I use to be what’s called a social liberal / fiscal conservative. In the early twenty teens my company was invited to work with what was then an unknown “chat bot” technology. It was plain to see where things were headed. Overnight I was a proponent of UBI. This is before Trump’s 2016 win. My friends and colleagues looked to me like I was crazy when I told them that within 10 years they’d be out of a job. I missed the mark there since majy of them turned into AI Bros, but I was close enough.
If we do not implement a safety net, REAL SOON, this entire society is going to collapse. There just won’t be enough means for people to survive. That’s not hyperbole.
Idk, I’ll always be skeptical about AI changing the game. It’s fundamental to market economics that it adapts to new technology, no matter how disruptive. The very system that got the rich AI cultists where they are now ensures it can never deliver what they want. We probably could have a relatively post scarcity society even with pre AI technology, but scarcity is economics. There is no escaping the return to homeostasis.
Society collapsing has nothing to do with AI and everything to do with neoliberalism as an ideology; the belief that the market is the only tool and all restrictions on it are impediments to world peace. They cannot conceptualize that the squeezing of almost everyone through artificial scarcity does more to destabilize the world than governments subsidizing their own industries to gain national wealth. It was always an excuse for already fortunate men from already fortunate countries to become even more fortunate.
People don’t go hungry because robots are too good for them to compete. Even if LLMs weren’t a dead end for creating artificial labor, people would still go hungry because of capitalism. UBI doesn’t fix the underlying problem of not even the upper middle class being secure in their safety. A few thousand people have god like dictatorial power over the direction of society, and they only choose to gain themselves more power. Until they aren’t the ones making unilateral decisions, we will only see further collapse.
Don’t you worry that with everyone on UBI, demagogues like Trump can just cut you off?
That’s my biggest hangup over UBI. I think everyone should have that safety net but I’m afraid of that much centralization of power.
UBI perpetuates suffering in periphery states. It’s for privileged core peoples to exploit the suffering of those slaving away overseas to provide their standard of living.
Capitalism is a zero sum game, for one to gain wealth it must be extracted from another and ultimately that burden falls to the periphery states.
UBI seeks to prop up late stage capitalism for as long as possible, it is not an ideal worth chasing over the proletariat owning the means of production outright.
Your answer isn’t to get rid of UBI, its to create it while also abolishing publicly traded (and eventually all private) companies, to be replaced with employee owned co-ops.
Counterpoint: UBI is best used as one preliminary step amongst many on the way to abolishing capitalism.
It needs price controls in order to work properly. Otherwise the capitalist overlords just make everything more expensive by at least as much, eliminating the benefit completely.
That being said, having UBI+price control would
- raise the spending power of 90%+ of people,
- free dozens of millions from inescapable generational poverty,
- improve the mental as well as physical health of the population
- free up time and resources for people to pursue beneficial activities that they’d otherwise never be able to, potentially unlocking brilliant scientists, civil rights advocates, artists and so on that are currently stuck behind the Great Paywall of Capitalism.
All of this happening WITHOUT the coming of Ragnarok and a Bigmac costing a thousand dollars would be an EXTREMELY effective way to make sure that people not only know but FEEL that the capitalism they’ve been brought up to venerate or at least consider necessary as a lesser evil is in fact not the best or even a good system for anyone except for birth lottery winners, people with a talent for getting away with extreme exploitation and fraud, and especially people who won the birth lottery AND have that despicable talent such as Trump, Musk, and nefarious mastermind Jack McBrayer
Capitalism is a zero sum game, for one to gain wealth it must be extracted from another
This is just not true. There are plenty of valid criticisms of capitalism, there’s no need to use false statements.
