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To all the detractors of work ethic and the supporters of UBI: What freedom will exist in a world where everyone is reliant on their government for survival, an

To all the detractors of work ethic and the supporters of UBI: What freedom will exist in a world where everyone is reliant on their government for survival, and all mass communication is mediated by or written by opaque AIs? In trading the yoke of labor for free time we would also trade our independence, and any hope of changing the structure of power that had been set in place. I'm so sick of our new style of wannabe rulers/overlords who use the promise of freeing humanity from labor as the appeal to grant them total power. It's an appeal, among other things, to the basest sloth and laziness. "Imagine what you would do if you never had to work" is a daytime talk show hook, and a way to lure people into gambling and playing the lottery and investing in crypto. It's not a revolutionary slogan, it's the oldest con in the book.

arrrg 4y ago
Everyone (to a close approximation) is already reliant on their government for survival. Taking yourself out of society and its interdependencies is already basically impossible. (This is not an argument against all points you are making, I just wanted to say something to that aspect of your comment.)
- zarzavat 4y ago
  There’s a big difference between being indirectly dependent on the government to maintain society, and being hand-to-mouth dependent on the government for food/welfare. As most people who have been in the latter situation can attest (at least outside of super rich countries like Norway), it is a distinctly less dignified existence. You live in constant uncertainty that your source of food, source of existence could be withdrawn at any time by government fiat. This is the future our dear thought leaders want for us.
  - AndrewKemendo 4y ago
    Current state of the world: You live in constant uncertainty that your source of food, source of existence could be withdrawn at any time by corporate whim Question: Who do you think the police work for? Hint: It's neither "citizens" nor is it "the government" They work for corporations. Go look at how they act. The whole goal is to provide security for private property holders (aka not you) and increasingly they are private mercenaries that have day jobs as city/state/county policeman. Ask a cop where their "overtime" pay comes from and it's typically protecting some business. Economic and political power should be dispersed as much as possible into the hands of the citizens, not anyone who was able to wrest as much control as possible from others - which is how we apportion it. Do you ask "how did this company I'm applying to get to this position?" If not then you're not doing anything different than picking a political party without due diligence. The act of consolidating power destroys the ethical standing of the institution
    - zarzavat 4y ago
      If your job stops paying you then you can find a new job. If your government stops paying you, you can’t find a new citizenship. A world where work is replaced by UBI is not a utopia. It’s a dystopia where the government controls if you can eat today. In which politicians divide and conquer by differentially giving and denying nutrition to different groups in order to gain votes. Give me a corporate hellscape any day of the week over that. UBI is one of those “semantic stop signs” where people just stop thinking whenever it is mentioned. The term is a stand-in for whatever utopian society the user has in mind. But the implications of UBI as a policy are completely contrary to the stated goals of the users of the term.
dools 4y ago
We are a long, long way from the end of work. Work is simply what we do for others. All we need is a just transition and an end to involuntary unemployment which is best achieved through a federal job guarantee: http://www.jobguarantee.org http://www.jobguarantee.org
davidktr 4y ago
Also great: These people never explain how exactly the profits made from automation will be redistributed. This is a political problem, not an economical or technological one. Already, profits from productivity increases go mostly to capital owners. This is why most of us have so little money, compared with what people used to have 50 years ago. This is why you can't afford a house. If productivity increases had been redistributed such that people could work considerably less while maintaining an acceptable standard of living, we all would work 3-4 days per week. Instead, those gains went to the capital owning class. AI will worsen the situation.
dataflow 4y ago
