits of their labor, we're in deep trouble. Until then, the machines belong to someone who gets to enjoy the fruits of the machines' labor. When all the machines are in the hands of the rich, while the poor are unemployed, nobody will have money to buy the products of the machines. Hence: tax the rich, give their money to the poor, so they can buy stuff from the rich. Or make the machines common property somehow.
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Machines have always taking jobs away from people, and people have figured out how to do things machines cannot. Nothing new here.
My dad said that things that are easy are usually not valued, and things that are hard tend to be more valuable. Things that require human effort and skill will always have value.
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Money has value if you can exchange it for resources. Other people's work is just one example, food would be another.
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It takes work to extract and transport resources. It takes work to grow, harvest, and transport food. So it's all work.
Yes, but oddly enough if you spend 10,000 times as much work to for example mine iron ore by hand, your labor-intensive iron ore isn't worth any more than when it's mined with much less work via machines. Almost as though its monetary value is not a measure of the work put into it.
Re:The value of money (Score:4, Insightful)
It takes work to extract and transport resources. It takes work to grow, harvest, and transport food. So it's all work.
That's only half of the equation. The value of a thing is determined by supply and demand. Supply is arguably a function of the amount of work that goes into the thing, but demand is completely different, it's how much people want it. So price is really closer to Want divided by Work.
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That option will be obsolete thanks to VR and sexbots. Along with a dose of genetic engineered creatures.
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But sex is not really about satisfying physical need, it is about power.
No, you're thinking of rape.
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Or regressive-left feminists. But I repeat myself.
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The act of sex as an expression of power is is pretty much the definition of rape. Perhaps you need your medication adjusted.
Re: The value of money (Score:5, Funny)
The act of sex is a topic slashdot and its members have absolutely no authority on.
Re: The value of consensuality (Score:3)
Um, no. An unconscious, drunk, drugged or otherwise incapacitated person cannot give consent. The manner in which they became incapacitated is not relevant.
Here's a simple tip. If someone is unconscious, drunk, drugged or incapacitated - don't have sex with them. Simple. And sex with someone who's conscious and willing is more fun. Trust me on this.
If someone runs onto the highway, high as a kite, most drivers would make the effort to try and avoid hitting that person, they wouldn't line them up in the cros
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Eventually the concept of money will be superseded by a new method of acquiring items people want. I propose we call the new exchange medium "sex".
that will lead to two new wealthy classes:
machines, who can engineer themselves to be attractive to anyone and who have no compunctions about performing acts most people would consider degrading or disgusting;
and people with no self-respect, who don't mind living in that barrel with the hole in the side.
Re: The value of money (Score:2, Funny)
Have you seen the price of barrels recently?
When I was a lad we dreamt of living in a barrel.
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Well for the most part sex is one of the driving forces towards multiple classes of people.
As to attract a mate you need to prove that you are superior in some way over someone else so you can do that with physical strength or with being more clever and useful than someone else. People use money to gain power not because of money but because we are genetically bread to seek power.
Communism failed because we never got a fair community people used the system to gain power over others. Capitalism attempts to
Re:The value of money (Score:5, Funny)
... we are genetically bread ...
I am genetically human, but to each its own.
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Dog-Cow
I am genetically human, but to each its own.
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A lot of people here on slashdot forget that it's quite rare to be able to earn a living from something you enjoy doing, like coding.
The value of freedom from wage slavery (Score:5, Insightful)
Your mistake is in conflating "human effort" with "Income."
History is replete with individuals who did valuable, and/or worthy, and/or artistic, things because that was what they wanted to do, and not because someone was paying them (and in many cases, no one was paying them.)
I write SDR software. It's pretty good -- in fact, a lot of my users say it's the best in the world. Guess what I get paid for doing that? Nothing. Zip. Nada. I do it because I like doing it. And, of course, because I can do it. In my case, it's because I've done some other things that got me the financial wherewithal to do what I want, instead of what I had to. But I assure you, if I'd been able to do my own thing sooner, I would have done so.
Frankly, if the only thing motivating someone to do something is money, they could be doing something better. Also, there is a distinct possibility that the job isn't being done as well as it could be.
We should get away -- entirely -- from the idea that human worth is tied to constant wage slavery.
