Right the problem with UBI is the people being productive in some way to fund it will always see the level of benefits as too much and those on the receiving end will see the benefits as too little. So as a higher % of people are on the receiving end, it creates a spiral of unfundable benefits demands.
Look at France, it seems like the biggest protests now are when it is suggested their retirement program is unsustainable and they should phase in a higher retirement age. And these programs across the west are becoming unsustainable because retirement ages were set decades ago at levels 0-10 years below life expectancy, and that gap has now grown to 20 years with a lower employed:retired ratio.
Monkey status games don't disappear just because everyone gets free money and no one has a job. They just take a different and more destructive form.
One of the benefits of status being associated with making money is that it tends to drive positive-sum productive behavior rather than zero-sum destructive behavior.
I think it is a moot question because UBI and automation will destroy society as we know it through uncontrolled, malthusian growth. I don't think we will last long enough to see what long-term culture that results in.
With infinite welfare, the dominant culture will be the one that is able to reproduce as much as possible, perhaps through cloning? We are already seeing IVF, surrogate mothers and other sorts of cloning/eugenics sexual strategies emerge, just not on a dominant level yet.
If it wasn't for cloning, I would say it would look more like Calhoun's rat utopia due to sex-based competition.
>The anti-freeloader impulse is one of the easiest ways to spur people to action.
I would say this depends on culture. Only industrious countries tend to have culture with this impulse.
People aren’t rats. Overall fertility is strongly regulated by education level, labor opportunities, cultural norms, etc.
If “infinite welfare” unavoidably led to a reproductive feedback loop, the richest, safest societies would already be there, which we don’t see.
Your comment seems to rest on the unstated assumption that hierarchy between humans is an essential stabilizing force, and that abundance without it is unsustainable. I don’t think that’s an empirically settled conclusion.
If AI automates most jobs and UBI becomes the primary source of income for most people, doesn't that imply the means of production eventually have to transfer to government control? Is there a different mechanism that makes this work without that transfer?
If AI somehow does materially, permanently change the amount of human employment required, I don't think anyone is going to like the outcomes.
I am to the left politically, but I do not think UBI can work in practice for the majority of population due to human nature and the resulting lack of purpose. People do seem to have an innate need for purpose, and most people need one imposed on them by circumstances, it would seem.
The % of people who will flourish and pursue their passions, given the means to pursue any higher purpose.. is stunningly low. They are the same people that are high-agency, intelligent, driven and will hustle in any job anyway.
The best case outcome for the majority is sitting on their couch consuming AI slop entertainment infinitely, and I am not optimistic we'd even land there.
The COVID bubble was the closest we've come in the US in terms of people having more time on their hands with less financial concerns (stimulus checks, employers subsidized to make payroll, unemployment payment increases, unemployment expiration extensions, federal benefit income caps raised, increased healthcare subsidies, student loan payment pauses, eviction moratoriums, etc etc). Unfortunately it seemed the outcome was less of human flourishing and more an increase in general disorder & disaffection.
Likewise, after Capital having financed trillions in investment to deliver AGI is not going to hand over the money to find UBI willingly.
Even people in the middle seem to be easily swayed by allegations of waste/scams in government benefits programs.
I guess the Tech Bro vision is that there just flat out won't be any interaction with money for the lower-classes anymore, because everything they need for living would be "free" (as in, provided by a set of perpetual "subscriptions" that don't require any direct compensation, but that tech companies can modify or even cancel at any point at their sole discretion)
If the means of production are taken from the billionaires and given to the government, how long would their wealth last? Not sure handing the means of production to a government would be a viable solution as politicians and bureaucrats are humans and often very terrible humans at that, but I don't see how billionaires could continue to last very long once they no longer have control over anything other than a declining number of currency units.
The government won't be able to force Robot Inc. to do anything. Robot Inc. has control of the robots, and the government has control over words on paper.
> Quite the opposite, capitalism even enforces useless work because it’s the main source of income.
