Topic: Basic income guarantee - opinions&criticism welcome - page 7. (Read 14389 times)

If we can avoid destroying ourselves to get robots reproducing, and benevolent, smarter AI than what we are, tech should have advanced to the point where: Energy = whatever you want. The Sun is spewing out a massive amount of radiation energy in all directions all the time...what a waste! Eventually we should be able to effectively black out the sun on all vectors apart from inhabited planets via perfect absorption. It's not infinite, but it's a lot more than what the Earth could ever hope to contain, and could easily support a certain figure of humans until it dies. The stars and laws of physics will be doing all of the work, so humans don't have to - in that sense, it's so cheap as to basically be free, but never technically. The cost may be as little as asking an AI to do something, and keeping the knowledge around of how it all works.

The point of the OP is not that everything should be free, it's that certain things that are necessary for life but very easy to now produce can be paid for by those who are motivated by peer pressure, if the land/manufacturing is productive enough. If only 10 people in a whole country are motivated by peer pressure and can't produce enough for everyone, then people will still be forced to work anyway and this is largely irrelevant. This is, incidentally, a major reason of why I believe communism failed (along with all the crazy). On the other hand, if 10 people working and 10 in training is all it takes to produce all the food/shelter/clothing/entertainment/all the wants of an entire planet, the OP is just a simpler system of organizing what's going to happen anyway.

No.  It is really much more complicated than that.

Money is really not just some tool invented to motivate people.  This basic income concept is not just some moral issue.

To answer your question, I do want people to be driven by their desire to build amazing stuff.  I just don't think a basic income is a way to realize that.  In a nutshell, I think it would just not work and that the corresponding currency would quickly get no value whatsoever.

Basically it boils down to this:

Do you want to have people motivated out of fear for their own survival so that they produce enough (& continue the GDP train)?

Or do you want to have people driven by their desire to build something new, beautiful, amazing?

In the first example, you will continue as we are - with all of the issues surrounding this.
In the second example, you provide the possibility for people to make something amazing. YEs, that means that for the first few months/years people will probably just fuck off and party. But then as it always does, it gets boring. People will put their creative drive into something that they want to bring about. This isn't just some wishful thinking BS, there are studies/ books written about our conception of human motivations & output and the realities.

Jeez, this discussion is silly but what the heck.

Time is not an unlimited resource.   At all.  Especially if you travel interstellar space at relativistic speed.  Your proper time will tell you that you've spent a year, but the solar system you left may have seen centuries pass away.

Cosmologists now think the future of the universe will be a deep freeze.   So if you spend too much time gathering stuff in the universe, you'll end up in an almost empty, deadly cold universe.

Absolutely. As technology advances, the cost to extract resources decreases and the value we can get out of them increases. So the quantity of resources that are usable for practical purposes increases as technology advances. That's why we've had a "20 to 25 year supply of oil" for almost 100 years now. (No joke, the first "imminent" oil crisis was predicted in 1918!)

If you're particularly worried about resource shortages, you should be pushing for greater development and exploitation of technologies that make resources cheaper to extract or allow us to get more value out of them. You should definitely oppose things like a basic income guarantee that discourage technological advances while reducing pressures that hold down population.

No matter how big the buffet, there's still no such thing as a free lunch.

True, but time is also a nearly unlimited resource. I suppose the Universe may eventually suffer heat death. But again, these fundamental limits won't matter for billions of years.

Are MRIs a basic amenity of life? What about indoor plumbing? The problem with this scheme is that it will actually do the reverse of what it is intended to do -- by discouraging productivity, it will delay the rate at which the economy is capable of developing new things that become basic amenities of life. That is, it will in practice deny people the basic amenities of life.

Speed of light is limited.  So even in a infinite universe, you'll have to wait a bit to get the desired amount of the thing you want if you have to fetch it by yourself.  So people might have to buy some to their neighbors if they don't want to wait.

Also, heavy elements in the universe are pretty scarce.

The entire Universe is a resource. Sure, resources are finite. But it will be billions of years before we run up against that limit. Until then, it's just a cost/benefit kind of thing.

Well, you can just build a clone with an artificial uterus or something   

Even in such a world, there would still be demand for "real" humans. It's just the nature of the beast.

If you want to push the science-fiction hypothesis to the extreme, you have to consider a world where robots can be indistinguishable from humans.



And there is nothing, at least theoretically, preventing AI to perform as well as a human in art, culture, music and all.

About material resources, again, recycling technologies will be optimized, and if it's going to be at the molecular level.

Such an automated world will create demand again for human interaction. Some will prefer human barkeepers and human care at the spa, and will look for a new quality of in the fields of arts, culture, music, and more we can't foresee yet.

True.  Indeed I forgot about that.

You're missing out on one very important point:  Resources are not infinite.

Sure, robots could conceivably be built that could create anything.  But the materials to build those robots have to come from somewhere.  You might say that the materials to build those robots come from mines operated by robots, but those mines can't last forever.

Land is a finite resource.  Land cannot be free.  Gold cannot be free, as it is a finite resource.  Etc, etc.

Basically, nothing can be free, as nothing is an infinite resource.

Ah I'm getting confused.   This subject is really tough, honestly.   No irony here.

On one hand I told you that there is no point to start now, since robot do not currently do all the work.

On the other hand I'm going to tell you that it's already started.  Robot do indeed do a lot of work, and some people do receive money doing nothing thanks to that.  I do.  I own shares and I get money by doing nothing.  So the system you are advocating has already begun.

The key point, imho, is whether or not robots create not just wealth, but also copies of themselves as well.  In that case, everybody can own robots, and there is no point having a system of shares that would be unevenly distributed.  But then again in that case price of things would really be almost zero.  Because everybody could create whatever he needs when he needs it. So there would be no point in buying something.  Hence a price of zero for everything.

Honestly I'm not sure anyone here gets how complicated this is.

No it probably wouldn't be free, who determines how much "free" you get versus me? there will most definitely still be currency. In current society, robots(automated machines) already produce significant portion of wealth, why not start now? you think the switch would happen suddenly?

The OP didn't specify, which is why I included both scenarios in my post.  Often, real income tends to nullify government-given benefits.

On paper, yes.

Thing is:  I very much doubt this basic income would really replace the current welfare.  First they say it will, but soon they'll add exceptions.  For instance, disabled people will receive a special treatment.  Then, pregnant women, and so on and on.  Soon you'll have basic income +  current welfare system.

Of course there is no way to prove that this is what would happen, but it is so easy to guess.