UBI eliminates the last bargaining chip the masses have - labor. Without workers, there can be no strikes. With everyone dependent on the UBI for livelihood, nobody could afford to oppose the system.
This is what the "plutocrats" are after. Masses without a lever to organize.
I don't necessarily agree with the thesis, it's just that the article really doesn't get to the point.
automation can't eliminate the bargaining chip if the populace have no means to purchase goods produced by automation. That's why it's actually UBI that makes a huge chunk of people a slave to the system
But if the rich people need people to have money to buy their goods, and you’re saying UBI would be this money, where is the UBI money coming from? Why couldn’t the rich people just get that money directly?
Why would the rich need the proles to buy anything, when their automated factories would make anything they want for them?
The thing is, the rich only have the threat of violence then to keep poorer masses in check. Though there are many kinds of violence, disease, starvation, homelessness.
The thing is, without the dictates of the rich, there will be places they would be unable or unwilling to reach. There, a socialism of even purer kind could start given enough automation. The problem would be hydraulic despotism. Resources like water, oil, metals would be hard to get.
Without an UBI they would be starving and start street protests.
Much like what happened during French revolution.
UBI removes that risk.
I'm in favour of an UBI, but one that's really universal (rich and poor get the same amount of money, forever) and one that goes together with a real public system including public universal healthcare, public schools, public infrastructures - roads, railroads - and trasnportation, similar to the ones we have in many European countries, but improved.
UBIs have to be universal (most proposals are not Universal, they are just Basic Incomes, Italy just created a fake one called "reddito di cittadinanza" literally translated as "citizen's income")
We may have public healthcare and schools, but most parts of the world, including the US, don't.
We also have universal public welfare, unemployment benefits, public housing, public transports, in Italy we also have mandatory car insurance, it means everybody has to pay for it, it also means that the prices are heavily regulated and must be affordable and - most of all - non discriminatory (you can't set a price based on personal data and background of the single client and there's an authority reviewing the methodology).
These are all things that in US don't exist or are seen as "socialist", hence bad.
If you add an UBI but don't fundamentally change the way the system works it won't make a difference, companies will just adjust the prices accordingly because more money will be in consumer's pockets (the market is always right! right?).
The only real point I can make is improving on the things that already work, just throwing money at problems won't solve problems.
> If you add an UBI but don't fundamentally change the way the system works it won't make a difference, companies will just adjust the prices accordingly because more money will be in consumer's pockets (the market is always right! right?).
If you assume prices work according to supply and demand, incorrect. The reason for this is that people also earn money from sources other than UBI.
To give an example, let's say I give every single person in the US, including children, $5. Will companies raise their prices accordingly? Maybe, but the difference in GDP is tiny. The difference in the purchasing power of the average 10 year old with no pocket money though, is vast, since they previously had $0 and now they have $5.
Similarly, UBI will probably result in price increases, but those will be less than the increase in purchasing power of those most in need of UBI.
Amazon will want those UBI money, they'll want you to spend money on their website instead of going to the dentist and we know they are good at it (too much if you ask me).
If the dentist is already paid by taxes, you could have both.
I've always wondered (at the furthest end of full-automation) what's to stop a collection of billionaires, equipped with their self-perpetuating, self-assembling, hermetic technological sphere, from deciding to turn the planet into their own personal Eden again by eliminating the 99.9% of humans that are no longer needed to keep civilization as was known before going? Offer a voice command and this self-functional tech (a dream at this point, admittedly, but a dream that many are actively pursuing) builds a fleet of drones and expert systems / AI work out the best strategy to achieve the end. People will say, oh the masses will rise up and eat the rich, but when the rich are in the their world war II-proof self-contained underground habitats with banks of genetic samples from every plant and animal formerly on Earth, there isn't going to be much worry about collateral damage; so chemical, genetic, germ warfare, all of it can be on the table. It might even be a video game, they could let their kids fly killer drones before dinner.
Not possible? Not technologically yet. But how many 'normal' people complain about there being 'too many people'? And if someone just has to talk to fancy Alexa on steroids to get whatever they want, why should they keep me around? Adulation? Holographics, gynoids, and there's and app for that.
It’d be pretty bad if omnicidal supervillains decided to kill everyone, yeah. It’d be especially bad if all the powerful people in the world simultaneously decided to become supervillains. But I mean... why would they?
I don't think there will ever be a point where the tech you're describing is suddenly available and the world is also just as overpopulated as it is today. I think our approach to the end state you describe will be much more gradual.
Our holy books still recommend that we be fruitful and multiply. We still have systems in place (like social security) that will fall apart unless we can maintain unbounded growth. Our society is riddled will all of these leftovers from a time when having more people actually was a good idea. Those memes aren't serving us anymore, and evolution will prune them with time. It probably won't be a comfortable time.
Cultural attitudes towards population aside, the nightmare scenario you describe is unfolding in tiny little pockets all around us. There's no need to nuke the poor people all at once when you can just let them starve one at a time. Nobody needs to make the single big hugely unethical decision of genocide, they just need to repeatedly make the small mildly unethical decision of apathy.
I'm hoping that we can make the former into a stronger effect than the latter, but I'm not optimistic.
I think a less extreme version of your scenario is a dark possibility in the future.
After the explosion of neo-racism and fascism and similar ideologies in recent years I found myself wondering what would happen if liberalism did in fact fall deeply out of fashion. We have panopticon mass surveillance, bioengineering, drones, and loads of other super-technologies that could allow genocide on an incredible scale with almost no realistic possibility of resistance. Some DIY guerilla group or gun nut militia would last minutes against a modern army that truly did not show restraint because their actual goal is extermination.
Now throw migrant crises created by climate change in there. Look at how a relatively small migrant crisis in Europe helped resurrect fascism across all of the West and imagine a migrant wave 10X larger.