If the work was really so useless, companies would love to become leaner (i.e. fire the employees who do useless work). It's rather the government who by its control freakery introduces lots of red tape for companies.
You ignore human nature. I used to say "the brain is a transformer", not in the sense of how the current batch of AI transformers work, but in the sense of an mathematical transormation. The input gets transformed into human behavior. Human behavior is not something that exists independently of our environment and stimuli. And specifically: if nothing comes in, nothing comes back out (if you actually take away inputs, right up to the point that the brain stops controlling the body and you die, but you don't have to drive it nearly that far to just make sure nothing happens anymore).
Perhaps surprisingly, humans don't object to that. Our human intelligence works by subtracting what we can predict from the inputs and then focusing on the portion that remains.
So if AI either prevents interactions with humans or makes them more predictable, then human minds just ... stop. Literally. Humans won't do anything anymore.
UBI will either fail, or it will succeed and humans will just stop.
Nothing gets rid of capitalism. In the socialist world, various forms of status just replace basic currency. When goods are limited, there has to be some way to ration them. In the former Soviet Union, it was just high party officials who were rich in limited goods. Maybe they didn't have "money" or US-style "capital", but they had other things that took that role.
How are billionaires “hoarders”? They may be a lot of things, but to use hoarders is a gross misunderstanding of wealth, billionaires, how equities work and more.
Bezos does not have a castle filled with a scrooge mcduck moneypool. There are not castles filled with grain that could otherwise be used to feed the starving peasants.
Yeah but compared to the value they have in equities that are active companies, employing people, and generating value, these underground bunkers are small.
If you have money you generally don't want it to sit around and depreciate instead of investing into real-estate, private equity, etc. directly or indirectly.
That money is already in the hands of "millions more people". Invested money is efficiently and quickly converted into paychecks for ordinary people. That is the means by which investors hope to make a return on their investment.
They quite literally hoard the profit produced by the people that work for them. If they didn't, they wouldn't be billionaires. Pretending that because the wealth isn't in the form of a pool filled with gold coins that somehow makes it different is just misunderstanding wealth.
As far as feeding people, he could single handidly fund SNAP for a year and still have 100 billion plus.
Exactly. A whole lot of people have been sold this idea that "taxing billionaires" is going to solve all their problems and provide endless spending for all the free things they want, but this is simply not the case. First off, the math, even the naive math that assumes that all billionaires' stock can be instantly liquidated at the current prices does not work. As individuals these people do have quite a lot, but there are not enough of them. The politicians constantly mention the same 5-6 individuals with net work measured in the hundreds of of billions, then list the number of billionaires, but the vast majority of these "billionaires" are single digit billionaires, with their net work held in an extremely illiquid investment such as private companies.
If you actually introduced your wet dream billionaire wealth tax that's going to pay for everything forever, all these people would be forced to go to the market at the same time and sell their assets while every other billionaire is also going to be in the same position at the same time, so who are they selling to? The market would crash (also incidentally impacting all your middle class retirement plans) destroying billions upon billions of dollars in wealth. But OK, let's say you get this money now, let's pretend you could get enough, and the government starts spending it on entitlement programs--what you have just done is convert investment into consumption. What do you expect to happen in this case? I'd expect surging inflation.
Society effectively consumes everything that we produce. If we want to consume more, we need to produce more. The government can put their finger on the scale as to what is produced and who consumes it, the government can put policies in place that lead to additional production via removing obstacles from productive activities, introducing obstacles to unproductive activities, making investments or subsidies, etc. but all of this is more complicated and messy, it needs to be done intelligently and carries risk of distorting market realities leading to unintended consequences. This is called "governing" and it's what politicians are supposed to be doing. Outsiders who want power but can't effectively govern are always trying to sell people on these "one weird trick" narratives of easy fixes to hard problems.