Here's something else;
Used to be we swept the floor. Someone had to do it, right? Then along came the vacuum cleaner, some time was saved, and the brooms got put away. Then along came Roomba, almost the entire tasl now requires no attention, and the vacuum cleaner got put away. What was lost? Not a damn thing. What was gained? The freedom to do do whatever you wanted while your floor got vacuumed. All that's left is emptying the Roomba's collected grit and grime; and how long do you suppose it'll be before the hardware doing the job can do that too? And again, what is lost? Nothing.
Labor-saving devices most critical value is that of relieving us of drudgery. Not that of freeing us to do other drudgery.
That's what everyone has to wrap their head around.
If I don't have to drive, mostly, I won't. If I don't have to vacuum the floor, I won't (and I do, in fact, own and appreciate a Roomba. I clean it once a day, takes about thirty seconds.) If I don't have to clean the catbox, I won't. Go shopping. Take out the garbage. Wash my clothes. Mow the lawn. And so on. And yes, that absolutely includes working for a wage -- when machines can do it, they should do it. It's not a bad thing. It's a wonderful thing.
We're a long way from this, but it is exactly where we should be trying to head. Money isn't a good thing. Money is what is holding our society in its current, stressed, divisively classed form.
It's going be very rough getting from here to there. I can't say I feel very good about watching the process, but the game is very much worth the candle. Let's not hang on to drudgery. Let's reach for freedom to do whatever we want.
We heared the same over and over again (Score:5, Insightful)
From the 1930s Keynes [theguardian.com] predicted a 15 hour working week. In the 60s and 70s a three day weekend was predicted. What actually happens is that some people have to work harder than ever for fear of losing their jobs while others have no work and live in poverty.
The test is whether Musk would be willing to pay a significantly higher corporation tax to fund the basic income.
Re:We heared the same over and over again (Score:4, Insightful)
With the increase in productivity that the American worker has produced since the mid 70s....
We would have something close to the 20hr workweek if those gains in productivity were distributed to the worker, and not to the investor.
Just because of an issue of distribution... don't blame the person who predicted the improvements... which DO EXIST... just not for the workers...
Re:We heared the same over and over again (Score:4, Insightful)
Exactly. The real problem is the economic system that puts all the power and profits in the hands of a rich few. We could have had that 15 hour work week if we'd divided the profits of our higher productivity in a more equal way, but we decided that taxing the rich is bad, while the rich owning all the means of production is good, so they get all the profits and they get to keep it.
Re:We heared the same over and over again (Score:4, Informative)
Umm, no.
Total income in the US is about $15T. If that were divided evenly between all US citizens, we'd get about $45K each, annually.
Which is certainly more than average now (if you exclude places like Silly Valley and such), but it wouldn't be enough to allow for a 15-hour workweek.
On the other hand, increasing automation will push us in the direction of a shorter workweek, once production reaches the point that everyone on the planet has a reasonable income....
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Number of fulltime workers in US: 124.73 million. Source. [statista.com]
Pot to be divvied up: $15 trillion.
Share per worker: $120,259. That's a tad more than $45k.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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The problem is the ignorance and indolence of the general population being seduced by socialism. It has never worked.
Depends on what you mean by that. The kind of wealth redistribution we have in northern Europe and in the US of the 1930s-1950s, worked quite well. Killing the free market is (usually) a terrible idea, but ensuring that people can afford to buy stuff works incredibly well.
Re:We heared the same over and over again (Score:5, Interesting)
You're very correct that all models of UBI require fundamental changes to taxation. However I'd argue that in the long term it's not even about the will of the companies, they'll be forced to. The alternative is to have huge masses of people living in poverty, which is bad for business in numerous ways. Firstly if people have little to no money there'll be little to no money to consume, which will eat at the profits of companies. Secondly the political instability that such a situation would cause is also damaging for corporations and wealthy individuals.
If we look at times when income inequality has been even higher than today, the 1800s are a good example: the wealthy elites enjoying the fruits of the industrial revolution paid little attention to the poor and starving masses, which eventually backlashed and lead to, among other things, the Russian revolution.
If you think about a situation wherein something like 10-20 % of the population is working full or part time and the rest are unemployed, that's not exactly something that can just be ignored. And absurd as that may sound now, that's the direction we're heading in a few decades.
Point being: if the people at the very top of the income and ownership classes have any sense of self-preservation, they'll realize that it's easier to spread some of the wealth and well being around voluntarily, because if that is not done eventually it will tear societies apart and endanger the elites themselves.
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and endanger the elites themselves.