I could definitely see some future gangster plutocracy deciding it's time to follow "race realism" and the cult of IQ to its logical conclusion.
We seem to be failing to cooperate at scale to phase out carbon intensive energy sources and curtail the problem. The next test will be whether we will cooperate at scale to adapt to the change or descend into war and genocide.
If a disastrous climate change scenario does unfold it could be true that large farming regions will be devastated, etc., but those people will not just sit and die. They will try to migrate. They may also engage in aggressive warfare themselves, "raiding" as we call it among our closest genetic relatives. Most deaths will be from war and genocide, not starvation.
If this coincides with a true abandonment of liberal humanistic attitudes in advanced nations I could definitely see the top ~10% of humanity dispatching the other 90% in an organized fashion. Any members of the elite who voiced opposition would join the condemned.
Smaller more isolated versions of that have happened before. Never before have humans had the power to scale it.
BTW I think that's why people are so spooked by the Nazi holocaust vs what Stalin and Mao and many others did. The Nazi body count was not the highest, but the chilling thing is how they applied modern industrial and management practices to deliberate murder at scale. I suspect it's so chilling because of it hints at dark possible future scenarios. Imagine Hitler and the SS with China's surveillance state and CRISPR-CAS9.
Of course those synthetic environments will be defended. There are LiDAR sensors that scan 1-2 kilometers now, those are already being installed at the boarders of middle eastern countries. Connect those to some turrets that can fire, you have automated defence that works in the dark, rain, and fog. I've seen this technology first hand, heck I even helped build it. How are they going to raid if they cannot even get close to the defence walls?
Advances in automated warfare will keep the rich safe and they wont have to get their hands dirty.
They'll own the communication infrastructure so if things get bad first will be absolute surveillance then they can just pull the plug on communications if the outsiders get too rowdy.
Self sustaining means you cant use scorched earth tactics. Internal power generation so no blackouts. Internal food production so no attrition warfare.
I am way off topic right now, but this is what chills me about some of the ideologies that I see people perpetuating online. Ultimately whether we get the future we are discussing or something much better will depend on ideas.
Be very careful what ideas you invest time and energy in perpetuating. Think through the consequences first. What would happen if this were actually believed by many people and by powerful people?
If the dominant idea is that the value of a human being is quantitatively measurable as their contribution to GDP or their IQ, we get a future like we are discussing. Racism is the same idea but with a much less sophisticated metric.
Thing is, you'd have to oppress in this situation. If you're just sat tight then the masses can go elsewhere and build their own utopia.
Im not sure that there's the stomach for active oppression throughout the whole of the ruling class.
Additionally, comms being what they are, cheap mesh networks can win through attrition so the masses can simply go off channel and avoid monitoring. From there the only way to find out what they're doing is through trust ie. Be (or pretend but then the entry bar gets raised) a good actor at which point the oppression stops.
The masses can go somewhere and build their own utopia?! This actually made me laugh out loud.
The masses are mostly average and below. They are the people living paycheck to paycheck, the working among them are on the verge of employment induced burnout, and almost all of them have no savings, and little / no access to capital. They are myopic and/or willfully blind. They have little to no situational awareness and don't solve problems until it's too late.
They are incapable, vision-less, disorganized and most importantly: resourceless - how are they going to just go and build a utopia?
The top 10% will get elysium and the 90% will get nothing.
> Im not sure that there's the stomach for active oppression throughout the whole of the ruling class.
Not personally but oppression is automated, thats the entire point. The rich live in their gated community bubble, and automation and security takes care of things at the boarders.
> Additionally, comms being what they are, cheap mesh networks can win through attrition so the masses can simply go off channel and avoid monitoring. From there the only way to find out what they're doing is through trust ie. Be (or pretend but then the entry bar gets raised) a good actor at which point the oppression stops
Mesh networks can be DoS'd easily if they become a problem. I know, I built and sold my first startup doing this.
Good points (and I'm glad I can make you laugh!) but i'll try to clarify:
> The masses can go somewhere and build their own utopia?! This actually made me laugh out loud.
On a macro scale this is what colonization is, specifically that trait of going off to find some land to make your fortune. Historically this has worked well, excluding the bit where indigenous populations were wiped out. Realistically here we're talking about getting the leftovers resource-wise.
I'd be willing to bet that despite automation, not all the ruling class could rest on their conscience ie. the Elon Musks, Bill Gates etc. of this world would be dissenting, and in a position to act as visionaries (in fact they would likely be polarized by others' actions) to help build out alternative infrastructure. This solves the directionless+resourceless issues you've raised.
Mesh networks can be DoS'd but that'd require active oppression to shut down the mesh, and if that happens, we get two possibilities, either you get help from aforementioned visionaries (wired network build-out) or you run a separate mesh, and keep doing so every time it's brought down.
Cost is affordable with say esp32s and lipo (the attrition aspect I mentioned), bandwidth is a different matter but then we're talking about jamming rather than DoS.
Does if have to be that complicated just put up a giant border wall and ignore climate change. Millions die of climate disasters and you can claim moral ambivalence.
I'm not worried. There are enough nukes to solve any such situation. Get to the point where someone is actively purging percentages of humanity with no end in sight? Launch a few dozen ICBMs and turn their little pool party into an irradiated piece of shit. And if they survived the ICBM volley? Enjoy your cancer, assholes!
Do you really think US/UK/Russia/France/Israel are all going to collectively give up control of their nuclear weapons to a single entity? Nuclear weapons are the ultimate equalizer. Your nation state can be 10000x less powerful, but still capable of threatening a superior civilization with total destruction of their population.
Getting the legislative votes to enact UBI is one thing. But my fear is that politicians would just think that after that, their task is done. In fact, it has hardly begun. The state would need to offer the masses of perpetually un- or underemployed people activities, things to do with their lives. This would be a hard sell in the USA especially, where historically there has been relatively little state support of community infrastructure, but the private institutions like churches and clubs that used to provide that infrastructure have now collapsed.
