One of the biggest problems in a world with UBI- the complete lack of power of the average person.
One worst things about the abuses of people in welfare by those in power (intentional abuse or not) is the utter disparity in power.
And the deep psychological effects of that.
Having been in such a position at one point, I felt humiliated, ashamed and really worthless.
This is not how all people felt or do feel, but by and large, it is not good.
I think a much better alternative to UBI- but one that might be even harder to do- would be to work to make everyone self sufficient.
E.g. if AI was used to design highly efficient, easily repairable solar panels and solar energy storage.
Mini factories that everyone could own that can make parts from raw material.
Greater ability to protect your own assets and purchase the things you need (through a combination of needing less things and things being cheaper) meaning not needing to rely on banks.
Laws/policies to prevent Buy to Let schemes and the ability to launder money/evade taxes through properties, to lower housing prices.
Laws/policies to close tax loopholes.
I think in a proper ‘utopia’ UBI would be completely unnecessary. And I don’t think UBI helps us get there- rather it does the opposite, by distracting from doing things like the above and giving an opposing argument to doing them (e.g.”Houses are expensive for loads of good reasons!! We should do UBI instead!!”)
If the powerlessness of those relying on UBi comes from those dispensing UBI being able to withdraw it, then the solution is a robust set of rights … and rights are also a necessary component of any alternative solution, like self sufficiency.
I think with lots of AIs the work everyone should best do is keeping the AIs aimed at their goals. Direct them, orient them, keep them in line with our overall interests. Everyone a foreman for a few instances of AIs doing something. Doubles as a possible alignment solution: give as little agency as possible to the AIs, delegate the decisions to the human overseers. Humans’ contribution to the economy will be “their values”.
There are already people trying to make an AI that destroys humanity “for the lols”.
Many people will try to use AI against each other. As they are now. E.g. militaries, scammers, revenge porn makers, etc.
Sure, but in general, given enough adequate tools, most people contribute to keeping those things in check. This doesn’t hold if AIs turn out to be “glass cannons”—tremendously powerful attackers, but poor at setting up defences against other AIs—but in that case, well, there’s pretty much no way out.
Full self-sufficiency would require everyone to have a whole productive chain at their fingertips, it just doesn’t seem realistic as something to be achieved before AIs are already incredibly advanced, and there’s a lot of danger from here to there. Besides, not sure it’d be realistic with Earth resources either (nor that everyone would want it; but I guess small self-sufficient tribe-sized communities might actually work a lot better for many people). The worries now concern much more realistic, close at hand scenarios.
“Sure, but in general, given enough adequate tools, most people contribute to keeping those things in check. ”
What are you basing this on?
And the issue is if the contributions will be enough. And not even making and providing adequate tools, but trying to figure out what tools will be adequate in the first place and then after that, getting people to actually use those tools.
Still don’t see what this has to do with UBI.
Society not just spontaneously collapsing under the pressure of the few antisocial types trying to destroy it?
And the issue is if the contributions will be enough. And not even making and providing adequate tools, but trying to figure out what tools will be adequate in the first place and then after that, getting people to actually use those tools.
True, that’s all part of the difficulty of this whole endeavour. I explained why I think this is relevant to UBI in the response to your other comment.
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.
One of the biggest problems in a world with UBI- the complete lack of power of the average person.
One worst things about the abuses of people in welfare by those in power (intentional abuse or not) is the utter disparity in power. And the deep psychological effects of that. Having been in such a position at one point, I felt humiliated, ashamed and really worthless. This is not how all people felt or do feel, but by and large, it is not good.
I think a much better alternative to UBI- but one that might be even harder to do- would be to work to make everyone self sufficient. E.g. if AI was used to design highly efficient, easily repairable solar panels and solar energy storage. Mini factories that everyone could own that can make parts from raw material. Greater ability to protect your own assets and purchase the things you need (through a combination of needing less things and things being cheaper) meaning not needing to rely on banks. Laws/policies to prevent Buy to Let schemes and the ability to launder money/evade taxes through properties, to lower housing prices. Laws/policies to close tax loopholes.
I think in a proper ‘utopia’ UBI would be completely unnecessary. And I don’t think UBI helps us get there- rather it does the opposite, by distracting from doing things like the above and giving an opposing argument to doing them (e.g.”Houses are expensive for loads of good reasons!! We should do UBI instead!!”)
If the powerlessness of those relying on UBi comes from those dispensing UBI being able to withdraw it, then the solution is a robust set of rights … and rights are also a necessary component of any alternative solution, like self sufficiency.
I think with lots of AIs the work everyone should best do is keeping the AIs aimed at their goals. Direct them, orient them, keep them in line with our overall interests. Everyone a foreman for a few instances of AIs doing something. Doubles as a possible alignment solution: give as little agency as possible to the AIs, delegate the decisions to the human overseers. Humans’ contribution to the economy will be “their values”.
There are already people trying to make an AI that destroys humanity “for the lols”. Many people will try to use AI against each other. As they are now. E.g. militaries, scammers, revenge porn makers, etc.
Sure, but in general, given enough adequate tools, most people contribute to keeping those things in check. This doesn’t hold if AIs turn out to be “glass cannons”—tremendously powerful attackers, but poor at setting up defences against other AIs—but in that case, well, there’s pretty much no way out.
Full self-sufficiency would require everyone to have a whole productive chain at their fingertips, it just doesn’t seem realistic as something to be achieved before AIs are already incredibly advanced, and there’s a lot of danger from here to there. Besides, not sure it’d be realistic with Earth resources either (nor that everyone would want it; but I guess small self-sufficient tribe-sized communities might actually work a lot better for many people). The worries now concern much more realistic, close at hand scenarios.
“Sure, but in general, given enough adequate tools, most people contribute to keeping those things in check. ” What are you basing this on? And the issue is if the contributions will be enough. And not even making and providing adequate tools, but trying to figure out what tools will be adequate in the first place and then after that, getting people to actually use those tools. Still don’t see what this has to do with UBI.
Society not just spontaneously collapsing under the pressure of the few antisocial types trying to destroy it?
True, that’s all part of the difficulty of this whole endeavour. I explained why I think this is relevant to UBI in the response to your other comment.
And I don’t see how this has anything to do with UBI.
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.