Bezos has, I believe, two jets and three yachts along with a number a large homes with large household staff. A lot for a person to be sure, but most of his wealth is unrealized investment in a company that delivers goods to hundreds of millions of people's homes and powers countless tech companies that are used by billions of people. Taking his boats and planes away is just not going to move the needle, it's not going to make groceries cheaper or reduce the price of college tuition or add housing stock (aside from a handful of luxury homes in a couple of neighborhoods around the wold) or add any new doctors to the medical field. Certainly taxes can be increased, but no one should expect this to make a real dent in the budget. We got into this situation by decades of taking the easy route, so of course people are looking for easy solutions.
This is the exact same kind of magical thinking that the right uses to convince people that their life would be oh so much better if they just kicked out all the immigrants. There is no magic bullet, most spending by the government is on the middle class, most consumption is by the middle class (this is even more dramatic if you measure this in real world physical goods terms rather than including "luxury" markup on spending by the upper middle class). This is a huge group, hundreds of millions, that collectively consumes an unfathomable amount of resources, and moving some numbers around on a few computers in downtown Manhattan is not going to change this.
My favorite Tech Bro "AI is gonna make money worthless" cognitive dissonance is how Musk keeps saying exactly this. He has been quoted that people won't need to save anymore due to abundance, while also extracting a potential $1T pay package for himself...
The West has started to destroy itself from the inside: Politicians and activists always focus on increasing incomes (increase wages) and increasing employment (full employment for everyone), while the cost of living (rent/mortgage, health insurance, auto insurance, etc) goes up. Reduce the cost of living as it helps all kinds of people.
Japan seems to have gotten there; in their case quite a bit is due to population decrease though. That’s probably viable in advanced economies but not in growing economies.
The tech world as a whole thinks the American Dream dying is a good thing and they're actively making that happen. And the answer is quite simple: further wealth concentration and the resulting inequality.
China is investing in infrastructure and making sure its citizens have enough to eat and a roof over their heads. The US is starving school children, unleashing its own Gestapo on its citizens, letting its citizens die, doing untold damage to every other country on Earth and letting our infrastructure rot so Jeff Bezos can buy a 4th megayacht.
Automation and AI could be a good thing for society. We could all enjoy the benefits by having to work less and having to less menial and/or dangerous work. But it won't work that here. It'll be used to displace workers, increase the wealth of th etop 0.01% and suppress the wages of reamining workers.
I'm unconvinced the trillions invested in AI will ever see a return. But even if it produces value in some way, will it even matter if nobody has any money to buy anything?
Right, look at what US (and the west in general) did over our long experience of ZIRP. Did we borrow at near-zero to build housing, transit, infrastructure, etc? No... but we got a boatload of SaaS.
The datacenters will be used for wide-scale facial recognition and real world surveillance. The tech demons got tired of being limited to spying on people’s online activities.
I mean this is just dumb. Why would anyone respect intellectual property anymore in this scenario for example. And governments will invest everything they have to steal or copy the knowledge required to compete.
I’m really curious how UBI would interact with the base emotional responses that drove a lot of our politics.
The anti-freeloader impulse is one of the easiest ways to spur people to action. Would that go away or be intensified under UBI?
would people cease to be charitable after a tragedy because they expect UBI to handle it?
Right the problem with UBI is the people being productive in some way to fund it will always see the level of benefits as too much and those on the receiving end will see the benefits as too little. So as a higher % of people are on the receiving end, it creates a spiral of unfundable benefits demands.
Look at France, it seems like the biggest protests now are when it is suggested their retirement program is unsustainable and they should phase in a higher retirement age. And these programs across the west are becoming unsustainable because retirement ages were set decades ago at levels 0-10 years below life expectancy, and that gap has now grown to 20 years with a lower employed:retired ratio.
Monkey status games don't disappear just because everyone gets free money and no one has a job. They just take a different and more destructive form.
One of the benefits of status being associated with making money is that it tends to drive positive-sum productive behavior rather than zero-sum destructive behavior.
Are people charitable after tragedies now? Anecdotally, most people I know don't feel like they make enough to make donations to others.
I think it is a moot question because UBI and automation will destroy society as we know it through uncontrolled, malthusian growth. I don't think we will last long enough to see what long-term culture that results in.
