It does because UBI presumes there’s just no work for people to do, while what I’m saying is that we shouldn’t abolish work entirely—because of what you say, the lack of power (and thus leverage). Instead we should distribute as much as possible the work of governance and decision-making, the only work that would be left and needs to be definitely in human hands, because automating it doesn’t relieve us of toil, but it pretty much makes us just spectators to our own history.
There are multiple arguments for UBI, only one of which is that there will be a reduction in paid work. There is certainly no requirement to abolish work.
It tends to be the end point of most visions of AGI. At some point, there’s just nothing left for humans to do. But also, if there was a large class (say, even just 50%) of citizens who simply don’t do any work and have no real leverage or economic contribution, I think they would quickly end up disenfranchised, UBI or not.
I wrote a whole post on why I think so but the short version is: because they have nothing to offer, and nothing they can threaten anyone else with. They’re literally not necessary any more. The people who do hold the money and power might keep them around at their whim—though the mindset that such people would be “parasites” is scarily common and IMO would not go away just because of the absurdity of holding it in a society in which 50% of jobs are automated—but they might also leave them to their own devices, and the drift in that direction would be irreversible. That said, society might be changed even more radically by AI before the process reaches the point of those people being left to die or similarly awful fate. If for some reason you had AGI and then froze the development there, though, that’s roughly the outcome I would eventually expect.
because they have nothing to offer, and nothing they can threaten anyone else with.
That’s true of quite a lot of people already, but we are not turning them into soylent..because our societies are based on human rights and civil rights and universal suffrage.
We may not be turning them into soylent, but the true completely powerless—the homeless, the unemployed, the disabled, the clandestine immigrants—tend to have it really bad. And the pressure tends to be on to clamp on their condition even further at the first sign of hardship or scarcity, or dump the blame on them for various problems as “burdens”. Even if just that was the fate in store for the non-working masses, it’s hardly utopia. But also, I think a society in which, say 95% of all people are fundamentally at least that disposable is a lot more unstable. Human and civil rights weren’t born out of nowhere, but out of negotiation and struggle, often backed by threats (not necessarily of violence, but at least of civil disobedience). That windfall ends up benefitting even people who would not be able to exert that same degree of leverage personally.
I’m not saying that every rich person is just waiting to have an army of personal robots to order them to slaughter the poor. I’m saying however that the only thing that would stop them from doing that would be if they don’t feel like it, and that is a very flimsy basis for a society, and not one I’d expect to survive two or three generations (though again, those would be really long timescales for that sort of world anyway).
If you ask me how I think that would look like, I’d guess something similar to what happened to Native Americans. A mix of “why should we give you more, be grateful for what little we pass onto you, it’s not like you do anything to deserve it” while progressively encroaching on spaces and living resources at any time when it’s necessary, followed by progressively more brutal repression of any hopeless attempt at rebellion (because, hey, it’s their fault: they started using violence, so we’re justified).
We may not be turning them into soylent, but the true completely powerless—the homeless, the unemployed, the disabled, the clandestine immigrants—tend to have it really bad.
In the US specifically?
But also, I think a society in which, say 95% of all people are fundamentally at least that disposable
Are you sure? Capitalists need customers.
You seem to be envisioning a situation where elites only care about living in luxury...but capitalists play the game of making the most money.
Money is just an intermediate step. Money is needed to access capital and labour. Why would you need the money to go through the hands of people who don’t do any work if you own both capital and labour, or can trade directly with the others who do?
Are you actually visualizing the world that we’re talking about here, or are you just generalizing what we know now about economics to a context that’s wildly out of domain?