Actually, I don't think it will. If they find that their purchased influence over governments is not enough to ensure that national armies are at their beck and call then they will establish private armies. You wouldn't need a huge army but a sufficiently well equipped and well trained platoon sized outfit would probably meet most needs. The elites could pay trained military staff far more than they ever got when the served for a national army; spreading their wealth just enough and no more to ensure self-p
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I'm very aware of these realities, but the whole point is tha
Re:We heared the same over and over again (Score:5, Insightful)
Apologies for poor quoting: relying on a phone.
Taxes will support it just fine. The misunderstanding is that everyone gets their annual 15k or whatever on top of whatever is happening right now. That's not the idea. The idea is that you rejig both taxes and ubi do that for example net income for a median tax earner doesn't change.
If there's no change in net income, and assuming gross salary doesn't change for many workers, then the total tax bill and expenditure is unchanged. Obviously I've simplified a bit, but basically you're scraping existing housing benefit, unemployment benefit etc etc and replacing it with basic income. There's no reason for the expenditure in total to change much.
As for operating businesses, I also disagree to some recent. It reminds me of the old joke about the farmer who won the lottery. When asked what he'd do he replied "keep farming until the money runs out". My new found albeit limited experience dealing with vendors and supply chains is that an awful lot of them seem to regard money as a messy technicality required in order to keep making their widgets. Anyway, taxes are a long long way from historical highs and there was plenty of business during periods of much higher taxation.
Re:We heared the same over and over again (Score:4, Insightful)
I explained what UBI is, modern day Communism as it will inevitably lead to nationalization of private property and of-course as all forms of collectivism will crash both, individual rights and the economy.
Except it's not. It's a re-jig of the current welfare state system. If anything it should encourage private enterprise because you don't risk having zero money to eat and make rent during the tricky early stages of the business.
Re:We heared the same over and over again (Score:5, Insightful)
If anything it should encourage private enterprise because you don't risk having zero money to eat and make rent
I think this is one of the critical pieces that everyone seems to ignore. It seems that most everyone thinks that UBI means more welfare and nothing changes culturally. I'd be shocked if that was the case.
I'm a decent writer, pretty solid cook, and I make pretty good beer. All of those things I do as hobbies because the risk in trying to do them as a job is too high for me. If I was given 2/3 or 3/4 of what I make now as UBI, I'd have to have a long talk with my wife about potentially quitting my job, being stay-at-home dad, and pursuing those hobbies as business ventures.
I can hardly imagine the boom in arts and culture that we'd see with UBI. All the starving musicians and artists who give up the dream to pay the mortgage would no longer have to. The sidewalk musician brightening our day would head home to a comfortable house, richer from the donations, but not starving if they are low for a day. I could see gardens and civic beautification projects exploding, as people with free time could invest it in their community. Kids would no longer be shipped off to day care with strangers. Parents could be more deeply involved in schools. Everyone with a crazy idea could pursue it, unlike now where most don't, because they can't afford to fail.
The parental engagement with kids may be the most significant impact financially. Kids who grow up in stable homes with involved parents do better in life than those who don't. They stay in school longer, stay out of trouble more, and, in general, become more productive members of society. If we can prevent 25% of the kids who get tangled up in the legal system and ER from doing that, either as kids or adults, that's a big savings for communities. If we can prevent 25% of the violent crime from happening, that's huge. And it could be more than that - most of the crime in my area is gang-driven, and the gangs form because the kids in them are desperate for a better life. If you can get paid enough to have a decent place to live, smoke weed, play video games, and shoot some hoops, being part of a gang is going to be a hard sell. And while the aforementioned weed smoker isn't going to be a productive member of society, if the choice is that or a gang-banger, I'll take the weed-smoker any day. The alternative is a serious negative impact on society, both in terms of happiness and overall financial well-being.
UBI will drive cultural change, the likes we haven't seen since abandoning agrarian society and moving into the mechanized one. I really think that with less poverty we'll see less chronic health issues (which increase hospital/ER costs tremendously) less crime (police and incarceration budgets are huge) more entrepreneurs (less organized labor and more individual and unique efforts, but potentially a broader tax-base) and there will be more people with expendable income to invest in those entrepreneurs.
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Nonsense. There's more than enough money and resources in advanced economies already that industrialized economies can offer a decent standard of living to their citizens. In the future work gets more efficient because of automation which means these economies can output more, not less, which means there is more than enough resources to go around in the future as well. Money itself is just a tool used in trading and allocating these resources, it's not somethi
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What? Do you understand that consumers are the basis of the profit motive to begin with?. If you leave the vast majority of society without jobs as is bound to happen and don't provide them with sufficient income, this will destroy the possibility of most companies to have any profits at all.