With infinite welfare, the dominant culture will be the one that is able to reproduce as much as possible, perhaps through cloning? We are already seeing IVF, surrogate mothers and other sorts of cloning/eugenics sexual strategies emerge, just not on a dominant level yet.
If it wasn't for cloning, I would say it would look more like Calhoun's rat utopia due to sex-based competition.
>The anti-freeloader impulse is one of the easiest ways to spur people to action.
I would say this depends on culture. Only industrious countries tend to have culture with this impulse.
People aren’t rats. Overall fertility is strongly regulated by education level, labor opportunities, cultural norms, etc.
If “infinite welfare” unavoidably led to a reproductive feedback loop, the richest, safest societies would already be there, which we don’t see.
Your comment seems to rest on the unstated assumption that hierarchy between humans is an essential stabilizing force, and that abundance without it is unsustainable. I don’t think that’s an empirically settled conclusion.
If AI automates most jobs and UBI becomes the primary source of income for most people, doesn't that imply the means of production eventually have to transfer to government control? Is there a different mechanism that makes this work without that transfer?
Robots and drones will keep the masses in check.
If AI somehow does materially, permanently change the amount of human employment required, I don't think anyone is going to like the outcomes.
I am to the left politically, but I do not think UBI can work in practice for the majority of population due to human nature and the resulting lack of purpose. People do seem to have an innate need for purpose, and most people need one imposed on them by circumstances, it would seem.
The % of people who will flourish and pursue their passions, given the means to pursue any higher purpose.. is stunningly low. They are the same people that are high-agency, intelligent, driven and will hustle in any job anyway.
The best case outcome for the majority is sitting on their couch consuming AI slop entertainment infinitely, and I am not optimistic we'd even land there.
The COVID bubble was the closest we've come in the US in terms of people having more time on their hands with less financial concerns (stimulus checks, employers subsidized to make payroll, unemployment payment increases, unemployment expiration extensions, federal benefit income caps raised, increased healthcare subsidies, student loan payment pauses, eviction moratoriums, etc etc). Unfortunately it seemed the outcome was less of human flourishing and more an increase in general disorder & disaffection.
Likewise, after Capital having financed trillions in investment to deliver AGI is not going to hand over the money to find UBI willingly.
Even people in the middle seem to be easily swayed by allegations of waste/scams in government benefits programs.
It is either UBI with massive taxation of everyone who provides AI services and thus keeping facade of capitalism or outright communism.
I'm far less worried about the consequences of automation than I am about the consequences of the chase for automation.
Where’s the money for UBI going to come from when billionaires are hoarders and don’t like paying tax?
I guess the Tech Bro vision is that there just flat out won't be any interaction with money for the lower-classes anymore, because everything they need for living would be "free" (as in, provided by a set of perpetual "subscriptions" that don't require any direct compensation, but that tech companies can modify or even cancel at any point at their sole discretion)
If the means of production are taken from the billionaires and given to the government, how long would their wealth last? Not sure handing the means of production to a government would be a viable solution as politicians and bureaucrats are humans and often very terrible humans at that, but I don't see how billionaires could continue to last very long once they no longer have control over anything other than a declining number of currency units.
how are the means of production going to be taken? They have direct control of all of the robots.
Until Congress passes a law nationalizing their company, and forces them to sell their company to a holding company owned by the government.
The government won't be able to force Robot Inc. to do anything. Robot Inc. has control of the robots, and the government has control over words on paper.
UBI and capitalism don’t match.
Quite the opposite, capitalism even enforces useless work because it’s the main source of income.
That’s why all these AI bros dreams of AI benefits are BS unless they think they could get rid of capitalism
> Quite the opposite, capitalism even enforces useless work because it’s the main source of income.
If the work was really so useless, companies would love to become leaner (i.e. fire the employees who do useless work). It's rather the government who by its control freakery introduces lots of red tape for companies.
