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That threat has many thinkers entertaining the idea of a universal basic income, a guaranteed living wage paid by the government to anyone left out of the workf

That threat has many thinkers entertaining the idea of a universal basic income, a guaranteed living wage paid by the government to anyone left out of the workforce. But McAfee believes this would only make the problem worse, because it would eliminate the incentive for entrepreneurship and other activity that could create new jobs as the old ones fade away. Others question the psychological effects of the idea. “A universal basic income doesn’t give people dignity or protect them from boredom and vice,” Etzioni says. It's funny how boredom, vice, and the indignity of receiving income without continual labor loom in importance if and only if we're talking about technological unemployment. What of people receiving Social Security, pensions, inherited wealth, royalties from patents and copyrights, rents collected on real estate...? Some people sound like they're planning how to invent enough bullshit jobs to provide everyone a regular 9-5 schedule and a supervisor even after machines are doing all the strictly necessary labor. It's like the worst of the Protestant work ethic married to the worst proposals from Keynesianism, so it's one of those special bad ideas that people from all parts of the political spectrum can endorse. I'd rather trust adults to find their own amusements and purpose, like we trust adults who today have income-without-regular-labor, and trust the robo-police to curb those whose boredom turns to criminality.

shams93 10y ago
Exactly we could have a society oriented around the arts and sciences, pure creativity and discovery instead of bullshit jobs we could put the pedal to the metal in human freedom and innovation.
- waqf 10y ago
  People are already creating more art than we actually need (witness how hard it is to make a living as an artist). Now just wait till the AIs become serious competition at that too.
  - wilkommen 10y ago
    The amount of money someone can make in our economy as an artist isn't a reflection of how much art we "need." Art in particular is not a commodity that society can just have enough of. And in general, the price something fetches in our economy isn't always a reflection of its value to society. See: salaries of social workers, emergency medical technicians, etc.
    - lowpro 10y ago
      Everything, including art, follows supply and demand. Value is the point where they meet. Salaries of social works and EMTs are where the supply of those positions meet the need for those positions in any certain area. Art has a defined supply and demand, where the supply is high and demand is low (probably due to the fact you can buy copies of famous masterpieces for very cheap).
      - dublinben 10y ago
        What is the value of the Sistene Chapel? How much would it cost to make a second one?
      - AnthonyMouse 10y ago
        > Everything, including art, follows supply and demand. It isn't about supply and demand, it's about transaction costs. Suppose you could create a work of art that fifty million people would each value at 25c, so total value of two million dollars. Far more than enough to pay your wages for a year. But if you actually try to charge them, the credit card company wants 30c + 3% per person (consuming more than the entire value) and other payment mechanisms suffer similarly infeasible costs in money or inconvenience or otherwise. But if we would pay the artist unconditionally and then they create art and give it away, we would get two million dollars worth of art for $12,000 and with no transaction costs. Meanwhile this allows some of the artists to become famous and then charge prices for their art that exceed the transaction costs, and now they're paying taxes and funding the UBI for the next generation of artists/inventors/experimentalists/etc.
        10y ago
  - thatguy0900 10y ago
    Once ai starts making better art than humans it might be able to improve itself better than humans as well. At that point we don't need humans either. Still nice to keep us around though.
- wozniacki 10y ago
  Putting aside our political slants, one might ask when exactly in the history of human civilization has any fraction of humanity ever consistently demonstrated that they were willing to devote themselves to the sole pursuit of "the arts and sciences, pure creativity and discovery" for any significant length of time? If such instances existed, did those noble pursuits come without costs? To either themselves or others? Say they did manage to exist in harmony with other civilizations (who may not have had any such lofty ideals or pursuits) then how long did they manage to keep doing so? [1] [2] How long did they survive? How long did their inventions or works of knowledge survive, in their intended forms? In fact the evidence is to the contrary that when humans are bequeathed with a surfeit of riches and time to devote, they indulged in decadence, degeneracy and if nothing else sloth. At which time, they were quickly wiped off by their geopolitical peers who placed a higher importance on self-preservation than they did on arts, science & discovery. We like to think we have ridden ourselves from the shortsightedness of those older, less-prudent & ill-advised civilizations. But really, on balance, have we? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Peoples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Peoples [2] http://www.ancient.eu/Sea_Peoples/ http://www.ancient.eu/Sea_Peoples/
  - vacri 10y ago
    "oriented around" != "sole pursuit". You're making a strawman by inserting an overly-high bar. However, the USA in the 50s and 60s matches your demand. An incredibly wealthy time, it was also a golden age of modern art and a golden age of science in so many fields. The moon shot itself cost 4% of the USA's GDP. How well did these advances survive? The cultural waves turned out to be the origin of the USA's soft power, with movies, music, and fashion spreading out throughout the world like nothing before. And much of the science continues to be the bedrock of science, engineering, and manufacturing today.
- edblarney 10y ago
  "we could have a society oriented around the arts and sciences, pure creativity and discovery instead of bullshit jobs " I'm afraid your statement implies a misunderstanding of what 'the economy' is. 'The economy' is people providing services and building products for one another. So that guy who waited on you at the restaurant, the girl who did your payroll, the guy who delivered your mail, the person monitoring your blocks internet connections, the person who planted crops, the person making sure your street is safe to walk down ... Those 'bullshit jobs' all exist for a reason - because they provide value to someone (like you), and we are willing to pay for it all by doing stuff for others as well. 'The jobs' that we do are a function of what other people in the economy 'want done' in terms of products and services. Not a function of 'what they want to do'. If you don't want to do anything that 'helps others' - that's fine, but you can't expect for them to help you in return if your 'lifestyle choice' is 'windsurfing'. But when we do help each other, the whole is actually greater than the sum of the parts (i.e. comparative value) - and that's where we really start to win. Most of the things you need done for you are not that fun. It'll always be that way.
  - andai 10y ago
    Most of them can be automated.
    - edblarney 10y ago