I don't know what you mean by "work ethic" (why does that have anything to do with UBI?), but regarding UBI, I think you're either exaggerating or misunderstanding some things, and I say these without any regard to my position on the topic (which is complicated). When you think UBI, don't think "everyone gets $300k/year for free so nobody needs to worry about working anymore". Think more like "everyone gets $30k/year for free so nobody's life is paycheck-to-paycheck". There are lots of people who literally don't have the opportunity to do anything (even better jobs!) other than their current jobs, which they need to put food on the table and have a roof over their heads. One of the envisioned benefits of UBI is that it would actually give them some opportunity & breathing room in their schedules to do something else - whether it's raising a kid, learning new skills, applying for other jobs, or anything else. Most people would still have quite a bit of an incentive to work for a more comfortable standard of living - it's just that they won't feel like they have a gun to their heads as the alternative. Does this mean UBI is obviously practical and we should start it tomorrow? No, there are lots of challenges, most notably including the funding itself - not many economies today are able to hand out that much money in a sustainable way, so there's some very hard rethinking necessary to figure out how this could ever work. Does this mean everybody will give a 10x ROI on it in the long term? No, some people would probably not do anything useful with the money. Does this mean UBI solves all problems? No, even if you do your best you can still have bad luck (get hit by a bus, medical bills, etc.). Does this mean UBI would work well everywhere? No, results might vary across different societies. But we're rapidly heading into a world where more and more people are being put out of work, and can't pick up new skills fast enough (if at all) to make ends meet. Expecting everyone to just adapt is incredibly unrealistic. UBI is one envisioned plausible way to address this problem and others systematically. Nobody knows for sure how it would play out in the long term, but to my knowledge nobody has obviously better solutions either.
- vasco 4y ago
  > Think more like "everyone gets $30k/year for free so nobody lives paycheck-to-paycheck What impact would UBI have on inflation? I've read some things about minimum wage increases largely going to landlords. If everyone has 30k, 30k is not worth much, right?
Raptor22 4y ago
This is a simplified version of the argument, but basically: right now, I am dependent on an employer for my survival. Keeping a roof over my head depends on my being competent at my job, AND my employer not deciding to fire me. One of those I can control - the other is completely outside of my control. If instead I was dependent on a democratic government for my survival and keeping a roof over my head, at the very least I and other citizens would have a say in the direction and decisions of that government every time an election happened. Your point does stand in autocracies and dictatorships though.
- vasco 4y ago
  You are not dependent on your employer. You're dependent on society having enough employers at any point that would match with the skills you can provide in exchange for salary, you can switch employers at any time you want. It's not 1-1, it's 1-many right now. By moving that to the government you're actually going from 1-many to 1-1 and getting a way worse deal. Worse deal because the many employers are in competition against each other so you can rely on their self interest to remain in business, whereas the people that get government jobs, their self interest doesn't have an incentive system where it would benefit me.
  - Raptor22 4y ago
    On the surface, yes, there are many employers. How's that going for the folks that have been recently laid off from checks notes... Amazon, Facebook/Meta, Twitter, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, EA, Indeed, Yahoo, Github, Zoom, Dell, Paypal, IBM, Spotify, Goldman Sachs, Coinbase, HP, Cisco... I'm not really sure that going from many possible employers who cannot guarantee my job to a single entity who can is a way worse deal, but ok.
    - vasco 4y ago
      > How's that going for the folks that have been recently laid off from checks notes... Amazon, Facebook/Meta, Twitter, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, EA, Indeed, Yahoo, Github, Zoom, Dell, Paypal, IBM, Spotify, Goldman Sachs, Coinbase, HP, Cisco... They are applying to different companies? Do you believe these employees made a decision to work for one of these companies for life and will now never again get another job? What is your point with this part? > I'm not really sure that going from many possible employers who cannot guarantee my job to a single entity who can is a way worse deal, but ok. I do not want to work for the kinds of jobs "a single entity who can guarantee" jobs can offer me. You know what happens in that world? You receive a note from your teacher when you are in school, telling you that based on what they saw, you are going to be studying X for the rest of your schooling. After studying X the government will send you a letter assigning you to the job where you are needed, wherever it is, and assign you a home near that job. You have no agency in this world. I'm not making this up, this is the only practical way such systems have worked. "Guaranteed work for life from a single entity" also means the guy that runs the "assignment office" for the government will now place his friends in good jobs, and you in bad ones. People who are against corporativism and capitalism have a way of forgetting that if there's "bad people owning companies and houses and stealing our labor", those same defects would be in the people who would work for the government. Bad people don't go away because you change the system, so does your system keep them in check?
