How Universal Basic Income Will Save Us From the Robot Uprising

You know hat? I've come to realize that what this really is is just Socialism under a tricky language.

like how torture becomes advanced interrogation techniques.

That sort of thing.

 

Hayek, Friedman, and founding father Thomas Paine aren't exactly socialists. This is using the wealth distributed through the free market to set a minimum standard of living, while A. taking the state middleman out of the equation, and B. removing the welfare trap scenario

 

This is just communism wrapped up with a pretty bow. In all such schemes the pretty bow is quickly replaced by the barrel of a gun. It's been tried and failed miserably every time. Time to get a job kiddies.

 

you know the people who invented the idea weren't communists, right?

the book where Milton Friedman recommended his negative income tax system was Capitalism and Freedom. The man knew is stuff too, he won the nobel prize in economics, as did Friedrich Hayek, Maurice Allais, and James Tobin

None of them were communists or socialists, all of them supported the basic income guarantee, all of them won the nobel prize in economics.

 

Sounds like it is all pie in the sky fantasy without any details on how it would work. You are talking on a global scale.....that would be quite an undertaking. I am afraid we will see economic collapse and chaos before anything like this would be implemented. Sorry to burst your bubble but I am a realist.

 

There has to be some system in place to relieve the poverty that capitalism causes.

We already have the “barrel of a gun” scenario in play with capitalism … it is how land became private property. Nature provided the land for free and it is every individuals natural right to use the earth to gain sustenance … but capitalism removes that natural right, makes land into the private property of parasites/dictators, and creates a class of individuals who have no legal right to exist on the earth … all at the “barrel of a gun”.

Same for capitalism. Pure capitalism does not exist anywhere on earth. Capitalism causes extreme poverty and that makes it unstable. There are countries with purer forms of capitalism than practiced in the U.S., and they poverty infested hell-holes.

That is what I keep saying about the privileged rich … they should get a productive job.

I would be willing to make a compromise though. If you would be willing to abolish all legal privilege from the system (land titles, patent and copyright law, corporate charters, banking charters, taxi-medallions, subsidies, occupational licenses, etc.) , then I would be willing to abolish all government welfare systems … can we agree on that?

 

Could they just not care? I find myself not caring if people want to spend their basic income on weed. Or alcohol or sugar or whatever. Guns. Hats. Whatever. Why would anyone care?

 

I tend to agree. I'm not really against the robot uprising, though there are some parts that I think we should all read the fine print on before we sign. I just want the humans to survive it.

 

There's no way to screw over workers so badly that they remain the cost-effective option in many jobs. A plan that deals with inevitable high unemployment while managing to avoid human suffering is needed. The robots are happening whether we like it or not -- technology isn't going to stop advancing, machines will keep getting better. This unemployment of humans is going to happen whether we like it or not. It doesn't have to turn everybody into desperate cannibal slaves.

 

But what if there simply are no jobs? Hypothetically.

 

So let's say, hypothetically, that the only task left for human beings to do is getting modern art. And you can't do it, at least not well enough to compete in the very tiny job market. How do we keep you from starving? Is the current welfare system the way to avoid it? Do you embrace desperate cannibal starvation? Do you find the people that dominate the job market of modern art interpretation and prostrate yourself before them, offering your service in exchange for their support?

 

Basic income for a basic job. Sorry you don't get to sit at home collecting money and not work your whole life. Yeah I know it's already happening. But then I don't agree with any able bodied person being given a dime without working for it. There is ALWAYS work that the city would need done local to wherever you live. No excuses.

 

By the time that happense we will already be massed in large camps awaiting harvesting of our skin and organs for their cybernetic organisms.

 

Sooner or later somebody is going to have to recognize that there isn't enough work out there for everybody and the robots are only going to continue making matters worse. I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for politicians to do the recognizing. They ALL have too much riding on the welfare/no welfare song and dance.

 

Personally I would prefer that the State grants a basic credit to citizens. With that credit a worker who loses his job because of the introduction of a robot in the firm where he worked ... could decide to buy shares of that society [so that he will have back in percentage a part of the profit generated by the businessman firing him and others].

The basic credit works better since it's [clear] financed by the public debt, but it will be given back [may be with zero interest] to the state by the citizen.