      True, but not for a very long time. The day someone that can make a robot to clean my bathroom and then make me a ham sandwich, I'll get worried. In the meantime, other industries like sports, entertainment, tourism, etc. expand. One are that will be the last to be automated is 'taking care of the elderly' - it's human-intense and that market is only expanding.
      - andai 10y ago
        I wish you were right. I wish it were 50 years off. Life, however, has other plans: https://arstechnica.com/business/2017/02/how-being-replaced-by-a-machine-turned-this-graphic-artist-into-an-activist/ https://arstechnica.com/business/2017/02/how-being-replaced-... (Incidentally there's actually a gif of a robot cooking in there.)
- masonic 10y ago
  Do you see much "creativity and discovery" coming out of present-day homeless shelters and encampments?
  - industriousthou 10y ago
    I mean, the whole idea is that if people have their basic needs met, they'll be able to be more creative and productive. Homeless people are the perfect counter example.
    - Turing_Machine 10y ago
      No. Homeless people almost all have mental illness, substance abuse problems, or some combination of the two. I'm not seeing why you and the OP think they are representative of the general population in any way. They are, pretty much by definition, people who are too messed up to function in society.
      - knieveltech 10y ago
        You couldn't be more wrong here. Have some facts: https://www.nlchp.org/documents/Homeless_Stats_Fact_Sheet https://www.nlchp.org/documents/Homeless_Stats_Fact_Sheet
        Turing_Machine 10y ago
        Posting a link to a spun document from an advocacy group doesn't actually prove me wrong. For example, "sleeping in public places not meant for human habitation" would include anyone who has ever taken a nap in the airport, even one time. When the piece starts out with an obviously bogus definition, there's really not much point in going through it point by point. It has zero credibility from the start. Other sources (easily found by Google) suggest that up to 2/3 of the real chronic homeless population has problems with alcohol and/or other substances
        knieveltech 10y ago
- gdeghtfg 10y ago
  "creativity" in Arts and Sciences (like academia in general) is driven by a silly popularity game. It is as BS as are lives across the spectrum. Far off mountains appear hospitable indeed.
zeteo 10y ago
> What of people receiving Social Security, pensions, inherited wealth, royalties from patents and copyrights, rents collected on real estate...? Not exactly the definition of the creative class is it?
- bijection 10y ago
  Plenty of scientists, entrepreneurs and creative thinkers have backgrounds that would allow them to subsist with minimal work, and choose to do what they do anyway.
  - tnzn 10y ago
    Heck in countries like France, scientists are paid like shit (I mean, by US standards) and still do unpaid overtime without being forced to.
- philipkglass 10y ago
  Before governments started heavily funding scientific research in the 20th century, most basic science was done as some wealthy person's hobby. Of course there were far more aristocrats who were interested in using their moneyed leisure to (e.g.) race horses than to experiment with electricity or identify new insect species, but some were driven by curiosity. (If you remember the Web in the 1990s, there was also a lot of amazing creativity that found an outlet via personal passion-sites that had nothing to do with earning an income.) If nobody really needed to work I think that's it quite possible that the huge population multiplied by a tiny percentage of people spontaneously taking up a creative pursuit (science, music, writing, mathematics, sculpture, animation...) could provide us with a "creative class" of a decent size. How many contemporaries of Henry Cavendish were born with comparable latent curiosity but left no scientific discoveries behind because they had to work in the fields all their lives instead of inheriting wealth? I personally stopped pursuing scientific research and started writing software (very little of it truly novel) because the wages and employment situation are so much better with software. If I didn't have to worry about income ever again I'd spend more time on truly novel interests. It's kind of sad if other people would use their newfound freedom from waged labor to rot on a couch in front of the TV, but not so concerning that I'd assign them a self improvement life-nanny.
Florin_Andrei 10y ago
Boredom quickly becomes a non-issue when the real issue is starvation. I'd love to get to the point where the main problem is being bored. I fear that, if the current social and political dogmas don't change, a heck of a lot of people will get kicked to the curb once AI-driven automation really takes off.
- TheProbabilists 10y ago
  Some learned observers say that's how we birthed communism, in the first place. Bored intelligentsia, often very very affluent themselves or under the tutelage of wealthy benefactors, who have been divorced from even the merest worry of a hand-to-mouth existence thought up Communism. The rest as they say is history.
crazy2be 10y ago
It does come up? In the case of pensions and royalties, it is wealth from prior work, so it's not really in the same category morally (for a culture that believes in the virtue of work). Social security and inherited wealth definately do have a sort of stigma attached to them though, precisely because of the lifestyles that "trust fund children" tend to live, and because the poor are already stigmatized in general. The structure of social security makes real problems here too, where people can't get jobs without losing their social security.
- stuaxo 10y ago
  The stigma that trust fund kids face is nothing compared to what people on benefits face. In Britain channel 5 has a whole subgenre of programmes about people on benefits, while similarly the Daily Express runs articles about the most extreme cases.
- sologoub 10y ago
  On "trust fund children", the lifestyle of a few loud examples is likely painting an unrepresentative picture to the masses. I'd love to see some real stats or study on people who inherited substantial wealth. On one hand, society seems to argue that inherited privilege perpetuates itself, which means that wealthy offspring are succeeding, sometimes despite their abilities. On the other, we have the stereotype of "trust fund babies" who by conventional wisdom don't amount to much and don't contribute to society. So which is it - is inherited wealth a road to success or failure? Likely, both with outcome dependent on other factors then wealth. If anyone has a good study to read on this that actually took more than anecdotal evidence, I'd love to read it.
  - ryandrake 10y ago
    It depends on your definition of success. The offspring of the wealthy tend to remain wealthy, regardless of whether or not they "contribute to society". If you consider wealth perpetuation success then they are succeeding.
    - sologoub 10y ago
fictioncircle 10y ago
> It's funny how boredom, vice, and the indignity of receiving income without continual labor loom in importance if and only if we're talking about technological unemployment. What of people receiving Social Security, pensions, inherited wealth, royalties from patents and copyrights, rents collected on real estate...? It is largely a desire for a control mechanism where the sheep are inherently dependent on the mechanism to eat. The retired pensioners and independently wealthy are both largely willing to sustain the status quo without substantial, rapid change. The scary thing to people at the top of the ladder is what happens when it isn't just those two segments of the population? What happens when you have millions of rebellious young people completely free of the 9-5 to grind to survive? They don't know if the answer supports the status quo and to them its a scary unknown.
