Universal Basic Income

[Nate North]

Interesting post Nate.

Yeah there's a lot of people in China and India.

I was totally spitballing with that number, but you've gotta understand I'm an american, so I'm not thinking of people in other countries when I said 4k/person

Edit: For real though there are other countries that are enemies of ours, and I am not gonna go to work so I can give them money.
Some kind of global government communist system is really a worst case strawman scenario where you're working for your enemies.

The real concern here is our friends and families losing their job and having no income and then what do we do as americans?
lets not get too theroetical, what can people really do?

Or speak for your own country if youre posting from elsewhere and think the AI collapse of jobs might happen.

When I ran those calculations I was really just curious about what the big meta number was without focusing on any specific economy it's not really a political statement about any type of one world theory or similar. It's relevant to note that I asked the AI to adjust and do the math according to purchasing power in each of the countries so that $30,000 a year in America would simultaneously be maybe$12,000 a year in Turkey simply because of the difference in expenses in each country. Obviously universal basic income would never be handled as a consolidated worldwide effort at least not in our lifetime but I thought it interesting to at least get a look at the big picture since I thought it might reveal something about the overall situation.

You do make a good point though as China for example is 25% of the world's population roughly. To add even more complexity to an extraordinarily complex theoretical situation we also have to consider that many things may become cheaper or more effective as the base wealth produced grows. Think about what's happened with something as simple as a home computer, It used to cost hundreds of dollars for a computer that you could barely get to type your name on the screen and now you can buy a $100 ipad knockoff at Walmart that is capable of many things our national space program could not have achieved in 1990. An example archeologist have recently discovered that some ancient civilizations had essentially used naturally occurring materials to create concrete that could self repair to a degree. What if we figured out how to build a house that simply lasted three times as long. That's effectively cutting the cost of housing by 66%. Even with concrete classic it used to take a number of people sacrificing a significant amount of time to create that building but in the near future it will absolutely be possible to create a similar structure in an afternoon using no labor.

Its aspects of the future like this that make me believe that if so much of humanity continues to suffer in poverty moving forward it will be a result of human decisions rather than necessities dictated by the natural order.

Then my final thought is that society simply lacks the zen to optimize itself. It's a flaw in the human mind or the human psychology itself and has little to do with the external world. Basically we tend to adjust what we think we need in accordance to what we already have. I don't need 10 more sandwiches what I need is 10% more sandwiches, always. It seems built in that no matter the absolute value of what we have we always feel that we need a little more. I can only assume that people who grew up dreaming of owning a plane are still desperately clawing at the ladder even after they have 10 planes. It would seem logical that if you Wanted a plane and then you got a plane then you could be happy, But it rarely seems to work out like that. If every person in the world could be even close to reasonable, As in I need food shelter purpose and entertainment, Everyone could absolutely have that even right now. It's only the need that we have to be bigger or better than another person that drives the ceaseless consumption. I'm no better than anyone else, Having bought 15 different guitars each shinier and more expensive than its predecessor, Even though the third guitar I bought in high school was good enough to last me for my entire life.

I can't help but wonder if people in the distant future will look back on our celebrity culture of pushing individuals up to be fawned over and idolized by masses as laughably primitive and utterly unnecessary. Did people need Miley Cyrus or young gravy as much as they needed $600 million worth of kidney surgeries for people who couldn't afford them? Right now we don't even think in those terms but an interesting thing to note here is that an agi certainly will think in those terms and it will be interesting to see what happens when we get into a period where clashes between cultural logic and absolute mathematical logic come to the surface of discussion on a national or global level.

My apologies for the poor capitalization in this post which I had to write with text to speech as I was away from keyboard.

 

[Nate North]

I heard a story from one of the factory owners in baltimore.. I can't remember the exact numbers but it was something like this...

When he replaced human staff with automation, he cut his costs by 50%, and the machines were so efficient he was able to double production and increase his gross profits by 200%

Cut costs in half and double your sales at the same time.
It's an irresistable siren's call to anyone that likes money and owns a factory, and that mentality and capability will soon spread to every industry on the planet, except for reality tv.

In America you have to pay for your employee's health care, so it's really expensive to have full time staff.