The Nordic countries have experienced this problem firsthand, where in spite of a safety net and generous funding of arts, culture, and leisure in areas suffering from high unemployment, a substantial number of people still prefer to drink their lives away or hang out on internet fora to complain about how they feel no purpose in their lives.
I don’t know what things are like in Nordic countries but I feel there’s tons of things that need to be done in the USA. Perhaps things like time banking for giving credit for all the tasks a community needs would be nice? https://www.yang2020.com/policies/modern-time-banking/
Not only is that an enlightened policy, I love the way it's presented. If all candidates were forced to clearly define their policies in that form, in writing, instead of the current spoken debate theatre we use, perhaps we could get out of this negative feedback loop we're in.
It's how people will morally justify the situation saying it's "good enough". Even though their quality of life could be much better. The alternative is no UBI which creates more glaring problems if people can't meed their physical needs and a less complacent population.
> It's how people will morally justify the situation saying it's "good enough"
This is a logical fallacy. It can be claimed that any human right can make the population complacent: 5 days work week, public healthcare and so on and there is no evidence to prove it's true.
On the contrary, it's well known that people with free time can become socially and politically engaged, while people working 2 jobs have no time for it.
> They can’t organize labor strikes if they have no labor.
The idea of UBI isn’t to make it so that the masses never work again. The idea is so they don’t starve and die when between jobs. It’s to give people a real chance to live their lives while training or retooling. Money gives people choices and options. Today’s lack of choices for people at the lowest levels of income amounts to slavery.
Low income people can and will still work under a UBI system. So I’m not sure the article’s central thesis makes sense.
If anything, it seems like UBI would empower union workers with their strikes because they have something to fall back on while negotiating for better terms.
There’s more than one model for UBI. I’m hoping for automation and UBI payouts to increase hand-in-hand: ultimately I’m expecting automation to make all human labour[1] uneconomical, and if that happens UBI will need to be enough to live on — but starting UBI at such a high level might prevent the economic development that is necessary to reach that level of automation.
[1] with the sole exception of “celebrity”, a role that can’t scale
> 12k in the US is not so bad for costs other than healthcare (lots of families of 3 are living on $35,000).
Lots may be doing it, but you'd be living in poverty your whole life. There's no way a family of 3 could get by on 35k a year without accumulating debt.
12k hardly covers just your rent in many places in the US
I come from Europe, so I might be biased, but we have unemployment benefits and training is often covered by contracts, most of the time it is mandatory, for example at my current job I had to take mandatory courses (mandatory means you can get penalties for not completing them) on GDPR and privacy policies and two full courses on Coursera chosen by me, but paid and approved by the company, in order to get access to the yearly bonus.
I don't really understand the argument here, and the writer didn't look into the rest of Yang's platform that addresses the plutocracy part of this equation.
Is our current system captured by the wealthy and special interests? Absolutely, and his Democracy Dollars and Ranked Choice Voting policies directly address those, and as a supporter I'm more excited about those two positions then the UBI as I think it is even more of a structural change.
I highly recommend his talk with Lawrence Lessig, who has been fighting the good fight against corruption for years.
No matter how many regulations lawmakers come up with, powerful interests will always find some ways to get their money into politics.
On the other hand, washing out lobbyist money with people's Democracy Dollars could be a game changer. And since the politicians benefit from this arrangement too, it has a decent chance of getting their support. I imagine it'd be hard for the lobbyists to lobby against this one.
Yes! I'm a volunteer with them as well, great non partisan organization trying to get some simple but absolutely transformative changes done in how our Democracy functions.
I’m not sure I understand the argument. A mass of angry people who have their basic needs met seems a good force for confronting exploitation. The Yang campaign specifically is the one very vocally calling out for capturing the fruits of automation to share.
The author does argue the principles. Power balance between the elites and everyone else has always kept things from getting too bad. Historically there has been violent revolution; more recently developed societies have empowered people through capitalism (despite its many flaws, it serves this crucial purpose). So labor movements have replaced violence in many cases. As the author says, economic contribution is the only real leverage regular people have. Without that we'd be reliant on the continued goodwill of the ultra-powerful. How has that played out historically?
This article reads more like a paranoid manifesto. Immortal billionaires controlling a society that cannot revolt? Like vampires or something?
A UBI seems like it should be more like a social assistance program where the people receiving it get to decide how to allocate the funds instead of a bureaucratic institution.
An alternative idea to UBI that achieves many of the same ends is to remove all taxes other than a wealth tax. A wealth tax actually would greatly augment UBI.
Stopping UBI won't stop automation, and you will still have to deal with the potentially massive rise of unemployment that could be caused by automation. You still will have dystopia with just automation and plutocracy, but somehow you will need to solve the implied unemployment, or the dystopia will be far worse.
I think really plutocracy + anything is dystopia. There’s just no way a small group of wealthy elites can organize society to pursue their (the plutocrats’) interests without devolving to dystopia.
Some of the best things about society are that plutocrats can be brought to justice and market forces can bring financial empires down. These are extremely critical sorts of checks & balances on plutocracy, and we need to entrench them more and more, to make it harder and harder for plutocrats to hide from legal or financial consequences.
We’re going to have to stop using up energy driving to jobs the world doesn’t need to produce crap you have to propagandize people into believing they want so they’ll spend money on it and then throw it in the landfill. That’s obviously an insane way for an increasingly technologically advanced species to continue to function, and one way or another we are going to have to start doing a lot more nothing quite soon.
And we won't stop, because people would rather kill each other over their creature comforts than come to the realization that all people are inherently equal and we need to share a limited pool of resources.
There is no solution and this will all end in tears.
UBI is a good idea in principle but a gateway to dystopia in practice. UBI and similar systems are an easily abused vector to create a new slave class.