- roryisok 10y ago
  I'm not against Universal Basic Income, but there are some things about it which worry me, and which don't seem to come up very much in these discussions. leverage If we're all on basic income, we no longer have any leverage if our "wages" are reduced. The ruling classes can decide to drop the amount we earn, and there's not much we can do about it. Sure, we can "vote", but we can't strike, which is a far more powerful way to fight against pay decreases. education the main driving force behind education is the need for employment. of course plenty of people seek education purely for their own fulfilment, and we imagine with the free time that will come with joblessness, more people will do this. but we'll almost certainly see a drop in the number of young people attending college, since there's no "need". with less people in college, the overall level of education around the world will drop.
  - fictioncircle 10y ago
    > If we're all on basic income, we no longer have any leverage if our "wages" are reduced. The ruling classes can decide to drop the amount we earn, and there's not much we can do about it. Sure, we can "vote", but we can't strike, which is a far more powerful way to fight against pay decreases. You could still strike. UBI has nothing to do with employment and it enables you to sustain strikes longer as you are guaranteed income regardless of employment status. (i.e. you won't starve) > the main driving force behind education is the need for employment. of course plenty of people seek education purely for their own fulfilment, and we imagine with the free time that will come with joblessness, more people will do this. but we'll almost certainly see a drop in the number of young people attending college, since there's no "need". with less people in college, the overall level of education around the world will drop. Tbh, I think many "creative" majors go into creative majors (despite the economic practicality) because they want to. (i.e. Art, English)
TheSmiddy 10y ago
The idea that giving someone just enough money to live will kill their motivation is insane. If that were true why do people still work 40+ hour weeks when they could be earning enough to live on just 15? Most UBI schemes are initially targeting around 1k per month which is nowhere near enough satisfy the vast majority of people.
- gozur88 10y ago
  >If that were true why do people still work 40+ hour weeks when they could be earning enough to live on just 15? There are all sorts of practical reasons why it's difficult to work 15 hours every week, the biggest of which is employers don't want to hire you. If you're flipping burgers, sure, but it's pretty rare to find that arrangement for a professional job.
  - nojvek 10y ago
    When everyone working 40 hours they are getting paid a lot more. They can afford high rents and mortgages. Even as a software engineer I struggle with rent and don't leave much for savings. When a robot is doing low skilled jobs and education is insanely expensive like it is now, the gap is inevitable. Capital buys AI allowing one person to do the work of many and reap the rewards of it. America is built on this very idea.
    - vegiraghav 10y ago
      well robots arent just doing low skilled jobs here. They are on the verge of replacing many white collaar jobs
      - drvdevd 10y ago
        This is an important point. AI could replace many programmers for example. Or make better investment decisions. It has the potential to kill the entire notion of wealth as we currently know it, regardless of social standing. What then?
fkchnmodpol 10y ago
It's fundementally about control. The people in power are afraid they will not remain in power if suddenly tens of millions of adults are given the opportunity and free time to scrutinize the decisions of the elite.
ryandrake 10y ago
Basic Income will never be politically possible in places where it's culturally expected that a living must be "earned". It's more likely we'll end up paying 50% of the population to dig holes and paying the other 50% to fill them in, than implementing a basic income.
- battlebot 10y ago
  We already do that--the number of government workers is insane. Healthcare is another place where there are tons of make work jobs. What you describe already exists right now.
- laughfactory 10y ago
  This is so true. You could argue we already have this occurring in the US, for example. I've worked many places where it's unclear exactly why it requires so many people doing their various jobs to keep the business afloat. I've even held various positions which seemed like that: some days I would dig holes, other days I'd fill them in (metaphorically). I'm not sure how this happens in private industry, maybe because of various incentives from the government? Tax breaks, etc.?
- tluyben2 10y ago
  ... never ... It'll take a few generations probably. If living cannot be 'earned' for the majority, it'll be done fast enough with that opinion.
- crdoconnor 10y ago
  In the United States you have plenty of holes that need to be dug (crumbling infrastructure) and a historically low labor force participation level and some people are still arguing that the cost of employing people to dig them is too high while arguing that BI will be necessary very soon because robots.
ar0 10y ago
The topics of "boredom, vice and the indignity of receiving income without continual labor" come up whenever there is unearned income (from the point of view of the recipient). In this area, UBI and welfare benefits are very different from pensions, royalties or rents which - from the point of view of the recipient - have all been earned (through prior work) and thus don't come with indignity / stigma attached. Inherited wealth is in some ways comparable and this is why there exist many examples where heirs have ruined family fortunes by desparately trying to make their own mark. (And many heirs of family fortunes would probably score high on the "vice" rankings, too.) Look (because these posts don't seem to sit well with the HN crowd): I'm not against a UBI. I'm just saying that it will not solve all the problems. Getting people money to live is only one piece of the equation. Making it socially acceptable (both regarding the inside perspective of the recipients themselves and their self-esteem as well as regarding the outside view of society) to live off of UBI instead of being in regular employment will IMHO be far more challenging and will take time (maybe generations).
- notahacker 10y ago
  Inherited wealth is if anything a generous comparison, since those eligible to inherit wealth are often encouraged by their parents to jump through sizeable work-ethic related hoops to ensure their inheritance, and inheritance is usually with good reason more heavily taxed than most money transfers. UBI is all about assuming that it's entirely unreasonable to set thresholds of need or effort to state handouts when we could instead deny them to people solely on more reasonable criteria like whether they had the decency to be born in a particular country. So yeah, I actually am against UBI for the foreseeable future, regardless of how well that sits with the HN crowd. Since in the real world we're a very long way from hard AI, replicators and post scarcity economics, UBI is - at best - redistributing from each according to his ability to each according to their ability to prove they're not a foreigner. Sure, the world isn't particularly fair anyway, but let's not pretend it's a step in the right direction to removing any assumption the welfare state is supposed to be a social insurance system for people that have paid into the system and are genuinely looking for work, and replacing it with the ethos that $nationals have a fundamental and inalienable entitlement to the fruits of other's labour (mostly non-entitled foreigners') if they're not particularly interested in trying to earn it themselves. (Of course there are plenty of arguments against UBI that don't rely on notions of "dignity of work" like the important practical question of how much you're willing to slash existing welfare or raise taxes to give state handouts to much larger numbers of people that haven't indicated they need or want them, but that's probably a tangent to this particular article)