The companies are faced with a choice: since automation is always more effective than paying a human worker to do the same job, they'll naturally gravitate towards it and that's fine. But if eventually all production more or less is automated, there will be nobody left to buy consumer goods if the consumers don't have money.
It's a common but usually implied belief among conservatives that the 1% can be the basis of the profit motive - that they can provide virtually all of the demand no longer provided by the middle and lower classes if we could just make them rich and powerful enough. It ties back into what I call the "charity theory of economics," which in a nutshell is a set of beliefs built around the core idea that economies are driven by the philanthropy of the rich. Again it's usually implied rather than overtly stated.
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Completely agreed. It's based on a very faulty understanding of economies and demand to begin with: sure, the top 1 % in the future can have insane amounts of money, even more than they do now, but no matter how much money they have, they're not going to be buying billions of bottles of coke or loaves of bread or cars for that matter. They might buy a few very expensive cars, but simply put the consumption
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No, all it takes is for the government to print it. Plenty of downsides, but the impact is higher on people with accumulated wealth.
No, the impact is higher on people with accumulated currency. People with accumulated wealth tend to keep the majority of it in non-currency investments, which are barely impacted by inflation. If you devalue the dollar by 50%, the only effect on someone holding a hundred million dollars' worth of capital goods and/or commodities is that their investments are now worth two hundred million, with no change in purchasing power. They may even benefit from the policy as people flee the depreciating currency, dri
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You're missing the big picture. Under the current situation what is happening is that companies are competing for the money of consumers that already by and large comes from other corporations as most consumers get their income as a salary.
The economy is a giant game in which a large pool of resources are concentrated at the top
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I've all of the Expanse series so far released and the impression you get from the book is that while life in the belt is hard, most people in the belt work. I'm assuming this is because sustaining life in the belt is very labor intensive and sustaining non-working people in the resource-thin belt is too costly.
Earth still has a massive population and most of the people who subsist on Basic seem to be on Earth, probably due to the productivity advantage a "natural" planet like Earth can provide.
Mars seems
This is just advertising (Score:3, Insightful)
His job is to sell you the idea of his company. In order to do that, he comes up with fanciful notions that will make you feel good so you think good things about him and his company. This is just advertising and has the same truth quotient as politicians kissing babies in front of cameras when in private, they eat babies. UBI is the socialist dream repackaged, and will fail for the same reasons Venezuela has fallen. When you give out money, it becomes less valuable. When you make it more difficult to acquire, it becomes more valuable. This value is measured in terms of what people will trade for it, not the denominations.
Tax machine work (Score:2)
We have to make machine work taxable. Then we'll have the funds to cross finance a UBI or some other model.
It would also move the tipping point where machine work is more cost effective than human labor. I mean it's pretty unfair as it is. A machine designed for a specific task is usually way faster at the task and more precise than a human and on top of that, a employer usually pays taxes on an employee. Not to mention the taxes the employee himself has to pay on his salary.
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He seems pretty sure of himself... (Score:4, Funny)
Did he hack into the simulation to peek at our probable future?
Ever the optimist is our Elon (Score:5, Interesting)
There's a history of visionaries predicting utopian scenarios including a greater share of leisure time as a result of automation. John Maynard Keynes famously predicted a 15 hour working week.
It's based on the idea that there's a certain amount of work that needs to be done, and once it's automated people have nothing to do. However, the work that really that "needs" to be done was automated away during the Agricultural Revolution in the 1700's and 1800's. 90% of the work we're doing now (and probably closer to 100% of slashdotters' work) doesn't *need* to be done, but we do it anyway.
What the visionaries don't take into account is that the top two levels of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs [simplypsychology.org] don't work like the bottom two levels. The first small part of our work fulfils the basic needs like food water and shelter, then we carry on working in pursuit of higher needs, such as prestige and a sensation that we're fulfilling our potential. These needs are relative to what everyone else is accomplishing.
This is why people will carry on working long weeks long after automation takes away their manual labour jobs. In fact, automation has lead to longer working weeks, as manual labour is replaced with office work that can physically be done for longer. People will work for as long as they can to compete with their peers
Back to Elon's preiction. What will actually happen is that in the short term, people laid off as a result of automation will suffer and be angry, and in the long term the economy will adjust to the excess supply of cheap labour and invent new ways to use it, not necessarily as pleasant as the old manual jobs.