Relevant reading: Manna: Two Visions of Humanity's Future
1. All resources are distributed for labor in an open market.
2. All resources are held, some are distributed for labor in an open market, some are distributed for UBI.
3. All resources are held, there is little to no open market left, the rest is distributed via UBI.
4. UBI now require certain conditions to be claimed, such as participation in various labor programs, or, perhaps, whatever program you are assigned to. The open market has collapsed or is too small to offer a meaningful alternative to, effectively, economically enforced labor.
Think of an economy like in Player Piano: only the engineers have jobs. The rest 'work' for their pay, but have no agency.
Sorry, I wasn't clear. Each stage is an evolution of policy. Once people rely on UBI and don't have easily accessible alternative options, those who control UBI can corrupt it to control those who depend on it.
We have seen this happen, generally with good intentions, in Federal funding for roads and such.
I'm not saying this course of events is inevitable, only that it is very possible to imagine. Particularly now, as many of our enshrined institutions are being corroded.
I read through your article and I found it to be silly and naive. I would highly recommend actually reading someone like marx or even von mises.
Here are some specific silly parts:
"This means we can predict that a universal basic income will just self-adjust to treat $1K/ month as the new $0."
"At present in the United States, there are more empty homes than homeless people on the street. The flaw with the current economic model is that if these homes were given out, that would incentivize people to become homeless in order to get free housing, and a free house is a loss in profit."
tldr; universal basic services ..as always the devil is in the details. How good will the free food and shelter be? Better than nothing for those that decide not to do anything i guess
We don't need UBI, because automation will naturally decrease prices, eventually to the negative. That means there will be more stuff than anyone can consume, thus it's less expensive to give it away than to store or demolish it.
I think this will lead to the end of the human race. We are becoming useless, and have already stopped reproducing. Only a few will survive, supported by technology that they no longer understand. When it fails, the remaining people will die, or start everything again without any technology.
A species doesn't really need to be "useful" in order to survive. It just needs to reproduce or continue living. We haven't stopped reproducing as a species. I can't imagine a future where humans decide to let ourselves die out just because we've built lots of amazing machines that take care of all of our needs.
> Only a few will survive, supported by technology that they no longer understand.
I think the human population might shrink to somewhere around 10-100 million over the next 10,000 years. It's hard to conceptualize, but humans were around 10,000 years ago, and we'll be around 10,000 years from now.
I personally believe that we're heading towards a utopian future, although there will be a lot of serious bumps along the way. Maybe we'll agree to maintain a population of 10 million humans on earth, and there will be many more living on interstellar arks that are slowly heading towards distant planets. We will have achieved immortality, so the birth rate will be very close to zero.
The problem might be that 10-100 million people isn't enough to maintain the level of technology or keep it in control. Now we have 7.7 billion people and we can barely keep important software secure. I think we are still way too dependent on a very few exceptional people.
Everything depends on whether the machines can fix and improve themselves, and do we want to give them that level of independence. If they're independent, I'm not sure if they would want to keep us alive.
I think we should aim for as many people as possible, but currently it seems a lost cause.
There's lots of things that are technology that are not all that complicated.
Like a shovel or whatever. If you assume an order of magnitude drop in population, there would be plenty of refined metals just sitting around to maintain quite a base of simpler technology.
I also wonder if we will see cultures/groups emerge that keep on reproducing at high growth even in the face of economic security.
Eventually to the negative? We aren't FORCED to create things. Even once the marginal cost is effectively zero, things still have a cost. Just make less of it.
The thesis seems to go something like this:
UBI eliminates the last bargaining chip the masses have - labor. Without workers, there can be no strikes. With everyone dependent on the UBI for livelihood, nobody could afford to oppose the system.
This is what the "plutocrats" are after. Masses without a lever to organize.
I don't necessarily agree with the thesis, it's just that the article really doesn't get to the point.
Surely it's automation that eliminates the bargaining chip, not UBI?
automation can't eliminate the bargaining chip if the populace have no means to purchase goods produced by automation. That's why it's actually UBI that makes a huge chunk of people a slave to the system
But if the rich people need people to have money to buy their goods, and you’re saying UBI would be this money, where is the UBI money coming from? Why couldn’t the rich people just get that money directly?
Why would the rich need the proles to buy anything, when their automated factories would make anything they want for them?
The thing is, the rich only have the threat of violence then to keep poorer masses in check. Though there are many kinds of violence, disease, starvation, homelessness.
The thing is, without the dictates of the rich, there will be places they would be unable or unwilling to reach. There, a socialism of even purer kind could start given enough automation. The problem would be hydraulic despotism. Resources like water, oil, metals would be hard to get.
Without an UBI they would be starving and start street protests.
Much like what happened during French revolution.
UBI removes that risk.
I'm in favour of an UBI, but one that's really universal (rich and poor get the same amount of money, forever) and one that goes together with a real public system including public universal healthcare, public schools, public infrastructures - roads, railroads - and trasnportation, similar to the ones we have in many European countries, but improved.
This is exactly what Yang is proposing. A UBI by definition gives everyone the same economic floor, even the billionaires.
He is also for universal healthcare. We already have public schools and roads, but perhaps I'm missing a larger point you are making here.
I wasn't making any particular point.
UBIs have to be universal (most proposals are not Universal, they are just Basic Incomes, Italy just created a fake one called "reddito di cittadinanza" literally translated as "citizen's income")
We may have public healthcare and schools, but most parts of the world, including the US, don't.
We also have universal public welfare, unemployment benefits, public housing, public transports, in Italy we also have mandatory car insurance, it means everybody has to pay for it, it also means that the prices are heavily regulated and must be affordable and - most of all - non discriminatory (you can't set a price based on personal data and background of the single client and there's an authority reviewing the methodology).
These are all things that in US don't exist or are seen as "socialist", hence bad.
If you add an UBI but don't fundamentally change the way the system works it won't make a difference, companies will just adjust the prices accordingly because more money will be in consumer's pockets (the market is always right! right?).