vacri 10y ago
> “A universal basic income doesn’t give people dignity or protect them from boredom and vice,” It may not give them dignity, but it protects them from poverty, which strips dignity. It also protects them from vice-based-on-need, just not vice-based-on-boredom.
moxious 10y ago
> Some people sound like they're planning how to invent enough bullshit jobs to provide everyone a regular 9-5 schedule and a supervisor even after machines are doing all the strictly necessary labor. I think that's mistaken on many fronts. First, new jobs that get invented aren't bullshit. Just as the internet destroyed DVD manufacturing jobs, it created smartphone app jobs, which weren't make-work. Second, the day will never come when machines are doing all of the strictly necessary labor; this is an affectation of the group-think that happens on this site. The firmly established pattern in humanity is that if you automate all of the existing work, humans will start wanting new things, which creates more work. It just....never....stops. So while I know there are techno-enthusiasts who think AI is so imminent that it can take over even high value knowledge work in the near term, and while I know that "elimination of the middle class through robotics" is a fashionable viewpoint right now, let me just say that I have been reading articles about how strong AI was just around the corner, just a few years off...for the last 20 years. I feel exactly the same way about driverless cars. Every time I pointed that pattern out, someone was always quick to say "this time is different" without really having much evidence why it was. So I guess I'll wait for my thread reply that this time, no, it's really different, AI is going to eat all of the jobs. I'm enthusiastic about all tech development, but prognostications about the future are pretty much always wrong. Isn't that intuitive? Does anybody really believe they can predict the future? It's like Star Trek and the 1960s view of what today would be like. Everybody expected matter transporters and flying cars. They didn't get either. But they did get the tricorder.
- philipkglass 10y ago
  If the market economy keeps producing new jobs fast enough to compensate for technology eliminating old ones, then I agree that we don't need to plan for mass unemployment at all. But I want to stake out a position early on that if the market economy plus automation does not actually produce enough jobs for job-seekers in practice, then we should accept that mass employment was a historically contingent phenomenon that can be let go. It's not something that governments should try to keep shambling around in zombie form after the original economic rationale has died. (Bullshit jobs invented just to keep people provided with employment/income is one kind of bad response that I'm worried we'll see from protective governments. Another bad response, from neglectful governments, would be to ignore mass technological unemployment observed in practice, should it come to pass, because they're too wedded to a theory that enough new jobs will always arise in the private sector to offset jobs eliminated by automation.)
kitd 10y ago
What of people receiving Social Security, pensions, inherited wealth, royalties from patents and copyrights, rents collected on real estate...? Earned income is directly or indirectly linked to how you perceive society values you, and therefore your self-esteem. Pensions have been earned previously, royalties earned by your intellect, even inheritance is earnings by your family. A life on social security is known to lower self-esteem. Most recipients are desperate to work. The UBI undercuts this to some extent. It may be part of the answer, but it is only a small part IMHO.
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Shaxberd 10y ago
I was going to start the next Apple but $10k a year and the prospect of a leisurely life of 40oz's in the park and generic brand mac n' cheese was enough to kill what overwhelming propensity and drive I had.
xg15 10y ago
A point i'm always surprised is not discussed much in the basic income debate is loss of control. Whenever a job is performed by a person, that person has the power to refuse doing the job or put their own spin on it. The effect is that there some basic checks of ethics. This keeps businesses from doing things blatantly against the interests of society and ensures that CEOs with grand visions of shaping humanity are forced to discuss their ideas with others before implementing them. All that is not true if a major part of society is not part of the work process. In the extreme, that could make the old "bond villain with robot army" scenario actually credible. But more realistically, it could lead to large and important aspects of society being under unchecked control by a relatively small number of people. This is already true today with communication and data collection (e.g. google/apple/etc can push arbitrary updates to billions of phones around the world without any sort of oversight) and it will likely be the same with transport and manufacturing in the future. I fear basic income not only doesn't address this problem but even worsens it by declaring it normal that a large part of society does not take part at all in shaping that society.
- dllthomas 10y ago
  Many things that people do without it being "a job" have a significant impact on shaping society. To the degree that your concern is legitimate (and I think to some degree it is) it is a concern about automation irrespective of basic income.
iAmAndSoRU 10y ago
Thing is, we are so far away from this reality of 'AI took our jobs' ala South Park's regrettable characterization of Southern indolence against the influx of low cost labor that it begs credulity to stand around the water cooler and say 'Gee, AI sure will suck when we all have nothing to do and no job to give us money to do it.' This is reactionary hedging. Last I heard, they can barely get robots to walk, and they damn sure can't answer a customer service line in under three painstakingly obtuse questions. Let's dial the rhetoric down shall we? Those of us in AI could use an attaboy instead of all the fear mongering. It's getting super old, and is groundless, baseless and frankly, rather disappointing to see on a tech oriented site. The world is not Keanu Reeves in The Matrix, Skynet is nothing but Google's spiders run amuck (sorry Serge et al, but srsly, do you really need ALL the data to run a decent search engine? You guys did very well for a long, long time with much simpler algorithms and everyone could find out where the closest Arby's is), and all this sabre rattling is more about the big AI firms gathering their might and squeezing competitors out of the cool kids club. You want reality? Google hypertorus quantum fluctuations in ground state bosons and see where General Intelligence is in terms of replicating human intelligence. Lot of papers being published on entanglement, but zero on how to even apply that knowledge to GI vis a vis an actual model of what entanglement entails. Ugh, the effing tedium of what people wanna scare us about relative to their working knowledge of the medium is unbelievably trite. Read a textbook, or ten s'il vous plait.