IIAOPSW 4y ago
Hard work is only seen as a virtue and sloth a vice because of the context of the world we are currently stuck in. You assume a system of value which might not make sense in the future.
- noduerme 4y ago
  On the contrary, it's the natural state of all thriving organisms to do some form of constructive work. It has also been the human condition and the condition for prosperity as long as we've existed. That isn't to say that leisure and play and pleasure have no value. Not at all! But it's axiomatic that nothing has value without its opposite. And if you look at the wealthy who do not work (as opposed to the ones who do), it's clear that nothing is valued by people without the sense that they've earned it.
K0balt 4y ago
I think what you are missing here is that we are quickly entering a time where employing humans for almost the entirety of management work will be unnecessary, as will a large swath of low hanging creative work, and in a short period of time, most manual labor. The cost of maintaining a human being will exceed to cost of automation in perhaps as much as 75 percent of the workforce. How does an economy function when the surplus value of labor is derived from machinery instead of humans? I know the past answer to this has been that people will just shift to operating or maintenance of the machines, but this shift is fundamentally different because the shift is of mind-power. We have been able to build machines that can deftly do anything that a human can do, and even replicate this capacity in human morphology. The problem has always been operating these machines in a way that replicates or improves upon human ability. Now that we are building machines that can be trained on existing data and synthesize novel solutions based upon that training, the need for human intervention in automated processes, including in the maintenance and repair of this processes, will drop precipitously. Let us consider the economics of a robot, assuming a general purpose anthropoid robot that ca be trained in most commercial processes, and presuppose that the mind for such a device will soon be available either by subscription or in an embodied form. We might see something like this: Mass produced cost will probably be similar to an automobile, at 20-200x the cost per kilogram of automotive engineering so about 30-300 thousand euros. Service life between overhauls at the indicated forces and speeds should achieve approximately 1 billion pivot revolutions if we assume the surface sliding/rotation movement durability of modern mass produced machines. This would translate to about or 8 billion steps or 1/8 rotation gestures. If we assume 1 such gesture or step per second, that translates into a mechanical service life of about 2.2 million hours, or a mechanical cost of 0.014 to 0.14 euros an hour. Now let us consider the cost of batteries, assuming that cost per capacity remains flat. Current production technologies allow for about $100 per kWh of battery capacity, with a 4000 cycle lifespan. If we assume that the robot exerts an average of 500w over its lifespan of 2.2 million hours, the battery maintenance cost of maintaining that output will be approximately 30,000 additional euros in battery replacements. The electricity itself, at .10 per kWh, will cost more at about 100,000 euros over the useful life of the robot. If we add all of this up we end up with 300k in machinery (200x as expensive as a car, or 1/3 the cost of a fighter jet per kg), 30k in batteries, 100k in electricity, and 3000 months of mind subscription at 100 euros a month per unit, we end up at about 750k lifetime cost for a machine that should be operational for about 250 years if it operates 24 hours day. Now, let’s assume that those same energy, compute, battery, and mechanical costs are compressed into only 25 years of useful service. That would be about 3.25 euros an hour. But that assumes that it is 1/10 as durable as modern automotive machinery yet costs 200 times as much per kg, costs 1000 a month in compute costs and consumes 5kw 24/7. -a pretty pessimistic figure. So we can say that GP anthropoid robots will probably cost between 0.33 and 3.30 euros per hour to operate and is less costly to acquire than a front end loader or a farm tractor. And it will be built and maintained by the selfsame machines. This is what we are facing. New solutions are needed.