The only real point I can make is improving on the things that already work, just throwing money at problems won't solve problems.
> If you add an UBI but don't fundamentally change the way the system works it won't make a difference, companies will just adjust the prices accordingly because more money will be in consumer's pockets (the market is always right! right?).
If you assume prices work according to supply and demand, incorrect. The reason for this is that people also earn money from sources other than UBI.
To give an example, let's say I give every single person in the US, including children, $5. Will companies raise their prices accordingly? Maybe, but the difference in GDP is tiny. The difference in the purchasing power of the average 10 year old with no pocket money though, is vast, since they previously had $0 and now they have $5.
Similarly, UBI will probably result in price increases, but those will be less than the increase in purchasing power of those most in need of UBI.
> Will companies raise their prices accordingly?
I never said raise, but adjust.
Amazon will want those UBI money, they'll want you to spend money on their website instead of going to the dentist and we know they are good at it (too much if you ask me).
If the dentist is already paid by taxes, you could have both.
I've always wondered (at the furthest end of full-automation) what's to stop a collection of billionaires, equipped with their self-perpetuating, self-assembling, hermetic technological sphere, from deciding to turn the planet into their own personal Eden again by eliminating the 99.9% of humans that are no longer needed to keep civilization as was known before going? Offer a voice command and this self-functional tech (a dream at this point, admittedly, but a dream that many are actively pursuing) builds a fleet of drones and expert systems / AI work out the best strategy to achieve the end. People will say, oh the masses will rise up and eat the rich, but when the rich are in the their world war II-proof self-contained underground habitats with banks of genetic samples from every plant and animal formerly on Earth, there isn't going to be much worry about collateral damage; so chemical, genetic, germ warfare, all of it can be on the table. It might even be a video game, they could let their kids fly killer drones before dinner.
Not possible? Not technologically yet. But how many 'normal' people complain about there being 'too many people'? And if someone just has to talk to fancy Alexa on steroids to get whatever they want, why should they keep me around? Adulation? Holographics, gynoids, and there's and app for that.
It’d be pretty bad if omnicidal supervillains decided to kill everyone, yeah. It’d be especially bad if all the powerful people in the world simultaneously decided to become supervillains. But I mean... why would they?
Rich people (most which are smart) are smart enough to understand that this not how you would be able to create progress.
But would they understand why they need any progress?
And furthermore, rich are perfectly capable of science, I bequeathe to you a gentleman scientist archetype.
Yes, but you need a lot of people "doing science". You need a lot of people just to not forget what we already know.
I don't think there will ever be a point where the tech you're describing is suddenly available and the world is also just as overpopulated as it is today. I think our approach to the end state you describe will be much more gradual.
Our holy books still recommend that we be fruitful and multiply. We still have systems in place (like social security) that will fall apart unless we can maintain unbounded growth. Our society is riddled will all of these leftovers from a time when having more people actually was a good idea. Those memes aren't serving us anymore, and evolution will prune them with time. It probably won't be a comfortable time.
Cultural attitudes towards population aside, the nightmare scenario you describe is unfolding in tiny little pockets all around us. There's no need to nuke the poor people all at once when you can just let them starve one at a time. Nobody needs to make the single big hugely unethical decision of genocide, they just need to repeatedly make the small mildly unethical decision of apathy.
I'm hoping that we can make the former into a stronger effect than the latter, but I'm not optimistic.
I think a less extreme version of your scenario is a dark possibility in the future.
After the explosion of neo-racism and fascism and similar ideologies in recent years I found myself wondering what would happen if liberalism did in fact fall deeply out of fashion. We have panopticon mass surveillance, bioengineering, drones, and loads of other super-technologies that could allow genocide on an incredible scale with almost no realistic possibility of resistance. Some DIY guerilla group or gun nut militia would last minutes against a modern army that truly did not show restraint because their actual goal is extermination.
Now throw migrant crises created by climate change in there. Look at how a relatively small migrant crisis in Europe helped resurrect fascism across all of the West and imagine a migrant wave 10X larger.
I could definitely see some future gangster plutocracy deciding it's time to follow "race realism" and the cult of IQ to its logical conclusion.
Global warming might do the genocide for them. Large parts of the planet become uninhabitable. C
Comfortable conditions for living and food production are in synthetic environments only the rich can afford
We seem to be failing to cooperate at scale to phase out carbon intensive energy sources and curtail the problem. The next test will be whether we will cooperate at scale to adapt to the change or descend into war and genocide.
If a disastrous climate change scenario does unfold it could be true that large farming regions will be devastated, etc., but those people will not just sit and die. They will try to migrate. They may also engage in aggressive warfare themselves, "raiding" as we call it among our closest genetic relatives. Most deaths will be from war and genocide, not starvation.
If this coincides with a true abandonment of liberal humanistic attitudes in advanced nations I could definitely see the top ~10% of humanity dispatching the other 90% in an organized fashion. Any members of the elite who voiced opposition would join the condemned.
Smaller more isolated versions of that have happened before. Never before have humans had the power to scale it.
BTW I think that's why people are so spooked by the Nazi holocaust vs what Stalin and Mao and many others did. The Nazi body count was not the highest, but the chilling thing is how they applied modern industrial and management practices to deliberate murder at scale. I suspect it's so chilling because of it hints at dark possible future scenarios. Imagine Hitler and the SS with China's surveillance state and CRISPR-CAS9.
Of course those synthetic environments will be defended. There are LiDAR sensors that scan 1-2 kilometers now, those are already being installed at the boarders of middle eastern countries. Connect those to some turrets that can fire, you have automated defence that works in the dark, rain, and fog. I've seen this technology first hand, heck I even helped build it. How are they going to raid if they cannot even get close to the defence walls?
Advances in automated warfare will keep the rich safe and they wont have to get their hands dirty.