shams93 10y ago

Exactly we could have a society oriented around the arts and sciences, pure creativity and discovery instead of bullshit jobs we could put the pedal to the metal in human freedom and innovation.

waqf 10y ago
People are already creating more art than we actually need (witness how hard it is to make a living as an artist). Now just wait till the AIs become serious competition at that too.
- wilkommen 10y ago
  The amount of money someone can make in our economy as an artist isn't a reflection of how much art we "need." Art in particular is not a commodity that society can just have enough of. And in general, the price something fetches in our economy isn't always a reflection of its value to society. See: salaries of social workers, emergency medical technicians, etc.
  - lowpro 10y ago
    Everything, including art, follows supply and demand. Value is the point where they meet. Salaries of social works and EMTs are where the supply of those positions meet the need for those positions in any certain area. Art has a defined supply and demand, where the supply is high and demand is low (probably due to the fact you can buy copies of famous masterpieces for very cheap).
    - dublinben 10y ago
      What is the value of the Sistene Chapel? How much would it cost to make a second one?
    - AnthonyMouse 10y ago
      > Everything, including art, follows supply and demand. It isn't about supply and demand, it's about transaction costs. Suppose you could create a work of art that fifty million people would each value at 25c, so total value of two million dollars. Far more than enough to pay your wages for a year. But if you actually try to charge them, the credit card company wants 30c + 3% per person (consuming more than the entire value) and other payment mechanisms suffer similarly infeasible costs in money or inconvenience or otherwise. But if we would pay the artist unconditionally and then they create art and give it away, we would get two million dollars worth of art for $12,000 and with no transaction costs. Meanwhile this allows some of the artists to become famous and then charge prices for their art that exceed the transaction costs, and now they're paying taxes and funding the UBI for the next generation of artists/inventors/experimentalists/etc.
      - 10y ago
- thatguy0900 10y ago
  Once ai starts making better art than humans it might be able to improve itself better than humans as well. At that point we don't need humans either. Still nice to keep us around though.
wozniacki 10y ago
Putting aside our political slants, one might ask when exactly in the history of human civilization has any fraction of humanity ever consistently demonstrated that they were willing to devote themselves to the sole pursuit of "the arts and sciences, pure creativity and discovery" for any significant length of time? If such instances existed, did those noble pursuits come without costs? To either themselves or others? Say they did manage to exist in harmony with other civilizations (who may not have had any such lofty ideals or pursuits) then how long did they manage to keep doing so? [1] [2] How long did they survive? How long did their inventions or works of knowledge survive, in their intended forms? In fact the evidence is to the contrary that when humans are bequeathed with a surfeit of riches and time to devote, they indulged in decadence, degeneracy and if nothing else sloth. At which time, they were quickly wiped off by their geopolitical peers who placed a higher importance on self-preservation than they did on arts, science & discovery. We like to think we have ridden ourselves from the shortsightedness of those older, less-prudent & ill-advised civilizations. But really, on balance, have we? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Peoples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Peoples [2] http://www.ancient.eu/Sea_Peoples/ http://www.ancient.eu/Sea_Peoples/
- vacri 10y ago
  "oriented around" != "sole pursuit". You're making a strawman by inserting an overly-high bar. However, the USA in the 50s and 60s matches your demand. An incredibly wealthy time, it was also a golden age of modern art and a golden age of science in so many fields. The moon shot itself cost 4% of the USA's GDP. How well did these advances survive? The cultural waves turned out to be the origin of the USA's soft power, with movies, music, and fashion spreading out throughout the world like nothing before. And much of the science continues to be the bedrock of science, engineering, and manufacturing today.
edblarney 10y ago
"we could have a society oriented around the arts and sciences, pure creativity and discovery instead of bullshit jobs " I'm afraid your statement implies a misunderstanding of what 'the economy' is. 'The economy' is people providing services and building products for one another. So that guy who waited on you at the restaurant, the girl who did your payroll, the guy who delivered your mail, the person monitoring your blocks internet connections, the person who planted crops, the person making sure your street is safe to walk down ... Those 'bullshit jobs' all exist for a reason - because they provide value to someone (like you), and we are willing to pay for it all by doing stuff for others as well. 'The jobs' that we do are a function of what other people in the economy 'want done' in terms of products and services. Not a function of 'what they want to do'. If you don't want to do anything that 'helps others' - that's fine, but you can't expect for them to help you in return if your 'lifestyle choice' is 'windsurfing'. But when we do help each other, the whole is actually greater than the sum of the parts (i.e. comparative value) - and that's where we really start to win. Most of the things you need done for you are not that fun. It'll always be that way.
- andai 10y ago
  Most of them can be automated.
  - edblarney 10y ago
    True, but not for a very long time. The day someone that can make a robot to clean my bathroom and then make me a ham sandwich, I'll get worried. In the meantime, other industries like sports, entertainment, tourism, etc. expand. One are that will be the last to be automated is 'taking care of the elderly' - it's human-intense and that market is only expanding.
    - andai 10y ago
      I wish you were right. I wish it were 50 years off. Life, however, has other plans: https://arstechnica.com/business/2017/02/how-being-replaced-by-a-machine-turned-this-graphic-artist-into-an-activist/ https://arstechnica.com/business/2017/02/how-being-replaced-... (Incidentally there's actually a gif of a robot cooking in there.)
masonic 10y ago
Do you see much "creativity and discovery" coming out of present-day homeless shelters and encampments?
- industriousthou 10y ago
  I mean, the whole idea is that if people have their basic needs met, they'll be able to be more creative and productive. Homeless people are the perfect counter example.
  - Turing_Machine 10y ago
    No. Homeless people almost all have mental illness, substance abuse problems, or some combination of the two. I'm not seeing why you and the OP think they are representative of the general population in any way. They are, pretty much by definition, people who are too messed up to function in society.
    - knieveltech 10y ago
      You couldn't be more wrong here. Have some facts: https://www.nlchp.org/documents/Homeless_Stats_Fact_Sheet https://www.nlchp.org/documents/Homeless_Stats_Fact_Sheet
      - Turing_Machine 10y ago
        Posting a link to a spun document from an advocacy group doesn't actually prove me wrong. For example, "sleeping in public places not meant for human habitation" would include anyone who has ever taken a nap in the airport, even one time. When the piece starts out with an obviously bogus definition, there's really not much point in going through it point by point. It has zero credibility from the start. Other sources (easily found by Google) suggest that up to 2/3 of the real chronic homeless population has problems with alcohol and/or other substances
        knieveltech 10y ago
gdeghtfg 10y ago
"creativity" in Arts and Sciences (like academia in general) is driven by a silly popularity game. It is as BS as are lives across the spectrum. Far off mountains appear hospitable indeed.