You ignore human nature. I used to say "the brain is a transformer", not in the sense of how the current batch of AI transformers work, but in the sense of an mathematical transormation. The input gets transformed into human behavior. Human behavior is not something that exists independently of our environment and stimuli. And specifically: if nothing comes in, nothing comes back out (if you actually take away inputs, right up to the point that the brain stops controlling the body and you die, but you don't have to drive it nearly that far to just make sure nothing happens anymore).
Perhaps surprisingly, humans don't object to that. Our human intelligence works by subtracting what we can predict from the inputs and then focusing on the portion that remains.
So if AI either prevents interactions with humans or makes them more predictable, then human minds just ... stop. Literally. Humans won't do anything anymore.
UBI will either fail, or it will succeed and humans will just stop.
Nothing gets rid of capitalism. In the socialist world, various forms of status just replace basic currency. When goods are limited, there has to be some way to ration them. In the former Soviet Union, it was just high party officials who were rich in limited goods. Maybe they didn't have "money" or US-style "capital", but they had other things that took that role.
How are billionaires “hoarders”? They may be a lot of things, but to use hoarders is a gross misunderstanding of wealth, billionaires, how equities work and more.
Bezos does not have a castle filled with a scrooge mcduck moneypool. There are not castles filled with grain that could otherwise be used to feed the starving peasants.
Don't most of them have prepper level bunkers on large parcels of property, a private jet flight away in case things go truly south?
Yeah but compared to the value they have in equities that are active companies, employing people, and generating value, these underground bunkers are small.
If you have money you generally don't want it to sit around and depreciate instead of investing into real-estate, private equity, etc. directly or indirectly.
Possibly, but those are irrelevant sums compared to their total wealth.
Bezos has a $500M yacht thats longer than a football field
Velocity would be much higher if the same amount of money was in the hands of millions more people.
Corruption of politics would be much harder, too.
That money is already in the hands of "millions more people". Invested money is efficiently and quickly converted into paychecks for ordinary people. That is the means by which investors hope to make a return on their investment.
They aren’t hoarding money, you don’t understand that?
What “money” velocity would be higher? Some of these companies have very little profit compared to wealth.
They quite literally hoard the profit produced by the people that work for them. If they didn't, they wouldn't be billionaires. Pretending that because the wealth isn't in the form of a pool filled with gold coins that somehow makes it different is just misunderstanding wealth.
As far as feeding people, he could single handidly fund SNAP for a year and still have 100 billion plus.
>They quite literally hoard the profit produced by the people that work for the
Do you realize jeff bezos was a billionaire long before amazon recorded a profit? So quite literally no, this is not true.
Exactly. A whole lot of people have been sold this idea that "taxing billionaires" is going to solve all their problems and provide endless spending for all the free things they want, but this is simply not the case. First off, the math, even the naive math that assumes that all billionaires' stock can be instantly liquidated at the current prices does not work. As individuals these people do have quite a lot, but there are not enough of them. The politicians constantly mention the same 5-6 individuals with net work measured in the hundreds of of billions, then list the number of billionaires, but the vast majority of these "billionaires" are single digit billionaires, with their net work held in an extremely illiquid investment such as private companies.
If you actually introduced your wet dream billionaire wealth tax that's going to pay for everything forever, all these people would be forced to go to the market at the same time and sell their assets while every other billionaire is also going to be in the same position at the same time, so who are they selling to? The market would crash (also incidentally impacting all your middle class retirement plans) destroying billions upon billions of dollars in wealth. But OK, let's say you get this money now, let's pretend you could get enough, and the government starts spending it on entitlement programs--what you have just done is convert investment into consumption. What do you expect to happen in this case? I'd expect surging inflation.
Society effectively consumes everything that we produce. If we want to consume more, we need to produce more. The government can put their finger on the scale as to what is produced and who consumes it, the government can put policies in place that lead to additional production via removing obstacles from productive activities, introducing obstacles to unproductive activities, making investments or subsidies, etc. but all of this is more complicated and messy, it needs to be done intelligently and carries risk of distorting market realities leading to unintended consequences. This is called "governing" and it's what politicians are supposed to be doing. Outsiders who want power but can't effectively govern are always trying to sell people on these "one weird trick" narratives of easy fixes to hard problems.