They'll own the communication infrastructure so if things get bad first will be absolute surveillance then they can just pull the plug on communications if the outsiders get too rowdy.
Self sustaining means you cant use scorched earth tactics. Internal power generation so no blackouts. Internal food production so no attrition warfare.
I am way off topic right now, but this is what chills me about some of the ideologies that I see people perpetuating online. Ultimately whether we get the future we are discussing or something much better will depend on ideas.
Be very careful what ideas you invest time and energy in perpetuating. Think through the consequences first. What would happen if this were actually believed by many people and by powerful people?
If the dominant idea is that the value of a human being is quantitatively measurable as their contribution to GDP or their IQ, we get a future like we are discussing. Racism is the same idea but with a much less sophisticated metric.
Thing is, you'd have to oppress in this situation. If you're just sat tight then the masses can go elsewhere and build their own utopia.
Im not sure that there's the stomach for active oppression throughout the whole of the ruling class.
Additionally, comms being what they are, cheap mesh networks can win through attrition so the masses can simply go off channel and avoid monitoring. From there the only way to find out what they're doing is through trust ie. Be (or pretend but then the entry bar gets raised) a good actor at which point the oppression stops.
The masses can go somewhere and build their own utopia?! This actually made me laugh out loud.
The masses are mostly average and below. They are the people living paycheck to paycheck, the working among them are on the verge of employment induced burnout, and almost all of them have no savings, and little / no access to capital. They are myopic and/or willfully blind. They have little to no situational awareness and don't solve problems until it's too late.
They are incapable, vision-less, disorganized and most importantly: resourceless - how are they going to just go and build a utopia?
The top 10% will get elysium and the 90% will get nothing.
> Im not sure that there's the stomach for active oppression throughout the whole of the ruling class.
Not personally but oppression is automated, thats the entire point. The rich live in their gated community bubble, and automation and security takes care of things at the boarders.
> Additionally, comms being what they are, cheap mesh networks can win through attrition so the masses can simply go off channel and avoid monitoring. From there the only way to find out what they're doing is through trust ie. Be (or pretend but then the entry bar gets raised) a good actor at which point the oppression stops
Mesh networks can be DoS'd easily if they become a problem. I know, I built and sold my first startup doing this.
Good points (and I'm glad I can make you laugh!) but i'll try to clarify: > The masses can go somewhere and build their own utopia?! This actually made me laugh out loud.
On a macro scale this is what colonization is, specifically that trait of going off to find some land to make your fortune. Historically this has worked well, excluding the bit where indigenous populations were wiped out. Realistically here we're talking about getting the leftovers resource-wise.
I'd be willing to bet that despite automation, not all the ruling class could rest on their conscience ie. the Elon Musks, Bill Gates etc. of this world would be dissenting, and in a position to act as visionaries (in fact they would likely be polarized by others' actions) to help build out alternative infrastructure. This solves the directionless+resourceless issues you've raised.
Mesh networks can be DoS'd but that'd require active oppression to shut down the mesh, and if that happens, we get two possibilities, either you get help from aforementioned visionaries (wired network build-out) or you run a separate mesh, and keep doing so every time it's brought down.
Cost is affordable with say esp32s and lipo (the attrition aspect I mentioned), bandwidth is a different matter but then we're talking about jamming rather than DoS.
> Global warming might do the genocide for them
100 companies are responsible for 71% of global emissions.
Climate change, soil depletion, water crisis, unaffordable food are not "just happening".
The ongoing genocide is caused by wealth inequality.
Does if have to be that complicated just put up a giant border wall and ignore climate change. Millions die of climate disasters and you can claim moral ambivalence.
I'm not worried. There are enough nukes to solve any such situation. Get to the point where someone is actively purging percentages of humanity with no end in sight? Launch a few dozen ICBMs and turn their little pool party into an irradiated piece of shit. And if they survived the ICBM volley? Enjoy your cancer, assholes!
But what if the ones doing the killing own all the nukes?
Do you really think US/UK/Russia/France/Israel are all going to collectively give up control of their nuclear weapons to a single entity? Nuclear weapons are the ultimate equalizer. Your nation state can be 10000x less powerful, but still capable of threatening a superior civilization with total destruction of their population.
all those governments are decidedly on the side of "The powerful"
Abstractly, yes. But in a non-unified manner.
Getting the legislative votes to enact UBI is one thing. But my fear is that politicians would just think that after that, their task is done. In fact, it has hardly begun. The state would need to offer the masses of perpetually un- or underemployed people activities, things to do with their lives. This would be a hard sell in the USA especially, where historically there has been relatively little state support of community infrastructure, but the private institutions like churches and clubs that used to provide that infrastructure have now collapsed.
The Nordic countries have experienced this problem firsthand, where in spite of a safety net and generous funding of arts, culture, and leisure in areas suffering from high unemployment, a substantial number of people still prefer to drink their lives away or hang out on internet fora to complain about how they feel no purpose in their lives.
I don’t know what things are like in Nordic countries but I feel there’s tons of things that need to be done in the USA. Perhaps things like time banking for giving credit for all the tasks a community needs would be nice? https://www.yang2020.com/policies/modern-time-banking/
Not only is that an enlightened policy, I love the way it's presented. If all candidates were forced to clearly define their policies in that form, in writing, instead of the current spoken debate theatre we use, perhaps we could get out of this negative feedback loop we're in.
The alternative to UBI + all jobs automated away is just all jobs automated away. I don't see how UBI is the problem here.
It's how people will morally justify the situation saying it's "good enough". Even though their quality of life could be much better. The alternative is no UBI which creates more glaring problems if people can't meed their physical needs and a less complacent population.
> It's how people will morally justify the situation saying it's "good enough"
This is a logical fallacy. It can be claimed that any human right can make the population complacent: 5 days work week, public healthcare and so on and there is no evidence to prove it's true.