zeteo 10y ago

> What of people receiving Social Security, pensions, inherited wealth, royalties from patents and copyrights, rents collected on real estate...? Not exactly the definition of the creative class is it?

bijection 10y ago
Plenty of scientists, entrepreneurs and creative thinkers have backgrounds that would allow them to subsist with minimal work, and choose to do what they do anyway.
- tnzn 10y ago
  Heck in countries like France, scientists are paid like shit (I mean, by US standards) and still do unpaid overtime without being forced to.
philipkglass 10y ago
Before governments started heavily funding scientific research in the 20th century, most basic science was done as some wealthy person's hobby. Of course there were far more aristocrats who were interested in using their moneyed leisure to (e.g.) race horses than to experiment with electricity or identify new insect species, but some were driven by curiosity. (If you remember the Web in the 1990s, there was also a lot of amazing creativity that found an outlet via personal passion-sites that had nothing to do with earning an income.) If nobody really needed to work I think that's it quite possible that the huge population multiplied by a tiny percentage of people spontaneously taking up a creative pursuit (science, music, writing, mathematics, sculpture, animation...) could provide us with a "creative class" of a decent size. How many contemporaries of Henry Cavendish were born with comparable latent curiosity but left no scientific discoveries behind because they had to work in the fields all their lives instead of inheriting wealth? I personally stopped pursuing scientific research and started writing software (very little of it truly novel) because the wages and employment situation are so much better with software. If I didn't have to worry about income ever again I'd spend more time on truly novel interests. It's kind of sad if other people would use their newfound freedom from waged labor to rot on a couch in front of the TV, but not so concerning that I'd assign them a self improvement life-nanny.

Florin_Andrei 10y ago

Boredom quickly becomes a non-issue when the real issue is starvation. I'd love to get to the point where the main problem is being bored. I fear that, if the current social and political dogmas don't change, a heck of a lot of people will get kicked to the curb once AI-driven automation really takes off.

TheProbabilists 10y ago
Some learned observers say that's how we birthed communism, in the first place. Bored intelligentsia, often very very affluent themselves or under the tutelage of wealthy benefactors, who have been divorced from even the merest worry of a hand-to-mouth existence thought up Communism. The rest as they say is history.

crazy2be 10y ago

It does come up? In the case of pensions and royalties, it is wealth from prior work, so it's not really in the same category morally (for a culture that believes in the virtue of work). Social security and inherited wealth definately do have a sort of stigma attached to them though, precisely because of the lifestyles that "trust fund children" tend to live, and because the poor are already stigmatized in general. The structure of social security makes real problems here too, where people can't get jobs without losing their social security.

stuaxo 10y ago
The stigma that trust fund kids face is nothing compared to what people on benefits face. In Britain channel 5 has a whole subgenre of programmes about people on benefits, while similarly the Daily Express runs articles about the most extreme cases.
sologoub 10y ago
On "trust fund children", the lifestyle of a few loud examples is likely painting an unrepresentative picture to the masses. I'd love to see some real stats or study on people who inherited substantial wealth. On one hand, society seems to argue that inherited privilege perpetuates itself, which means that wealthy offspring are succeeding, sometimes despite their abilities. On the other, we have the stereotype of "trust fund babies" who by conventional wisdom don't amount to much and don't contribute to society. So which is it - is inherited wealth a road to success or failure? Likely, both with outcome dependent on other factors then wealth. If anyone has a good study to read on this that actually took more than anecdotal evidence, I'd love to read it.
- ryandrake 10y ago
  It depends on your definition of success. The offspring of the wealthy tend to remain wealthy, regardless of whether or not they "contribute to society". If you consider wealth perpetuation success then they are succeeding.
  - sologoub 10y ago

fictioncircle 10y ago

> It's funny how boredom, vice, and the indignity of receiving income without continual labor loom in importance if and only if we're talking about technological unemployment. What of people receiving Social Security, pensions, inherited wealth, royalties from patents and copyrights, rents collected on real estate...? It is largely a desire for a control mechanism where the sheep are inherently dependent on the mechanism to eat. The retired pensioners and independently wealthy are both largely willing to sustain the status quo without substantial, rapid change. The scary thing to people at the top of the ladder is what happens when it isn't just those two segments of the population? What happens when you have millions of rebellious young people completely free of the 9-5 to grind to survive? They don't know if the answer supports the status quo and to them its a scary unknown.