The Human Pretense (Score:5, Insightful)
I am glad someone said this. I first read it in Houellebecq's Whatever, and was shocked by how flagrantly true it is. Most of what we do now is shuffling the desk chairs on the Titanic, hoping people will keep the money machine going.
A slightly more nuanced view: whatever everyone has becomes mediocre, partially from our pretense and partially because the wider the appeal of any given thing, the less quality is invested in it. People are working to rise above the Herd because the Herd converts everything it touches into mediocre variants of the original.
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People will work for as long as they can to compete with their peers
Do you realize that the pears we are going to compete with are going to be machines in the far future when machines will be more intelligent than pure non-enhanced people. Either people will merge with machines or use genetic engineering heavily to improve themselves to be competitive. There is one other option: pure non-enhanced people will finish like horses did. A small percent of them will survive for the fun of the productive machines (something along the lines like horses are useful in horseracing now
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90% of the work we're doing now (and probably closer to 100% of slashdotters' work) doesn't *need* to be done, but we do it anyway.
That's because the alternative is to just give them the things they need to live, which bothers a lot of people who like to take the position that the only moral way to survive is to work.
This. Politicians talk about full employment as if that were an economic necessity, whereas it's really just a moral choice. You can think of today's economy as a more efficient engine that survives on much less fuel than it used to. But to a lot of people, the moral thing is to burn out all the fuel.
In practice, there's also the inertia in our system being set up as it is. I could easily live on 10..20 hours of work a week (one time I was teaching 16 h/week for half a year, and it was awesome), but the
I wouldn't take that bet. (Score:2, Insightful)
The automation problem will end one of two ways.
Universal basic income or related economic solution.
OR.
A lot less humans thanks to automated killing.
Grim. But option 2 is far more likely given the people that run the world.
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I think you underestimate how hard killing a lot of people is.
The nazi's spent ~4 years setting up a formidable killing industry, partly automated and partly mechanised (especially in Eastern Europe most jews and other victims were killed by (machine)gunfire, not in the extermination camps), which resulted in around ~10 million deaths (of 6 million jews and of which 3 million in extermination camps), or 2.5 million people per year. Stalin took around 20 years to kill 10-60 million people, so a similar death
Numbers (Score:2, Informative)
Let me put forth a simple challenge: based on the budget data of 2015 for your own country, show where the money is going to come from.
The final equation should show this: (number of recipients) * (yearly sum paid) = (total income state) - (other expenditures state)
Show the following ***numbers*** (i.e. no handwaving):
- Number of recipients: this is either the total number of adults, or the total number of people (i.e. adults and children). Tell us how many there are.
- Yearly sum paid: this is what each rec
Re:Numbers (Score:5, Interesting)
I did do the research about a year ago, but I don't have all the numbers at hand anymore.
UBI of $2000/month per adult, $800/month per child, flat tax of about 45-50% on all income, pretty much no deductions, no taxes on capital gains or interest/dividend income (but no deduction on interest/dividend payments or capital losses), elimination of gift/estate taxes, a VAT of about 25%, instead of deducting charitable contributions the organization gets a percentage of all contributions in additional funds directly from the government, eliminate welfare/SNAP, eliminate minimum wage. Single-payer universal healthcare would be available.
If we want to continue to subsidize certain things like home loan interest, they'd be direct reductions in the interest rate rather than deductions from your taxable income. All income, except the UBI itself, would be subject to the flat tax, paid directly by the employer.
Corporate taxes would be at the same rate as the personal income tax rate, with only direct costs deductible (not business lunches or advertising or corporate jets except to the extent they can be shown to actually save money over alternative transportation). This is where capital gains and dividend payments are taxed. Depreciation of actual working assets would be allowed as ongoing expenses as long as any resale of those assets is counted as income.
The income tax (personal and corporate) would be automatically set to provide 50% of the annual budget needs, while the VAT would provide the other 50% (based on the previous two-year period's numbers or similar).
Most individuals would never need to file a tax return. Payments would all be electronic to save on costs to administer.
Eliminating capital gains and dividend income is reasonable because you're collecting the taxes through a different route - and basing the country's budget and economy on the vagaries of the stock market is insane. Taxing everything at the source eliminates most ways of avoiding taxes. If a business is paying someone under the table to avoid taxes, they are just going to be paying a higher tax themselves since those payments won't be legitimate business expenses. Etc.