On the contrary, it's well known that people with free time can become socially and politically engaged, while people working 2 jobs have no time for it.
So once the problems are more glaring, what remedy will you suggest? Cancel automation?
But in an automation-heavy future how could it be better without some combination of revolution and full-blown socialism?
Article says:
> They can’t organize labor strikes if they have no labor.
The idea of UBI isn’t to make it so that the masses never work again. The idea is so they don’t starve and die when between jobs. It’s to give people a real chance to live their lives while training or retooling. Money gives people choices and options. Today’s lack of choices for people at the lowest levels of income amounts to slavery.
Low income people can and will still work under a UBI system. So I’m not sure the article’s central thesis makes sense.
If anything, it seems like UBI would empower union workers with their strikes because they have something to fall back on while negotiating for better terms.
There’s more than one model for UBI. I’m hoping for automation and UBI payouts to increase hand-in-hand: ultimately I’m expecting automation to make all human labour[1] uneconomical, and if that happens UBI will need to be enough to live on — but starting UBI at such a high level might prevent the economic development that is necessary to reach that level of automation.
[1] with the sole exception of “celebrity”, a role that can’t scale
Yeah, it's not like 12k a year is enough to live on. People on UBI will still need jobs.
A lot of time people talking about 'basic income' intend the 'basic' to indicate it would be sufficient to cover needs.
12k in the US is not so bad for costs other than healthcare (lots of families of 3 are living on $35,000).
> 12k in the US is not so bad for costs other than healthcare (lots of families of 3 are living on $35,000).
Lots may be doing it, but you'd be living in poverty your whole life. There's no way a family of 3 could get by on 35k a year without accumulating debt.
12k hardly covers just your rent in many places in the US
> 12k in the US is not so bad for costs other than healthcare (lots of families of 3 are living on $35,000).
Expenses do not scale down linearly with household size.
Yes, people depending solely on a $12k basic income might have to, uh, do something like live with other people.
Turns out that has a real impact on expenses even when they aren't family.
Yes, living with other low-income, unable-to-afford-to-survive-independently can drive up your expenses considerably.
I come from Europe, so I might be biased, but we have unemployment benefits and training is often covered by contracts, most of the time it is mandatory, for example at my current job I had to take mandatory courses (mandatory means you can get penalties for not completing them) on GDPR and privacy policies and two full courses on Coursera chosen by me, but paid and approved by the company, in order to get access to the yearly bonus.
I don't really understand the argument here, and the writer didn't look into the rest of Yang's platform that addresses the plutocracy part of this equation.
Is our current system captured by the wealthy and special interests? Absolutely, and his Democracy Dollars and Ranked Choice Voting policies directly address those, and as a supporter I'm more excited about those two positions then the UBI as I think it is even more of a structural change.
I highly recommend his talk with Lawrence Lessig, who has been fighting the good fight against corruption for years.
https://youtu.be/kjiHwx6bpkg
No matter how many regulations lawmakers come up with, powerful interests will always find some ways to get their money into politics.
On the other hand, washing out lobbyist money with people's Democracy Dollars could be a game changer. And since the politicians benefit from this arrangement too, it has a decent chance of getting their support. I imagine it'd be hard for the lobbyists to lobby against this one.
Also check out represent.us!
Yes! I'm a volunteer with them as well, great non partisan organization trying to get some simple but absolutely transformative changes done in how our Democracy functions.
I’m not sure I understand the argument. A mass of angry people who have their basic needs met seems a good force for confronting exploitation. The Yang campaign specifically is the one very vocally calling out for capturing the fruits of automation to share.
The argument here is terrible. Basically, billionaires want UBI, therefore it must be bad for us. Sorry, but you have to do better than that.
You need to actually argue against the principles not just assume bad faith of those supporting it.
The author does argue the principles. Power balance between the elites and everyone else has always kept things from getting too bad. Historically there has been violent revolution; more recently developed societies have empowered people through capitalism (despite its many flaws, it serves this crucial purpose). So labor movements have replaced violence in many cases. As the author says, economic contribution is the only real leverage regular people have. Without that we'd be reliant on the continued goodwill of the ultra-powerful. How has that played out historically?
This article reads more like a paranoid manifesto. Immortal billionaires controlling a society that cannot revolt? Like vampires or something?
A UBI seems like it should be more like a social assistance program where the people receiving it get to decide how to allocate the funds instead of a bureaucratic institution.
Sites down for me, but I’m more of the feeling UBI + automation = utopia.
I guess maybe utopia + plutocracy = dystopia?
Centralization of power and lack of independence is never going to be a utopia for long.
Yes centralization of power is an issue, and our current system rewards corruption and listening to special interests.
Democracy Dollars and some of Yangs other policies directly address this.
His whole platform is about giving people more individual freedom and power.
When automation is something feared by such a large fraction population you are already living in the dystopia.
An alternative idea to UBI that achieves many of the same ends is to remove all taxes other than a wealth tax. A wealth tax actually would greatly augment UBI.
How do those two accomplish the same ends? UBI gives money, a tax takes money.
Even if the wealth tax could go negative at low income levels, it doesn't seem obvious that this would _augment_ UBI.
It wouldn't help those who don't make enough to pay taxes as well as the homeless, students, stay-at-home parents, disabled, retired, caretakers, etc.
Vi Hart[1] wrote a very detailed essay about UBI + AI (automation) leading to "dystopia".
"Changing my Mind about AI, Universal Basic Income, and the Value of Data"
https://theartofresearch.org/ai-ubi-and-data/
[1] creator of "Doodling in math class", "Pi Is (still) Wrong", and other fun math videos
Mirror: https://web.archive.org/web/20190908093705/https://caitlinjo...
Stopping UBI won't stop automation, and you will still have to deal with the potentially massive rise of unemployment that could be caused by automation. You still will have dystopia with just automation and plutocracy, but somehow you will need to solve the implied unemployment, or the dystopia will be far worse.