Bezos has, I believe, two jets and three yachts along with a number a large homes with large household staff. A lot for a person to be sure, but most of his wealth is unrealized investment in a company that delivers goods to hundreds of millions of people's homes and powers countless tech companies that are used by billions of people. Taking his boats and planes away is just not going to move the needle, it's not going to make groceries cheaper or reduce the price of college tuition or add housing stock (aside from a handful of luxury homes in a couple of neighborhoods around the wold) or add any new doctors to the medical field. Certainly taxes can be increased, but no one should expect this to make a real dent in the budget. We got into this situation by decades of taking the easy route, so of course people are looking for easy solutions.
This is the exact same kind of magical thinking that the right uses to convince people that their life would be oh so much better if they just kicked out all the immigrants. There is no magic bullet, most spending by the government is on the middle class, most consumption is by the middle class (this is even more dramatic if you measure this in real world physical goods terms rather than including "luxury" markup on spending by the upper middle class). This is a huge group, hundreds of millions, that collectively consumes an unfathomable amount of resources, and moving some numbers around on a few computers in downtown Manhattan is not going to change this.
UBI could be packaged in the form of a jobs program. There's still plenty of work to do. AI can't protect our cities from immigrants.
/s
https://archive.is/1jgGr
My favorite Tech Bro "AI is gonna make money worthless" cognitive dissonance is how Musk keeps saying exactly this. He has been quoted that people won't need to save anymore due to abundance, while also extracting a potential $1T pay package for himself...
https://fortune.com/2026/01/12/elon-musk-retirement-savings-...
Money at that level is about power. Unlike what must of us use our money for, power is relative, it's a zero sum game
Yes so he advocates for & looks forward to a future where he has even more money (power) and the rest of us collectively have even less money (power).
What point are you trying to make?
He needs the money for Mars bro
Just a few hundred billion more
We’re so close to interplanetary civilisation bro
Just hundreds of billions more, just one last time
we could afford a UBI now. I'm not sure why some people seem to think an AIpocalypse is a necessary precondition.
Because they killed it
The West has started to destroy itself from the inside: Politicians and activists always focus on increasing incomes (increase wages) and increasing employment (full employment for everyone), while the cost of living (rent/mortgage, health insurance, auto insurance, etc) goes up. Reduce the cost of living as it helps all kinds of people.
Japan seems to have gotten there; in their case quite a bit is due to population decrease though. That’s probably viable in advanced economies but not in growing economies.
Non-paywall version: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/why-the-tech-world-thi...
The dream of a single family home (in SF) is dying
The tech world as a whole thinks the American Dream dying is a good thing and they're actively making that happen. And the answer is quite simple: further wealth concentration and the resulting inequality.
China is investing in infrastructure and making sure its citizens have enough to eat and a roof over their heads. The US is starving school children, unleashing its own Gestapo on its citizens, letting its citizens die, doing untold damage to every other country on Earth and letting our infrastructure rot so Jeff Bezos can buy a 4th megayacht.
Automation and AI could be a good thing for society. We could all enjoy the benefits by having to work less and having to less menial and/or dangerous work. But it won't work that here. It'll be used to displace workers, increase the wealth of th etop 0.01% and suppress the wages of reamining workers.
I'm unconvinced the trillions invested in AI will ever see a return. But even if it produces value in some way, will it even matter if nobody has any money to buy anything?
Right, look at what US (and the west in general) did over our long experience of ZIRP. Did we borrow at near-zero to build housing, transit, infrastructure, etc? No... but we got a boatload of SaaS.
The datacenters will be used for wide-scale facial recognition and real world surveillance. The tech demons got tired of being limited to spying on people’s online activities.
I mean this is just dumb. Why would anyone respect intellectual property anymore in this scenario for example. And governments will invest everything they have to steal or copy the knowledge required to compete.
maybe they finally discovered George Carling ;))