Yeah, living on $24000/year for a single person might not be great, but it would give people the freedom to move to places where prices are lower without worrying about whether there will be jobs there to support them. Once they move there, of course, then more jobs will become available as the economy picks up in the low-priced areas.
A UBI turns a flat tax into a progressive tax. UBI of $24,000 and flat tax of 50% means someone with income of $48,000 is paying 0% tax, $100,000 is paying 26% tax, a couple earning $120,000 total is paying 12%, a couple with two kidswith $250,000 total income is 30%, at $1,000,000 for one person the effective rate is 48%.
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The only thing I would add is a mechanism to created mixed income neighbourhoods everywhere. They exist in many European countries, often being based on rent/pricing controls. Prevents ghettos appearing or rich people siphoning off all the available public resources for their own areas.
some level of minimum wage is still needed or labo (Score:2)
some level of minimum wage is still needed or more labor laws so a place can't get away with unfair wage deductions to get free work out of people.
Gradual versus sudden change (Score:2)
Automation has been happening for well over a century; probably back to Marc Brunel's Pulley Block production line in the 1800's. Robots improved this but we never replaced all workers at the same time. The closest we got was during the industrial revolution.
So there's no immediate need for this. Society will adapt at the same rate that automation does, and we'll have a lot of largely acceptable compromises rather
death (Score:2)
No, the ruling classes won't hand out cash to people who need it. It'll be more likely Aids v2 will be launched.
This is welfare, nothing more (literally) (Score:5, Insightful)
..."People will have time to do other things, more complex things, more interesting things,"...
Really? Go ask those living under the current welfare state how "complex" and "interesting" their lives are based on a government-funded paycheck.
UBI will be nothing more than the current welfare program expanded. And if you think for a second any government will financially approve any more than BASIC bread-and-cheese income, you're delusional. This cannot and will not happen without a massive overhaul of unadulterated greed that has created the 1% elite class who care about themselves, not funding millions of humans to enjoy an "interesting" life sitting on their ass no matter how much self-education and groupthink may advance the human race. Greed always wins. Look at history.
At first, there may be some kind of pay scale to reward those with advanced degrees and careers (lawyers, doctors, etc.) as they're put out to pasture by automation. But once we realize that automation and AI have made educating a human an extinct concept, all humans will be pretty much treated the same way financially, for there will literally be no valid reason to reward one above the other.
Forget defeating unadulterated greed for a moment, an equally delusional concept is thinking that governments can afford to pay humans to have a complex and interesting life. Much like trying to extract taxes out of the wealthy, lobbyists and loopholes serving the elite class will ensure they take on the smallest burden possible, which translates to minimal funding for the UBI concept.
TL; DR - Either figure out another way to pay for it, or call a spade a spade, and drop the delusional dreamspeak.
lower full time to 32 hours a week and set salary (Score:2)
lower full time to 32 hours a week and set salary min level to 75K+COL or more. To start
By lowering the full time levels we can get more people working.
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> call a spade a spade
As a tool, I much prefer the guillotine. More complex, yes, but it does a much cleaner job.
You'll need more throughput to offset the initial cost, though.
Hollywood has done enough to lay the plan out for the inevitable Skynet takeover. No need to jump the gun (or blade in this case).
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
The machines will be smashed (Score:2)
UBI will be a disaster (Score:5, Interesting)
The complete naivete of the slahdot crowd concerning UBI is beyond comprehension.
It looks like most slahdotters think a simple tinkering with the taxation system (which will mostly affect wealthy corporations and individuals) will bring universal joy to everyone.
I tell you what. It will absolutely do no good. It looks like everyone thinks that wealthy men keep their wealth in some kind of vault like Smaug. This is not the case. Most of their wealth is already in the economy, there is basically nothing you can get from the wealthy by taxing them more.
At best UBI will create a society similar to the one in Atlas Shrugged. I do not like to live in such society.
So, what is the solution to the problems UBI is supposed to cure? Most probably the answer is WAR. Currently, nobody dares to comprehend this possibility.
cheaper then jail / prison that some use for there (Score:5, Insightful)
cheaper then jail / prison that some use for there needs at a much higher cost.
$31,286 or more per inmate vs just giving people UBI
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This is not the case. Most of their wealth is already in the economy....
Most of a rich man's wealth which isn't hoarded is transferred to another rich man, and then rides a carousel which eventually makes it way back to the original rich man. Sure, the wealth is in the economy; but only in a very small, tiny part of the population gets to use it.