Right now, capital alone is dead without labour put in. This means labour is valuable; and the only way to mass purchase labour is to pay people. Labour is the only resource that scales precisely with the number of people, and you can’t just make more of it on demand. Because labour is valuable, and virtually every person on this planet has an equal-ish share of it to rent out, everyone who wants to produce goods must pay for labour. This means that workers have some resources (note btw that looking for example at past systems like slavery does not change the situation: slavery is inefficient and expensive, especially for complex cognitive labour, and doesn’t overcome the scarcity issues, so even economically speaking and discarding all morals, it’s a dead end for an industrialised society). Since workers want to spend those resources to stay alive, and also, having as much people as possible is good because it means more labour with which to produce more, then the best thing to do is to sell them goods. Capital enhances the productivity of workers, allowing them to make a lot more stuff than they would alone; in exchange they get some of that stuff (via salaries that allows them to buy the product of other workers’ efforts), and the rest goes to those who own the capital.
AGI + robotics is capital that needs no labour. With AGI, you get all the benefits of ideal slavery without any of the downsides. You can command AGI to just make more AGI, it will grow easily way past the limits of a human supply of labour and much faster. It doesn’t just make labour a lot cheaper, pricing human labour out entirely; it changes the ownership distribution of labour. Right now, every human owns exactly one human’s worth of labour, with some allowance for variable individual capability. With AGI, if you own a server farm and enough robots, you can own thousands, millions of humans’ worth of labour. Not rent it out: own it. It’s yours, and it maintains itself. It’s also much cheaper than what you could rent. Now dedicating resources to maintaining human labourers becomes a drain on something that could just be used to make more AGI, or more products for you to use. Don’t auto-farm to feed billions, auto-farm to feed thousands (you and your fellow AGI-capitalists), and exchange the food with them for whatever extravagant products their robotic factories make, and save all the other labour to do more fun stuff. The other humans have nothing to offer you; they used to have a nigh-monopoly on labour by sheer dint of numbers, but that’s not the case any more. The economy would be completely upended, and this would inevitably also reflect on social and moral norms, in time.
Capitalists need labour to make things to sell things to make money. Labour needs money for practical things like clothes and shelter. Top tier capitalists are way beyond that: they use money to score their status games. How do they do that if they can’t sell anything.
It does because UBI presumes there’s just no work for people to do, while what I’m saying is that we shouldn’t abolish work entirely—because of what you say, the lack of power (and thus leverage). Instead we should distribute as much as possible the work of governance and decision-making, the only work that would be left and needs to be definitely in human hands, because automating it doesn’t relieve us of toil, but it pretty much makes us just spectators to our own history.
There are multiple arguments for UBI, only one of which is that there will be a reduction in paid work. There is certainly no requirement to abolish work.
It tends to be the end point of most visions of AGI. At some point, there’s just nothing left for humans to do. But also, if there was a large class (say, even just 50%) of citizens who simply don’t do any work and have no real leverage or economic contribution, I think they would quickly end up disenfranchised, UBI or not.
Disenfranchised as in literally losing the vote? Why?
I wrote a whole post on why I think so but the short version is: because they have nothing to offer, and nothing they can threaten anyone else with. They’re literally not necessary any more. The people who do hold the money and power might keep them around at their whim—though the mindset that such people would be “parasites” is scarily common and IMO would not go away just because of the absurdity of holding it in a society in which 50% of jobs are automated—but they might also leave them to their own devices, and the drift in that direction would be irreversible. That said, society might be changed even more radically by AI before the process reaches the point of those people being left to die or similarly awful fate. If for some reason you had AGI and then froze the development there, though, that’s roughly the outcome I would eventually expect.
That’s true of quite a lot of people already, but we are not turning them into soylent..because our societies are based on human rights and civil rights and universal suffrage.
We may not be turning them into soylent, but the true completely powerless—the homeless, the unemployed, the disabled, the clandestine immigrants—tend to have it really bad. And the pressure tends to be on to clamp on their condition even further at the first sign of hardship or scarcity, or dump the blame on them for various problems as “burdens”. Even if just that was the fate in store for the non-working masses, it’s hardly utopia. But also, I think a society in which, say 95% of all people are fundamentally at least that disposable is a lot more unstable. Human and civil rights weren’t born out of nowhere, but out of negotiation and struggle, often backed by threats (not necessarily of violence, but at least of civil disobedience). That windfall ends up benefitting even people who would not be able to exert that same degree of leverage personally.