roryisok 10y ago
I'm not against Universal Basic Income, but there are some things about it which worry me, and which don't seem to come up very much in these discussions. leverage If we're all on basic income, we no longer have any leverage if our "wages" are reduced. The ruling classes can decide to drop the amount we earn, and there's not much we can do about it. Sure, we can "vote", but we can't strike, which is a far more powerful way to fight against pay decreases. education the main driving force behind education is the need for employment. of course plenty of people seek education purely for their own fulfilment, and we imagine with the free time that will come with joblessness, more people will do this. but we'll almost certainly see a drop in the number of young people attending college, since there's no "need". with less people in college, the overall level of education around the world will drop.
- fictioncircle 10y ago
  > If we're all on basic income, we no longer have any leverage if our "wages" are reduced. The ruling classes can decide to drop the amount we earn, and there's not much we can do about it. Sure, we can "vote", but we can't strike, which is a far more powerful way to fight against pay decreases. You could still strike. UBI has nothing to do with employment and it enables you to sustain strikes longer as you are guaranteed income regardless of employment status. (i.e. you won't starve) > the main driving force behind education is the need for employment. of course plenty of people seek education purely for their own fulfilment, and we imagine with the free time that will come with joblessness, more people will do this. but we'll almost certainly see a drop in the number of young people attending college, since there's no "need". with less people in college, the overall level of education around the world will drop. Tbh, I think many "creative" majors go into creative majors (despite the economic practicality) because they want to. (i.e. Art, English)

TheSmiddy 10y ago

The idea that giving someone just enough money to live will kill their motivation is insane. If that were true why do people still work 40+ hour weeks when they could be earning enough to live on just 15? Most UBI schemes are initially targeting around 1k per month which is nowhere near enough satisfy the vast majority of people.

gozur88 10y ago
>If that were true why do people still work 40+ hour weeks when they could be earning enough to live on just 15? There are all sorts of practical reasons why it's difficult to work 15 hours every week, the biggest of which is employers don't want to hire you. If you're flipping burgers, sure, but it's pretty rare to find that arrangement for a professional job.
- nojvek 10y ago
  When everyone working 40 hours they are getting paid a lot more. They can afford high rents and mortgages. Even as a software engineer I struggle with rent and don't leave much for savings. When a robot is doing low skilled jobs and education is insanely expensive like it is now, the gap is inevitable. Capital buys AI allowing one person to do the work of many and reap the rewards of it. America is built on this very idea.
  - vegiraghav 10y ago
    well robots arent just doing low skilled jobs here. They are on the verge of replacing many white collaar jobs
    - drvdevd 10y ago
      This is an important point. AI could replace many programmers for example. Or make better investment decisions. It has the potential to kill the entire notion of wealth as we currently know it, regardless of social standing. What then?

fkchnmodpol 10y ago

It's fundementally about control. The people in power are afraid they will not remain in power if suddenly tens of millions of adults are given the opportunity and free time to scrutinize the decisions of the elite.

ryandrake 10y ago

Basic Income will never be politically possible in places where it's culturally expected that a living must be "earned". It's more likely we'll end up paying 50% of the population to dig holes and paying the other 50% to fill them in, than implementing a basic income.

battlebot 10y ago
We already do that--the number of government workers is insane. Healthcare is another place where there are tons of make work jobs. What you describe already exists right now.
laughfactory 10y ago
This is so true. You could argue we already have this occurring in the US, for example. I've worked many places where it's unclear exactly why it requires so many people doing their various jobs to keep the business afloat. I've even held various positions which seemed like that: some days I would dig holes, other days I'd fill them in (metaphorically). I'm not sure how this happens in private industry, maybe because of various incentives from the government? Tax breaks, etc.?
tluyben2 10y ago
... never ... It'll take a few generations probably. If living cannot be 'earned' for the majority, it'll be done fast enough with that opinion.
crdoconnor 10y ago
In the United States you have plenty of holes that need to be dug (crumbling infrastructure) and a historically low labor force participation level and some people are still arguing that the cost of employing people to dig them is too high while arguing that BI will be necessary very soon because robots.

ar0 10y ago

The topics of "boredom, vice and the indignity of receiving income without continual labor" come up whenever there is unearned income (from the point of view of the recipient). In this area, UBI and welfare benefits are very different from pensions, royalties or rents which - from the point of view of the recipient - have all been earned (through prior work) and thus don't come with indignity / stigma attached. Inherited wealth is in some ways comparable and this is why there exist many examples where heirs have ruined family fortunes by desparately trying to make their own mark. (And many heirs of family fortunes would probably score high on the "vice" rankings, too.) Look (because these posts don't seem to sit well with the HN crowd): I'm not against a UBI. I'm just saying that it will not solve all the problems. Getting people money to live is only one piece of the equation. Making it socially acceptable (both regarding the inside perspective of the recipients themselves and their self-esteem as well as regarding the outside view of society) to live off of UBI instead of being in regular employment will IMHO be far more challenging and will take time (maybe generations).

notahacker 10y ago
Inherited wealth is if anything a generous comparison, since those eligible to inherit wealth are often encouraged by their parents to jump through sizeable work-ethic related hoops to ensure their inheritance, and inheritance is usually with good reason more heavily taxed than most money transfers. UBI is all about assuming that it's entirely unreasonable to set thresholds of need or effort to state handouts when we could instead deny them to people solely on more reasonable criteria like whether they had the decency to be born in a particular country. So yeah, I actually am against UBI for the foreseeable future, regardless of how well that sits with the HN crowd. Since in the real world we're a very long way from hard AI, replicators and post scarcity economics, UBI is - at best - redistributing from each according to his ability to each according to their ability to prove they're not a foreigner. Sure, the world isn't particularly fair anyway, but let's not pretend it's a step in the right direction to removing any assumption the welfare state is supposed to be a social insurance system for people that have paid into the system and are genuinely looking for work, and replacing it with the ethos that $nationals have a fundamental and inalienable entitlement to the fruits of other's labour (mostly non-entitled foreigners') if they're not particularly interested in trying to earn it themselves. (Of course there are plenty of arguments against UBI that don't rely on notions of "dignity of work" like the important practical question of how much you're willing to slash existing welfare or raise taxes to give state handouts to much larger numbers of people that haven't indicated they need or want them, but that's probably a tangent to this particular article)

vacri 10y ago

> “A universal basic income doesn’t give people dignity or protect them from boredom and vice,” It may not give them dignity, but it protects them from poverty, which strips dignity. It also protects them from vice-based-on-need, just not vice-based-on-boredom.