When will robots replace Elon Musk? (Score:2)
Is Elon Musk worried about his job? No? Then this is really about the concentration of wealth into ever fewer hands. The technology is just a smokescreen.
God damn it he's a red (Score:2, Offtopic)
Hope I don't end up in District 12 (Score:2)
Although living with Katniss wouldn't be too bad.
Work is more than a money producer. (Score:4, Informative)
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I think the answer is to not have an UBI that allows for a comfortable life and then remove the minimum wage.
People will still work if they can, unemployment will go down and those that cant really work for a reason, at least will not live in absolute poverty.
So I would say an initial UBI of $200 and then lower the minimum wage by $200. This will get most people even. But it will make living conditions a little easier for the bottom income segments.
Then we can start raising it up.
Perhaps Ownership a Mandatory Portion of Wages (Score:3)
So the fundamental issue we're having is that wages are not tied to ownership of productive resources. Programs like UBI presume to deal with this by taxing production.
What if, instead, wages must be part cash and part ownership? Something like a "minimum ownership wage".
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Elon Musk says: Don't have people aboard rockets while fueling them. Just in case something goes wrong.
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It's not so much the "insight" that is significant here; it's the fact that it's said by a wealthy corporate owner.
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If I had mod points, I'd mod you up. Musk seems overly optimistic about this issue. There will be mass unemployment, mass poverty, more homeless people and more families at the lower end of the income ladder who struggle to survive. Judging from history, the gap between the rich and the poor will continue to increase like it has during the past 40-50 years. There is more potential for unrest and civil war in the US than for basic income. As for other countries in the world, BI might be a bit more likely bec
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This mass of people will not go away, then the super-rich will have three choices:
A) Build a robot army of ext
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UBI still seems better to me than your tax suggestion, because it also increases consumption and allows people to flourish without constant fears about the future. It fosters unusual career paths and would result in many successful small companies and more creative "content producers". More education, music, writers, more handcrafting of luxury goods. These things are good for a modern industrialized society and the calculations of UBI costs I've seen are not that bad at all in comparison to expensive wellf
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Mexico.
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The best thing the rich can do is to keep lower classes fed. If they don't I fear they will be inviting civil war.
Re:Yeah and who the fuck will pay for it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well we certainly won't have to worry about it in the U.S. We can't even get universal basic healthcare, much less a universal basic income.
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Re: living in a society with a basic universal income:
Who would want to live in a dysgenic, third-world, overpopulated pile of crap?
The effects of dysgenia are already manifesting and things are starting to get creepy...
Idiocracy + Brave New World + Camp of the Saints (Score:4, Interesting)
Things are getting creepy in general because our civilization is collapsing, and when that happens, only untruths are tolerated which means that almost everything is a lie.
We have not only homegrown dysgenics (Idiocracy style) but the effects of a consumer population bent on pleasure (Brave New World style) combined with a constant third-world influx so that we may virtue signal our way to social success (see Camp of the Saints).
The result is that there is no way for this society to survive. The babbling over the UBI is just a way of keeping the groundlings fascinated and thus distracted while the kleptocracy takes anything of value that is left before the edifice falls.
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"our civilization is collapsing"
This dire opinion is only true if you ignore the history if the US in it's entirety. People complain that some how the US has declined as if the US achieved some model society.
The US has been fighting in one war or another since the inception of the state.
The US suffered through a civil war that tore the country apart. During this war Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and jailed journalist who were publishing news he determined were fanning the north-south hate. Still he is rem
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We have not only homegrown dysgenics (Idiocracy style)
Citation needed. And no, a shitty movie is not a citation.
Countercitation: flynn effect [wikipedia.org]
I would suggest that if the social order is on the verge of collapse, it's because our current social order was designed by morons who were quantifiably dumber and less informed than future generations are.
Re:Idiocracy + Brave New World + Camp of the Saint (Score:5, Insightful)
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Actually, its an alternative to dying in a dysgenic, third-world, overpopulated pile of crap called the USA.
Those people whose education included history, are aware of the French revolution the (English) peasants revolt, WW1 and WW2, and various other incidents. As a result, they understand that, taken as a whole, evidence suggests that if you make the poor suffer enough, the results are quite similar to what is happening with
Arbeit macht frei (Score:3)
This. A thousand times this.
It won't be UBI that kills the nation. It'll be selfish "I hadda do X so you do too" morons, assisted by the "Arbeit macht frei" morons and the "work is a required pursuit to be of human worth" morons.