Yeah you nailed it, that's what's going to happen here. No business is going to turn down a 4X multiplier to the bottom line and in the near future all businesses will be faced with that decision so essentially we already know what's going to happen. So in a very compressed version of what I was saying in the longer post above all we really have to do is take this 4X increase in wealth and productivity and not turn it into a way for people to be even poorer than they are now. Sounds incredibly simple but unfortunately I expect we have quite a struggle ahead. It would be so easy you don't even have to be remotely intelligent to get this right, Forget universal basic income just raise everyone's standard of living by 4X when things get four times easier, Even with just that simple of a solution the entire nation would be lifted out of poverty. You could actually do way better than that with the same circumstance but what I'm saying is that with the introduction of widespread universal AI labor it would actually be trivial to eliminate much of the pain and suffering that most of the people have had to endure in past eras.

 

[mlesemann]

In America you have to pay for your employee's health care,

That only applies to companies with more than 50 employees and only employees who work at least 30 hours a week have to be covered.

Also, those companies have to provide health insurance, which isn't the same as paying for the employee's health care.

 

[CelticRambler]

What if we figured out how to build a house that simply lasted three times as long.

Three times as long as what? I live in a house that's 300 years old and is not particularly exceptional for the area. I have friends and acquaintances that live in houses that are 1000 years old, so they've already lasted three time as long as mine.

What you're referring to is not the inability to build for the future, but the choice of the "free market" and the many millions of consumers who voluntairely buy cheap, unreliable crap instead of decent quality that'll last several lifetimes. This applies across just about every aspect of society.

When he replaced human staff with automation, he cut his costs by 50%, and the machines were so efficient he was able to double production and increase his gross profits by 200%

'Twas ever thus: read up on the Spinning Jenny and the Luddites to help put the disruptiveness of text-to-video into context. These examples always reduce down to someone figuring out how to make more for less, promoting the "more" as a Good Thing, usually trying to convince us that it's great that the "more" is now accessible to a greater number, and ignoring the inevitable consequences of increased waste and ultimately reduced profit margins as whatever is being sold loses its value on account of so much of it being sold, requiring the producer to produce even more to make the same amount of money and leaving the local population with a river full of pollution and a hinterland stripped of resources.

Hence

Does money become worthless,

Yes. Well, no ... well, kinda.

There are plenty of people around the world for whom $4000 a year would be a great income, so what any given dollar is worth depends entirely on the circumstances of the person holding it. There's a fierce debate raging in my home country (Ireland) about the cost of housing, with an "average family home" selling for about 300000€ these days (double or triple that for a "desireable location"), and much wailing and gnashing of teeth about how unaffordable it is. Yet no-one is forcing these prospective house-buyers to pay those kinds of prices. They willingly saddle themselves with 30- and 35-year mortgages to compete with some other couple to have That House for completely arbitrary reasons. Then they saddle themselves with extra life and property insurance costs because they have so much debt to protect, and extra childcare costs because they have to work (or commute) every available hour in the day, and higher food bills because they don't have the time to prepare low-cost meals themselves, and extra medical costs because their lifestyle is so stressful they're more susceptible to illness.

It would be entirely feasible for any one of those people to choose a different direction, buy a much cheaper house in a completely different location and lead a lifestyle that prioritises values other than money. That doesn't mean going full off-grid hermit; it only requires being prepared to invest a different kind of energy, such as learning a new language or growing vegetables or engaging in volunteer programmes. When you turn your back on mass consumption and free-market capitalism, suddenly "AI" is much less of threat: it's not going to take the job you don't have!

 

[sfoster]

Three times as long as what? I live in a house that's 300 years old and is not particularly exceptional for the area. I have friends and acquaintances that live in houses that are 1000 years old, so they've already lasted three time as long as mine.

What you're referring to is not the inability to build for the future, but the choice of the "free market" and the many millions of consumers who voluntairely buy cheap, unreliable crap instead of decent quality that'll last several lifetimes. This applies across just about every aspect of society.