moxious 10y ago

> Some people sound like they're planning how to invent enough bullshit jobs to provide everyone a regular 9-5 schedule and a supervisor even after machines are doing all the strictly necessary labor. I think that's mistaken on many fronts. First, new jobs that get invented aren't bullshit. Just as the internet destroyed DVD manufacturing jobs, it created smartphone app jobs, which weren't make-work. Second, the day will never come when machines are doing all of the strictly necessary labor; this is an affectation of the group-think that happens on this site. The firmly established pattern in humanity is that if you automate all of the existing work, humans will start wanting new things, which creates more work. It just....never....stops. So while I know there are techno-enthusiasts who think AI is so imminent that it can take over even high value knowledge work in the near term, and while I know that "elimination of the middle class through robotics" is a fashionable viewpoint right now, let me just say that I have been reading articles about how strong AI was just around the corner, just a few years off...for the last 20 years. I feel exactly the same way about driverless cars. Every time I pointed that pattern out, someone was always quick to say "this time is different" without really having much evidence why it was. So I guess I'll wait for my thread reply that this time, no, it's really different, AI is going to eat all of the jobs. I'm enthusiastic about all tech development, but prognostications about the future are pretty much always wrong. Isn't that intuitive? Does anybody really believe they can predict the future? It's like Star Trek and the 1960s view of what today would be like. Everybody expected matter transporters and flying cars. They didn't get either. But they did get the tricorder.

philipkglass 10y ago
If the market economy keeps producing new jobs fast enough to compensate for technology eliminating old ones, then I agree that we don't need to plan for mass unemployment at all. But I want to stake out a position early on that if the market economy plus automation does not actually produce enough jobs for job-seekers in practice, then we should accept that mass employment was a historically contingent phenomenon that can be let go. It's not something that governments should try to keep shambling around in zombie form after the original economic rationale has died. (Bullshit jobs invented just to keep people provided with employment/income is one kind of bad response that I'm worried we'll see from protective governments. Another bad response, from neglectful governments, would be to ignore mass technological unemployment observed in practice, should it come to pass, because they're too wedded to a theory that enough new jobs will always arise in the private sector to offset jobs eliminated by automation.)

kitd 10y ago

What of people receiving Social Security, pensions, inherited wealth, royalties from patents and copyrights, rents collected on real estate...? Earned income is directly or indirectly linked to how you perceive society values you, and therefore your self-esteem. Pensions have been earned previously, royalties earned by your intellect, even inheritance is earnings by your family. A life on social security is known to lower self-esteem. Most recipients are desperate to work. The UBI undercuts this to some extent. It may be part of the answer, but it is only a small part IMHO.

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Shaxberd 10y ago

I was going to start the next Apple but $10k a year and the prospect of a leisurely life of 40oz's in the park and generic brand mac n' cheese was enough to kill what overwhelming propensity and drive I had.

xg15 10y ago

A point i'm always surprised is not discussed much in the basic income debate is loss of control. Whenever a job is performed by a person, that person has the power to refuse doing the job or put their own spin on it. The effect is that there some basic checks of ethics. This keeps businesses from doing things blatantly against the interests of society and ensures that CEOs with grand visions of shaping humanity are forced to discuss their ideas with others before implementing them. All that is not true if a major part of society is not part of the work process. In the extreme, that could make the old "bond villain with robot army" scenario actually credible. But more realistically, it could lead to large and important aspects of society being under unchecked control by a relatively small number of people. This is already true today with communication and data collection (e.g. google/apple/etc can push arbitrary updates to billions of phones around the world without any sort of oversight) and it will likely be the same with transport and manufacturing in the future. I fear basic income not only doesn't address this problem but even worsens it by declaring it normal that a large part of society does not take part at all in shaping that society.

dllthomas 10y ago
Many things that people do without it being "a job" have a significant impact on shaping society. To the degree that your concern is legitimate (and I think to some degree it is) it is a concern about automation irrespective of basic income.

iAmAndSoRU 10y ago

Thing is, we are so far away from this reality of 'AI took our jobs' ala South Park's regrettable characterization of Southern indolence against the influx of low cost labor that it begs credulity to stand around the water cooler and say 'Gee, AI sure will suck when we all have nothing to do and no job to give us money to do it.' This is reactionary hedging. Last I heard, they can barely get robots to walk, and they damn sure can't answer a customer service line in under three painstakingly obtuse questions. Let's dial the rhetoric down shall we? Those of us in AI could use an attaboy instead of all the fear mongering. It's getting super old, and is groundless, baseless and frankly, rather disappointing to see on a tech oriented site. The world is not Keanu Reeves in The Matrix, Skynet is nothing but Google's spiders run amuck (sorry Serge et al, but srsly, do you really need ALL the data to run a decent search engine? You guys did very well for a long, long time with much simpler algorithms and everyone could find out where the closest Arby's is), and all this sabre rattling is more about the big AI firms gathering their might and squeezing competitors out of the cool kids club. You want reality? Google hypertorus quantum fluctuations in ground state bosons and see where General Intelligence is in terms of replicating human intelligence. Lot of papers being published on entanglement, but zero on how to even apply that knowledge to GI vis a vis an actual model of what entanglement entails. Ugh, the effing tedium of what people wanna scare us about relative to their working knowledge of the medium is unbelievably trite. Read a textbook, or ten s'il vous plait.