Someone could say that a basic credit could damage the market of banking and financing, but which bank would loan money to a person without jobs and perspectives?

Only the state could risk to lose money loaning it to a jobless individual.

 

Makes as much sense to me as universal sickness or universal prison time. You know, we can add up all the sentences and divvy it up amongst the non imprisoned population. Heck we could even get the government to give everyone more time if the tally came up short. And what about universal retirement? Why think, learn, or prepare for anything? We could have sleeper hippies and worker hippies. And we could all hop like socialistic toads rather than put one foot in front of another like free men. sheesh!

 

I think we're in a pretty bad place when folks feel entitled to a guaranteed paycheck.





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Because after they're done spending it, they'll turn to you and say "I need to eat, are you going to let me starve?"




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Put robots to do the dirty and boring jobs. Let humans be the creative force. Btw it' s not necessary for humans to disappear in favor of robots. Once technology is good enough we can have our basic needs satisfied without moving a finger ( automatic mechanized agricolture and infrastructures ). This provided that corporations won't become excessively greedy and start thinking about wiping out the world's population through reproduction restriction laws and leave only a small elite to rule over all the resources.

 

ONLY if it also accompanies a waiver of many rights, especially voting rights, a legal acknowledgement of being a ward of the state and unable to participate in investments or many other business dealings. Preferably if also accompanied with a mandatory move to "reservation" areas to cut down the expense.

Other than that, it's a terrible idea, immoral, soul-stealing, unjust to self-reliant people.

 

Let me interrupt your Happy Time with just a touch of reality. The underlying assumption of this whole thread is that you have more people than jobs. It's much more likely that you will loose a people before you loose all of those jobs.

With growing populations combined with observable climate change, you are setting up for a population collapse. Roughly 80% of the world's population lives within 100 miles of the oceans and that alone will cause one hell of a population migration. You are already having drought and famine something that is projected to become more common. The current Ebola outbreak should demonstrate what an infectious plague is capable of especially if you consider that Ebola isn't particularly contagious. You are precisely one large EMP blast away from a return to the Dark Ages. Your fisheries are 92% used up just since WWII. Even the mighty Amazon is in the news this week needing active intervention and replanting to survive, yet deforestation continues at an ever faster pace.

If half of the people in the world were to die today, you still would have what is likely an unsustainable world population. Robots take over the world? They might be the only ones left.

 

This idea was discussed on this forum in another thread recently, and when you boil it right down, the reason it won't work is because one of the purposes is to replace the current social welfare system and it can't do that. The people on the bottom are worse off under this system than the current one. The cash benefit of someone on Medicaid, SNAP, WIC, TANF, and various public housing and housing vouchers far exceeds the amount usually being described as the amount for a universal income guarantee, around $10,000 a year. So it's great if you are a hipster slacker working part time as a barista, but it's horrible if are a single mother with children and no job skills.

 

It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once.
—David Hume

This is the ultimate in collectivism and statism, this notion of The State even providing for your every need. I don't think it would be possible to get any farther away from the union of free states with *ahem* liberty for all that this country was founded to be. You are not free when government cares and provides for you, just as a child is not free when cared for by a parent or some other dependent person is in the care of a home.

There is one cardinal sin for government, and that's reducing it rather than expanding it, yet that would be the right thing to do. Do away with welfare handouts, yes, but don't try to replace them with some other tax & redistribution scheme. Just get the State, the government, out of our pockets. People can rely on charities, religious or secular, in times of need. It helps that churches are tax-exempt - they can thus afford to take and use donations to help people. That is how it works and ought to work.

Down with Utopia! It has no place in the real world.

 

I could get behind a system ala Paine's Agrarian Justice but many modern Georgist proponents force me to reconsider. They nearly always betray their true intentions when they rail against capitalism in general.

So, I leave that particular philosophy up on the shelf, to maybe be dusted off one day when the idea isn't hijacked by people with ulterior motives.

 

I'm not seeing the connection. I mean, I think I see how you see the connection. But I don't think it's actually there.

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Because there's stuff that needs to be done?

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Welfare is good for the economy. That's money that gets spent rather than being hoarded.

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Nothing. I want to skip to the end of The Matrix and have peace between man and machine.

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Which would be different than now ... how, exactly?