The transition from a work-for-survival ec
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First of all government does not spend tax. Never has in a fiat money system.
It rationalises spending against forward estimates of tax.
A government cannot ever go insolvent in its own IOU's (currency) in fact it can only voluntarily choose to go insolvent because it is a currency issuer not user. So if congress approves a UBI the keystrokes will create the money. (put on your maths hat: what if you subtract trillions from an infinite set)
Secondly: yes that is the problem with UBI is valid: So everyone is ge
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$500 a month for an apartment is cheap. I pay 860 euro for a 1 bedroom apartment in an economic deprived region in Western Europe hit hard by an outgoing brain drain and an incoming wave of unschooled third world social welfare check hunters who get an apartment double the size of mine for free. More than half my generation has emigrated to the US, Canada or Australia, but also to Spain and amazingly enough, eastern Europe. Migration to Eastern Europe is not migration out of economic perspective but out of
Re: America 2018 (Score:3)
What country is this? I keep being told that Christmas is being cancelled in this country but it just seems to get bigger every year instead.
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Quoting future history is not the most convincing form of evidence in support of a position.
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People keep saying something like this whenever the government talks about raising minimum wage, and although it is true that costs do go up somewhat, the net long term effects on society as a whole have historically always been an increase in the standard of living for those on the lowest rungs of the earnings ladder.
Why would a UBI be any different?
Re:America 2018 (Score:5, Insightful)
People keep saying something like this whenever the government talks about raising minimum wage, and although it is true that costs do go up somewhat, the net long term effects on society as a whole have historically always been an increase in the standard of living for those on the lowest rungs of the earnings ladder. Why would a UBI be any different?
Because a scary amount of people in this country take a shattered economic theory as gospel. No amount of evidence that it is wrong- to the point in many instances of reality being a diametric opposite of its predictions- will ever convince these people, because they were raised believing it, and few people ever throw the yoke of the beliefs they were indoctrinated with as children. Cognitive dissonance is real, and it is strong.
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Gift-giving programs like this always turn into runaway spirals.
And setting up straw man arguments always leads to being able to easily make ignorant comments seem insightful.
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Another problem has reared its head. Because America is now giving out free money, people are flooding across the borders.
Europe and Canada give already far greater amounts to people coming in. Make a political refugee claim in either one and you get a rather decent check no questions asked until such a time they can go over your file, usually many months, even years later.
Europe has had "gift-giving" programs for over forty years, yet their deficits and taxation levels overall are lower than they in the 1970-1980s. There is no such runaway spiral in reality. This is just an argument from the rich to keep the poor down.
Re: America 2018 (Score:3, Funny)
Are you talking to me? I voted Sauron. I have standards you know.
Sauron was the good guy (Score:5, Funny)
Sauron was the good guy. The elves were racists bastards that would rather leave Middle Earth than see their leader's daughter marry a dirty human. The dwarves were just as bad. Not even the humans got along with the humans.
Meanwhile, Sauron ruled a multicultural group of diverse individuals that worked well tighter, goblins, orcs, trolls, humans, spiders, etc. And all they wanted was to not be oppressed by the evil racists humans and elves. They were just trying to improve their lives and move from the volcanic wasteland that was Mordor to a better place where they could farm in peace.
Sauron was the great hope of the oppressed and downtrodden.
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Meanwhile, Sauron ruled a multicultural group of diverse individuals that worked well tighter, goblins, orcs, trolls, humans, spiders, etc.
That's some revisionist history right there. It's well established that Sauron enslaved the trolls for his war machine, drove the previously sovereign race of spiders into hiding in Cirith Ungol when they refused to bow to his will, and engaged in a widespread eugenics program to eliminate a disabled group of orcs who suffered great pain when exposed to daylight so that his cult-like Uruks could replace them. And you have the gall to suggest that he's their great hope?
Mind you, this is the guy who for nearl
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Taxes are decided by the House of Representatives. If you want change, you need to vote all those lazy incumbents out.
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When most of the work is automated,
TFTFY
Let's face it, as more and more stuff gets automated, there is less and less need for living human beings other than those needed to maintain the machines.
Thus, more and more machines equals more and more pressure to FORCE birth control and reproduction rights on the entire human race.
If you hate big government now, just wait for the advent of machines that decide how many humans are really needed to live and maintain them.
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Well, Musk is a genius, just ask him any question you like. He has an opinion and never has to answer "I don't know". Money talks.
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So...what have you done lately?