Just FYI, Open AI, the world's largest AI company, is, and has been dedicating a major chunk of all it's research time towards engineering a system of UBI that would function well.
I strongly suspect that it's because they are already aware that their work specifically will decimate the job market.
As far as political discussions on IT, while that's up to IT himself, I don't personally know of any regulations on what people discuss here. If I have to watch what I say on a site for fear of being attacked, I just go to another site. It's a big world out there. I'd also note that until the demise of the news feed, this site was actually about 25% political speeches by volume, and I never saw anyone kicked off for having any particular stance. Most bans seem to center around "drunk and disorderly", or disrespectful behavior towards a respected member. IT, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. It's not a political site, but to my knowledge civil discourse isn't policed too much.
Now to the important part, that I think is difficult for people to grasp. This upcoming situation with AGI, and it's many cousins, is NOT just like when they closed down the sewing machine factory because they had a robot sewing machine, and those people had to go across the street and get a better paying job at the auto shop. This is moving rapidly towards the inexpensive replacement of all labor, both mental and physical. The impact this will have on society will be unprecedented, so attempts to cite precedent are futile.
Rich people will still give other rich people money for jobs that don't need to be done. They are doing that all the time right now, without AGI. Older people still print out emails on a printer, even though they could simply read them off of the screen. I've seen them do it. That type of thing will happen too. However, if you live outside the fantasy world bubble of inherited wealth, and have to compete, you will not be able to compete in the market by hiring your entire immediate family for 400k a year each to alphabetize documents or summarize papers. You cannot afford 120k a year for a truck driver, when your competitor uses trucks that drive and maintain themselves, with fewer lawsuits, less insurance, and a better safety record. This is not going to be "just another time where people have to move from one job to another". This is different, and we have absolutely zero experience with what's about to happen. Here's a video, from the real world, of 2 dozen rich people basically trying to screw in a light bulb with a few million in funding. Watch this advertisement that THEY filmed and published, and see if you think a 5th grader could have ironed this out for a candy bar. My dad's lifetime income was lower than the cost of this "solution".
The truly sad thing about all this is that if society were smart, and if people were actually good, as opposed to simply believing that they are good, we would be barreling towards a Utopia. I can say with absolute certainty that AI COULD, EASILY, create for us a world of plenty. A world where every person had a good life, with all their needs met, and opportunities to explore life with a freedom formerly reserved for kings. I don't think that will happen though. Through greed, selfishness, ideological thinking, and the predictable percentage of character flaws per million, the people in power will use this to hoard wealth on a scale never before seen, and for the first time ever, there won't be any way to earn it back.
There are good people out there, even rich people, even people in power, some of them are trying to do the right thing. The problem is that even if they were exactly right about what right and wrong actually is, much of that changes from year to year as the circumstance changes. So a perfectly moral person from 1888 might gun down a drunk person for stealing a horse. It's moral because people back then would have to watch their kids starve in the winter if they didn't have that one horse to plow a field, or deliver the mail, or whatever their job was. So a person learns ethics, CIRCA whatever time they start, and then it takes them decades to become a powerful influence on society. The less moral they are, the faster they get rich. Back to that horse, let's say you rose to power over a 50 year period, and you had rock solid certainty that horse thieves deserved summary execution. There are cars now. Teenagers are sometimes given stables full of horses as a birthday present. Nobody starves without a horse. It's just a toy for people now. But this person's moral code is set in stone, based on the understanding they developed in a different CIRCUMSTANCE, so they want to force a reality where the world THEY became comfortable with during their period of arrested development still exists. It's 1972 and you're a lawmaker who grew up when people were all saying "weed makes you murder people and rape animals" And gradually we as a society learned that there was zero truth to that, but in the mean time, these old guys threw fathers, daughters, and anyone who they didn't like in prison for life destroying stretches, for crimes such as buying things now available to the public at a gas station. Over and over, we've seen people hurt others en masse due to outdated ideologies.
This is what I think will happen with AI. People who grew up in the depression era, deciding on our behalf that everyone who isn't throwing themselves down a mineshaft is a greedy, entitled, lazy, stupid person, who deserves to die from a preventable medical condition. Even when there really is a day when there is more than enough to go around without such sacrifices being necessitated. 100 empty houses for each homeless person in America today. So that people can feel more important than other people. Sadly, I see a day of great hatred and class warfare ahead, and I suspect it's going to get violent. This will be mankind's fumbling of our greatest gift, we will take the opportunity for all people to live in peace and prosperity, and we will turn it into a civil war on the basis of dimwitted ideologies, each a different mask for the supremacy of one groupthink tribe or another.
Despite how many homes are in the U.S., many of which are vacant, unhoused populations continue to grow. See which cities have the highest disparity here.
unitedwaynca.org
Last year, I tasked an AI with explaining to me, with adjustments for all differences in global economies, how much money there was available for every man, woman, and child on earth. It's about 30 grand per year. That means that even if you went full communist (which I do not support) an average American family would have a default household income of around 120k. It's not great, but it's not bad. I don't think we should do that exact thing, but it's a baseline to provide context. The interesting thing about that fictional scenario is, that the better you were at working together or simply living in harmony with others, the better your life would likely be, in contrast to our current system, where the more fights break out on facebook, the richer Zuckerberg gets. We have seen this in older European countries where families commonly pool wealth across generations, and people of median income are now living quite well.
Here's what I think makes way more sense. Look at the charts on American prosperity over the decades. During the middle part of the 20th century, pre Reagan, we graduated tax on personal wealth to a high degree. You need to work 3x as hard as the next guy if you want to make 10x as much salary, by the time you want to displace 1000 people, we turn up the difficulty. People with more money than they could ever spend got taxed so much it was hard to continue on, and against their best efforts, they actually had to give another human being a chance to live once in a great while. It was the happiest and most universally prosperous time in our history. Not just one person per city with a billion dollars and everyone else starves, but one guy with 10 million dollars and a thriving city of happy people raising families at a decent income level. You don't need communism, capitalism works way better, but you need to have limits so that individuals don't death spiral into extreme, psychopathic levels of personal greed that destroy the lives of millions of people for myopic and self centered reasons based around the maladjusted psychological needs of one individual.
About the 4k a month income comment, that sounds good, but it's mathematically impossible right now. All the money in the world would only come up to about 2.5k per person, and that's not accounting for things like infrastructure and military. If you implemented UBI right now, with opportunities to work and earn preserved, and paid for stuff like bridge and water tower repair, you'd end up with about a grand a month. What's new about the AI age, is just a shift in the base volume of overall production. Once the world is producing 10k worth of goods per person per month, this whole thing becomes a completely different proposition. Good news, that can happen with AI. Bad news, we as a society are not mature enough to take the win, and will likely find ways to make vast numbers of people suffer needlessly in an attempt to hold on to values born in a time when resources were 100x as scarce.
We've talked a lot this decade about the evils of slavery, and I think we all agree that forcing one person into servitude under another based on things they had no control over is bad. So my question is, if the combine is out there harvesting corn on autopilot, do we really NEED to keep forcing everyone to go work the fields. Why? Everyone suffers to some degree, that's life, but the distinction we need to address is which aspects of this issue are real, and which are man made. If we don't need suffering for some survival based purpose, we should never again intentionally create it. This coming decade could be the beginning of the end, or the end of the beginning, dependent on how we as a society rise to the occasion.
