I was once talking with one of my classmates and he said that in the future, there will be universal basic income implemented by entire world. I was not convinced at that time and thought he is just being stupid but given the layoffs happening and massive amount of unemployment, I am thinking about this possibility. What do you say?
UBI to me is a leftist pipe dream of how a post-scarcity society could work. When you actually look at the financials and how greedy humanity is, it all falls apart and will either bankrupt entire nations or pay an absolute pittance.
The UK’s voluntary living wage is £13.45 an hour, which translates to £26,227.50 for someone working full time 37.5 hours a week. If we replaced our entire welfare system (state pensions, Universal Credit, child benefit, Personal Independence Payments, Disability Living Allowance, etc) and paid our approx 58.1 million population of working age people and retirees the living wage, it would cost us over £1.5 trillion, or roughly half our annual GDP. Our current welfare expenditure by comparison is at an estimated £333.7 billion.
I am using the Living Wage as a comparison since it’s an agreed metric calculated by a non-profit organisation for how much a worker would need to earn to live on their wage in the UK. To pay a living wage to every adult in the country we would need to spend nearly three times as much as what the USA spends on its military.
The question then becomes “How the fuck will we pay for it?” We can’t even get the rich to pay their fair share of tax as things stand. They are going to flat-out refuse to foot the bill once AI leads to mass unemployment.
What I think is a more likely scenario is societal collapse. People starve, leading to widespread civil unrest and then a brutal and violent crackdown, made easier than ever by armed drones and humanoid robots that have no sense of morals. This is exactly the kind of doomsday scenario that a lot of billionaires are prepping for.
The only way I can see humanity not ripping itself apart is if automation somehow makes the cost of living so cheap that UBI could viably exist.
You’re forgetting to factor in all the people that won’t receive it because they already earn enough. A majority of people won’t get anything at all. Replacing all of our current welfare systems with a simple UBI would save us money. It’s just that the billionaires are under the impression that it would stop people from working harder for a better life, which is also something they think about our current welfare system, and has never been true.
I’m talking about a scenario where entire industries of workers end up getting displaced by AI and robotics, and I don’t think we’re far off from this becoming a reality. If Tesla’s Optimus 3 robots are anywhere near as advanced as they are rumoured to be, they could easily replace warehouse and logistics workers.
We already have Waymo disrupting the taxi industry further by removing the driver from the equation, and Miso Robotics automating kitchens in restaurant chains like Jersey Mike’s Subs and White Castle.
Also, doesn’t means-testing UBI kinda defeat its intended purpose?
New tools used to replace workers happens throughout the course of human history, I don’t think we will ever see robots replace humans successfully enough to really dent the workforce, they’ll just go to other industries.
Though the one industry whose collapse could spur the entire UBI system, is long-haul truckers. That may happen, but again, I think they’ll just go into other off-shoot industries, and the change in workforce won’t be so dramatic that it’s one day they’re all on the road with jobs, and the next day they’re all out of work. You’ll need truckers with experience to actually park the things for loading/un-loading, and nobody is going to trust an AI or robot with piloting that much freight all by itself. they’ll want a human behind the wheel, ready to take over.
The industry we should be driving people towards is computer chip manufacturing.
Each technological advancement has created new jobs in some capacity. What new jobs has AI created? And don’t tell me “prompt engineer” like every AI bro likes to hype up. That is not an actual position and the fact that I cannot find any jobs advertised where typing out very specific and accurate prompts are one of the skills required is proof of this.
AI isn’t perfect. It hallucinates and sometimes gives bad answers. But I think that we are one incredibly good model away from being able to reliably automate white collar work.