'Twas ever thus: read up on the Spinning Jenny and the Luddites to help put the disruptiveness of text-to-video into context. These examples always reduce down to someone figuring out how to make more for less, promoting the "more" as a Good Thing, usually trying to convince us that it's great that the "more" is now accessible to a greater number, and ignoring the inevitable consequences of increased waste and ultimately reduced profit margins as whatever is being sold loses its value on account of so much of it being sold, requiring the producer to produce even more to make the same amount of money and leaving the local population with a river full of pollution and a hinterland stripped of resources.

Hence

Yes. Well, no ... well, kinda.

There are plenty of people around the world for whom $4000 a year would be a great income, so what any given dollar is worth depends entirely on the circumstances of the person holding it. There's a fierce debate raging in my home country (Ireland) about the cost of housing, with an "average family home" selling for about 300000€ these days (double or triple that for a "desireable location"), and much wailing and gnashing of teeth about how unaffordable it is. Yet no-one is forcing these prospective house-buyers to pay those kinds of prices. They willingly saddle themselves with 30- and 35-year mortgages to compete with some other couple to have That House for completely arbitrary reasons. Then they saddle themselves with extra life and property insurance costs because they have so much debt to protect, and extra childcare costs because they have to work (or commute) every available hour in the day, and higher food bills because they don't have the time to prepare low-cost meals themselves, and extra medical costs because their lifestyle is so stressful they're more susceptible to illness.

It would be entirely feasible for any one of those people to choose a different direction, buy a much cheaper house in a completely different location and lead a lifestyle that prioritises values other than money. That doesn't mean going full off-grid hermit; it only requires being prepared to invest a different kind of energy, such as learning a new language or growing vegetables or engaging in volunteer programmes. When you turn your back on mass consumption and free-market capitalism, suddenly "AI" is much less of threat: it's not going to take the job you don't have!

Anti-consumption is admirable, and I think in particular animal agriculture would greatly benefit from individual participation rather than this mass production that we've all heavily leaned into.

Having said that, the temptations are only going to increase... to a really irresistable level.
Imagine the year is 2035 - your have a parent or a grandparent under your care, and they have alzheimer's disease.

For $20,000 you can buy a robot that sorta looks like you, and you can leave the house whenever you want, do whatever you want, the robot talks to your parent with bad vision, parent can't tell the difference and when you're gone they think they're still talking to their loved one.

The robot never gets mad and hits them or steals from them, it shifts all the responsibilities off your shoulder.
And if you're tired the robot will even give you a free massage for as long as you want, and cook your food, and do your chores.

Alternatively, you could spend all day doing back breaking labor so you can grow a few carrots, and spend all of your free time caring for someone extremely high maintenance and give up all of your own life. And what happens to your parent while you're outside toiling? They hurt themselves cause no one is watching them?

Given those two options, the vast majority will choose to work a life of consumption in a cushy air conditioned office so they can get that robot and feel enabled. Plus I am really excited about being able to turn comic book frames into steoescopic vision and go inside my old comic books as a kid. The toys will get so cool.

 

[sfoster]

That only applies to companies with more than 50 employees and only employees who work at least 30 hours a week have to be covered.

Also, those companies have to provide health insurance, which isn't the same as paying for the employee's health care.

Thanks, paying for insurance vs full health care costs is an important distinction.
Still insurance costs a lot per person, and if you have 50+ employees it really adds up

the whole system incentivizes employers to switch to automation, if you can elimination millions of jobs its hundreds of millions in savings, and if you're a small business that can drop below 50 full time employees, now you don't have to pay for any health insurance at all anymore.

An automated employee will never get sexually harrassed by a middle manager and sue the owner, it will never slip and hurt itself and sue, it'll never file for workmens compensation, it'll never do something against policy out of anger and get you sued by a customer, etc.

In principle a CEO has three main responsibilities, generally prioritized in this order
Keep the shareholders happy
Keep the customers happy
Keep the employees happy

No more employees = less responsibility/less work/less risk for the CEO plus more money, plus shareholders are happier.
they're incentivized, they all want to do this switch from manual labor to AI automation

 

[mlesemann]

n principle a CEO has three main responsibilities, generally prioritized in this order
Keep the shareholders happy
Keep the customers happy
Keep the employees happy

I wish!
In the American system, the only goal of corporations is to keep the shareholders happy. Smaller companies don't have shareholders so yes, I think the 2nd & 3rd do matter in that case, especially since owners see them face to face.