I think really plutocracy + anything is dystopia. There’s just no way a small group of wealthy elites can organize society to pursue their (the plutocrats’) interests without devolving to dystopia.
Some of the best things about society are that plutocrats can be brought to justice and market forces can bring financial empires down. These are extremely critical sorts of checks & balances on plutocracy, and we need to entrench them more and more, to make it harder and harder for plutocrats to hide from legal or financial consequences.
We’re going to have to stop using up energy driving to jobs the world doesn’t need to produce crap you have to propagandize people into believing they want so they’ll spend money on it and then throw it in the landfill. That’s obviously an insane way for an increasingly technologically advanced species to continue to function, and one way or another we are going to have to start doing a lot more nothing quite soon.
And we won't stop, because people would rather kill each other over their creature comforts than come to the realization that all people are inherently equal and we need to share a limited pool of resources.
There is no solution and this will all end in tears.
UBI is a good idea in principle but a gateway to dystopia in practice. UBI and similar systems are an easily abused vector to create a new slave class.
Relevant reading: Manna: Two Visions of Humanity's Future
> UBI is a good idea in principle but a gateway to dystopia in practice.
seems like a strong claim about something that hasn't actually been tried at scale afaik.
Can you detail how giving stipend resources to everyone leads to a new slave class? Slavery is forced labor.
I can see what their though process is.
1. All resources are distributed for labor in an open market. 2. All resources are held, some are distributed for labor in an open market, some are distributed for UBI. 3. All resources are held, there is little to no open market left, the rest is distributed via UBI. 4. UBI now require certain conditions to be claimed, such as participation in various labor programs, or, perhaps, whatever program you are assigned to. The open market has collapsed or is too small to offer a meaningful alternative to, effectively, economically enforced labor.
Think of an economy like in Player Piano: only the engineers have jobs. The rest 'work' for their pay, but have no agency.
"UBI now require certain conditions to be claimed"
No it does not. That the idea of universal basic income. Everyone gets it.
Sorry, I wasn't clear. Each stage is an evolution of policy. Once people rely on UBI and don't have easily accessible alternative options, those who control UBI can corrupt it to control those who depend on it.
We have seen this happen, generally with good intentions, in Federal funding for roads and such.
I'm not saying this course of events is inevitable, only that it is very possible to imagine. Particularly now, as many of our enshrined institutions are being corroded.
UBS is a better alternative to UBI.
I wrote a pretty lengthy article about this & the evolution of wealth: http://free.eco .
The question is do you believe the government is better at providing services than a competitive marketplace?
Government: UBS
Marketplace: UBI
The question is wrong. UBS does not imply services are provided by the government.
I read through your article and I found it to be silly and naive. I would highly recommend actually reading someone like marx or even von mises.
Here are some specific silly parts:
"This means we can predict that a universal basic income will just self-adjust to treat $1K/ month as the new $0."
"At present in the United States, there are more empty homes than homeless people on the street. The flaw with the current economic model is that if these homes were given out, that would incentivize people to become homeless in order to get free housing, and a free house is a loss in profit."
What is UBS?
Universal basic services
tldr; universal basic services ..as always the devil is in the details. How good will the free food and shelter be? Better than nothing for those that decide not to do anything i guess
The plutocracy, though...that’s the actual problem.
The one thing that's necessary above all else is a strong Estate Tax regime that battles all the sneaky ways to avoid the taxman.
Dynastic wealth is what creates civilizational rot. A mobile populace with fluctuating power centers spells dynamism.
Let us think of all the poor children born to rich families who would not get the chance to tell the story of their self-made wealth.
Plutocracy = Dystopia; the rest of the equation is noise.
Bernie, like Socialism, never wins. Get to work. Make something.
We don't need UBI, because automation will naturally decrease prices, eventually to the negative. That means there will be more stuff than anyone can consume, thus it's less expensive to give it away than to store or demolish it.
I think this will lead to the end of the human race. We are becoming useless, and have already stopped reproducing. Only a few will survive, supported by technology that they no longer understand. When it fails, the remaining people will die, or start everything again without any technology.
A species doesn't really need to be "useful" in order to survive. It just needs to reproduce or continue living. We haven't stopped reproducing as a species. I can't imagine a future where humans decide to let ourselves die out just because we've built lots of amazing machines that take care of all of our needs.
> Only a few will survive, supported by technology that they no longer understand.
I think the human population might shrink to somewhere around 10-100 million over the next 10,000 years. It's hard to conceptualize, but humans were around 10,000 years ago, and we'll be around 10,000 years from now.
I personally believe that we're heading towards a utopian future, although there will be a lot of serious bumps along the way. Maybe we'll agree to maintain a population of 10 million humans on earth, and there will be many more living on interstellar arks that are slowly heading towards distant planets. We will have achieved immortality, so the birth rate will be very close to zero.
The problem might be that 10-100 million people isn't enough to maintain the level of technology or keep it in control. Now we have 7.7 billion people and we can barely keep important software secure. I think we are still way too dependent on a very few exceptional people.
Everything depends on whether the machines can fix and improve themselves, and do we want to give them that level of independence. If they're independent, I'm not sure if they would want to keep us alive.
I think we should aim for as many people as possible, but currently it seems a lost cause.
There's lots of things that are technology that are not all that complicated.
Like a shovel or whatever. If you assume an order of magnitude drop in population, there would be plenty of refined metals just sitting around to maintain quite a base of simpler technology.
I also wonder if we will see cultures/groups emerge that keep on reproducing at high growth even in the face of economic security.
> That means there will be more stuff than anyone can consume, thus it's less expensive to give it away than to store or demolish it.
You could also, you know, stop producing stuff at that point?
Eventually to the negative? We aren't FORCED to create things. Even once the marginal cost is effectively zero, things still have a cost. Just make less of it.
wall-e