I’m not saying that every rich person is just waiting to have an army of personal robots to order them to slaughter the poor. I’m saying however that the only thing that would stop them from doing that would be if they don’t feel like it, and that is a very flimsy basis for a society, and not one I’d expect to survive two or three generations (though again, those would be really long timescales for that sort of world anyway).
If you ask me how I think that would look like, I’d guess something similar to what happened to Native Americans. A mix of “why should we give you more, be grateful for what little we pass onto you, it’s not like you do anything to deserve it” while progressively encroaching on spaces and living resources at any time when it’s necessary, followed by progressively more brutal repression of any hopeless attempt at rebellion (because, hey, it’s their fault: they started using violence, so we’re justified).
In the US specifically?
Are you sure? Capitalists need customers.
You seem to be envisioning a situation where elites only care about living in luxury...but capitalists play the game of making the most money.
Not in a society with fully automated pipelines entirely free of human labour, they don’t. That’s the problem.
How do they make money?
“They don’t need any more money”
“Bezos, Musk and Buffet don’t need any more money, but they keep on making it”.
Money is just an intermediate step. Money is needed to access capital and labour. Why would you need the money to go through the hands of people who don’t do any work if you own both capital and labour, or can trade directly with the others who do?
If you are not selling stuff to other people in some sense, you are not going to pull ahead of other billionaires.
Are you actually visualizing the world that we’re talking about here, or are you just generalizing what we know now about economics to a context that’s wildly out of domain?
Right now, capital alone is dead without labour put in. This means labour is valuable; and the only way to mass purchase labour is to pay people. Labour is the only resource that scales precisely with the number of people, and you can’t just make more of it on demand. Because labour is valuable, and virtually every person on this planet has an equal-ish share of it to rent out, everyone who wants to produce goods must pay for labour. This means that workers have some resources (note btw that looking for example at past systems like slavery does not change the situation: slavery is inefficient and expensive, especially for complex cognitive labour, and doesn’t overcome the scarcity issues, so even economically speaking and discarding all morals, it’s a dead end for an industrialised society). Since workers want to spend those resources to stay alive, and also, having as much people as possible is good because it means more labour with which to produce more, then the best thing to do is to sell them goods. Capital enhances the productivity of workers, allowing them to make a lot more stuff than they would alone; in exchange they get some of that stuff (via salaries that allows them to buy the product of other workers’ efforts), and the rest goes to those who own the capital.
AGI + robotics is capital that needs no labour. With AGI, you get all the benefits of ideal slavery without any of the downsides. You can command AGI to just make more AGI, it will grow easily way past the limits of a human supply of labour and much faster. It doesn’t just make labour a lot cheaper, pricing human labour out entirely; it changes the ownership distribution of labour. Right now, every human owns exactly one human’s worth of labour, with some allowance for variable individual capability. With AGI, if you own a server farm and enough robots, you can own thousands, millions of humans’ worth of labour. Not rent it out: own it. It’s yours, and it maintains itself. It’s also much cheaper than what you could rent. Now dedicating resources to maintaining human labourers becomes a drain on something that could just be used to make more AGI, or more products for you to use. Don’t auto-farm to feed billions, auto-farm to feed thousands (you and your fellow AGI-capitalists), and exchange the food with them for whatever extravagant products their robotic factories make, and save all the other labour to do more fun stuff. The other humans have nothing to offer you; they used to have a nigh-monopoly on labour by sheer dint of numbers, but that’s not the case any more. The economy would be completely upended, and this would inevitably also reflect on social and moral norms, in time.
Capitalists need labour to make things to sell things to make money. Labour needs money for practical things like clothes and shelter. Top tier capitalists are way beyond that: they use money to score their status games. How do they do that if they can’t sell anything.