 

[sfoster]

I wish!
In the American system, the only goal of corporations is to keep the shareholders happy. Smaller companies don't have shareholders so yes, I think the 2nd & 3rd do matter in that case, especially since owners see them face to face.

It's easy to be cynical, since the priority is so heavily skewed toward keeping the shareholders happy, but all 3 are still part of the job.
If you don't keep your customers happy, and you hire a pedophile to be a your rich and famous spokesman, you might see 5,000 of your store franchises close because the customers are so unhappy with the decision.
If you don't keep your employeees happy, they might all go on strike, and then production shuts down entirely.

I won't disagree that shareholders have been over-prioritized in our culture, but you cannot be an effective CEO if you completely disregard 2 & 3, otherwise you risk harming your business profits and now you've damaged your #1 priority. It's all a connected balance.

 

[sfoster]

This was announced this morning...

Microsoft and Jeff Bezos are teaming up together, along with openAI and nVidia for ROBOTIC HUMANS
New company called FIGURE

engineers are working on a robot that looks and moves like a human... to perform dangerous jobs that are unsuitable for people

Edit: NVida CEO also had this to say, that programming has become an obsolete skill no longer necessary for kids to learn.

everybody in the world is now a programmer. This is the miracle, this is the miracle of artificial intelligence. For the very first time, we have closed the gap, the technology divide has been completely closed and it's the reason why so many people can engage artificial intelligence. It is the reason why every single government, every single industrial conference, every single company is talking about artificial intelligence today. Because for the very first time you can imagine everybody in your company being a technologist.

 

[CelticRambler]

Given those two options,

If you live in a world where you have only those two options, then you've chosen a dystopian lifestyle. Fortunately, even in 2035, there will be all kinds of other alternatives, most of which will offer a good intergenerational relationship between humans so that they can all enjoy good mental and physical health, and most households' robots will be relegated to sweeping the floor and mowing the lawn.

 

[sfoster]

If you live in a world where you have only those two options, then you've chosen a dystopian lifestyle. Fortunately, even in 2035, there will be all kinds of other alternatives, most of which will offer a good intergenerational relationship between humans so that they can all enjoy good mental and physical health, and most households' robots will be relegated to sweeping the floor and mowing the lawn.

Well don't hold back now, what are these other options that will be available to us

 

[CelticRambler]

Hire someone to care for your aged parent; put them in a home; share the care with siblings/children/neighbours ... there are three options straight off. Over on this side of the Atlantic, the option of euthanasia is also available in certain countries and certain circumstances.

The average age of death in the village where I live is between 90-95, and I'd see the majority of my elderly neighbours pottering about in their vegetable patches until the day they get carted off in a hearse. "Toiling in the garden" is arguably a far healthier way to make it to a compis mentis old age than sitting in an air-conditioned office, bathed in electromagnetic radiation from a million "connected" devices and doped up to the eyeballs on prescription medication because that's the only way you can drag yourself out of bed to put in a day's work for some corporate CEO.

Which brings us back to the question of what constitutes a reasonable amount of UBI. This is where the politics and the injustice will come into play. Should it include money for commuting to a place of work? Why - if you don't have to work - because you're getting UBI - you shouldn't need money for commuting. Should you even get an allowance for owning/running a car? If you're not commuting, you could manage with a bike, or a donkey - much more environmentally friendly. Do you need enough money to buy a trolley-load of vegetables in the supermarket every week? Because that's just feeding another corporate CEO, and you could grow that veg yourself with a dozen packs of seeds and some bags of compost.

As @Nate North pointed out earlier: society trundles along with a delay of about 50-100 years behind technological advances, which is not necessarily a bad thing. By the time we catch up, many of those "advancements" have proven to be less advantageous than we thought, or nowhere near as advanced as what came afterwards. That's where we are with "the robots are taking all of our jobs" - no, they're not, and no, they're not going to. But by the time our Glorious Leaders get around to agreeing on the principle and the amount of UBI, the world will have changed a bit more, and you never know - maybe UBI will include an allowance for an in-home cathether-changing robot (with AI urinalysis as optional extra, 20% off if you use the promocode IndieTalk4Ever).

 

[mlesemann]

Purely by coincidence, this article is running today on nj.com which is a compendium of news sources in my home state of New Jersey.

UBI-adjacent trial in Paterson NJ

 

[sfoster]

Hire someone to care for your aged parent; put them in a home; share the care with siblings/children/neighbours ... there are three options straight off. Over on this side of the Atlantic, the option of euthanasia is also available in certain countries and certain circumstances.

Well I can tell you from experience.. sharing the care with siblings / children etc is an extreme hardship.
I dated an indian woman for 4+ years that was very committed to her grandma with dementia and was extremely rough on the family.

They also could not afford to hire someone to care for her, because she only spoke punjabi and they lived in america... there was a huge language barrier that made it very hard to care for her, same with putting her in a home, it just wasn't an option.

The mom and dad couldn't even sleep in the same bed together, one of them always had to sleep with the grandma.
And on her bad days? very emotionally trying.

They were also a very caring and family oriented group, so I don't think they would have considered euthanasia if it was an option.
Hiring a robot for $20k that could speak the language and look like the granddaughter would have been a godsend for them.

 

[sfoster]

that's where we are with "the robots are taking all of our jobs" - no, they're not, and no, they're not going to

A lot has gone in the thread, so you might have missed the announcement.
Jeff Bezos and Microsoft have teamed up with nVidia to create a GENERAL PURPOSE ROBOT HUMAN.

Figure

Figure is the first-of-its-kind AI robotics company bringing a general purpose humanoid to life.

www.figure.ai

That's not CGI. It's 5'6" 130lbs with a 5 hour runtime on a rechargable electric battery.
Three of the biggest companies on the planet have combined to create Figure and it's a tiny baby learning how to crawl.

A $3+ TRILLION ~$2 TRILLION and $1+ TRILLION dollar company have all three combined their best and brightest resources with the goal of creating a robot that can capably do almost ANY human job. The bell has been rung, I can hear it clear as day.

They are absolutely going to take our jobs from what I can see. This thing will grow in capabilities - FAST.
These are serious people with serious resources and they're chomping at the bit to get this robot market ready.

 

[sfoster]

Ah they posted another Status Update on their video channel.
Figure 01 is currently moving at 16.7% speed of a human.

Figure will be a car mechanic in my lifetime.

 

[CelticRambler]

You're a great man for getting excited about announcements. I've got to that stage in life where I've learnt that announcements are the easiest part of the delivery process.

Figure will be a car mechanic in my lifetime

So just about keeping up with the robots of the 1950s, then.

 

[sfoster]

You're a great man for getting excited about announcements.

Is that the french version of "Bless your heart"

 

[sfoster]

@mlesemann Interesting Banking and AI Article

Bankers Will See Three-Quarters of the Workday Transformed by AI - BNN Bloomberg

Artificial intelligence is likely to replace or at least lend a hand in tasks that take up almost three-quarters of the time bank employees now spend working.

www.bnnbloomberg.ca

banking has the potential to benefit more from the technology than any other industry.

Banks can boost their productivity by as much as 30% using generative AI over the next three years, according to Accenture.

About 60% of the routine tasks performed by bank tellers, whose jobs primarily involve collecting and processing data, could be supported by generative AI, Accenture found.

Analysts at Bank of New York Mellon Corp. can wake up two hours later to write their research, because AI technology can create a rough draft and prepare related data for them overnight, Chief Executive Officer Robin Vince said on an earnings call last month.

 

[sfoster]

Follow up by bloomberg, the AI banking software appears to wildly surpass earlier expectations, eliminating 90% of manual work

JPMorgan’s AI-Aided Cashflow Model Can Cut Manual Work by 90%

JPMorgan Chase & Co. helped some of its corporate customers slash manual work by almost 90% with its cashflow management tool that runs on artificial intelligence, bringing the largest US bank one step closer to charging for this service.

www.bloomberg.com

Wow so it really is coming after the banking industry.