arrrg 4y ago

Everyone (to a close approximation) is already reliant on their government for survival. Taking yourself out of society and its interdependencies is already basically impossible. (This is not an argument against all points you are making, I just wanted to say something to that aspect of your comment.)

zarzavat 4y ago
There’s a big difference between being indirectly dependent on the government to maintain society, and being hand-to-mouth dependent on the government for food/welfare. As most people who have been in the latter situation can attest (at least outside of super rich countries like Norway), it is a distinctly less dignified existence. You live in constant uncertainty that your source of food, source of existence could be withdrawn at any time by government fiat. This is the future our dear thought leaders want for us.
- AndrewKemendo 4y ago
  Current state of the world: You live in constant uncertainty that your source of food, source of existence could be withdrawn at any time by corporate whim Question: Who do you think the police work for? Hint: It's neither "citizens" nor is it "the government" They work for corporations. Go look at how they act. The whole goal is to provide security for private property holders (aka not you) and increasingly they are private mercenaries that have day jobs as city/state/county policeman. Ask a cop where their "overtime" pay comes from and it's typically protecting some business. Economic and political power should be dispersed as much as possible into the hands of the citizens, not anyone who was able to wrest as much control as possible from others - which is how we apportion it. Do you ask "how did this company I'm applying to get to this position?" If not then you're not doing anything different than picking a political party without due diligence. The act of consolidating power destroys the ethical standing of the institution
  - zarzavat 4y ago
    If your job stops paying you then you can find a new job. If your government stops paying you, you can’t find a new citizenship. A world where work is replaced by UBI is not a utopia. It’s a dystopia where the government controls if you can eat today. In which politicians divide and conquer by differentially giving and denying nutrition to different groups in order to gain votes. Give me a corporate hellscape any day of the week over that. UBI is one of those “semantic stop signs” where people just stop thinking whenever it is mentioned. The term is a stand-in for whatever utopian society the user has in mind. But the implications of UBI as a policy are completely contrary to the stated goals of the users of the term.

dools 4y ago

We are a long, long way from the end of work. Work is simply what we do for others. All we need is a just transition and an end to involuntary unemployment which is best achieved through a federal job guarantee: http://www.jobguarantee.org http://www.jobguarantee.org

davidktr 4y ago

Also great: These people never explain how exactly the profits made from automation will be redistributed. This is a political problem, not an economical or technological one. Already, profits from productivity increases go mostly to capital owners. This is why most of us have so little money, compared with what people used to have 50 years ago. This is why you can't afford a house. If productivity increases had been redistributed such that people could work considerably less while maintaining an acceptable standard of living, we all would work 3-4 days per week. Instead, those gains went to the capital owning class. AI will worsen the situation.

dataflow 4y ago

I don't know what you mean by "work ethic" (why does that have anything to do with UBI?), but regarding UBI, I think you're either exaggerating or misunderstanding some things, and I say these without any regard to my position on the topic (which is complicated). When you think UBI, don't think "everyone gets $300k/year for free so nobody needs to worry about working anymore". Think more like "everyone gets $30k/year for free so nobody's life is paycheck-to-paycheck". There are lots of people who literally don't have the opportunity to do anything (even better jobs!) other than their current jobs, which they need to put food on the table and have a roof over their heads. One of the envisioned benefits of UBI is that it would actually give them some opportunity & breathing room in their schedules to do something else - whether it's raising a kid, learning new skills, applying for other jobs, or anything else. Most people would still have quite a bit of an incentive to work for a more comfortable standard of living - it's just that they won't feel like they have a gun to their heads as the alternative. Does this mean UBI is obviously practical and we should start it tomorrow? No, there are lots of challenges, most notably including the funding itself - not many economies today are able to hand out that much money in a sustainable way, so there's some very hard rethinking necessary to figure out how this could ever work. Does this mean everybody will give a 10x ROI on it in the long term? No, some people would probably not do anything useful with the money. Does this mean UBI solves all problems? No, even if you do your best you can still have bad luck (get hit by a bus, medical bills, etc.). Does this mean UBI would work well everywhere? No, results might vary across different societies. But we're rapidly heading into a world where more and more people are being put out of work, and can't pick up new skills fast enough (if at all) to make ends meet. Expecting everyone to just adapt is incredibly unrealistic. UBI is one envisioned plausible way to address this problem and others systematically. Nobody knows for sure how it would play out in the long term, but to my knowledge nobody has obviously better solutions either.

vasco 4y ago
> Think more like "everyone gets $30k/year for free so nobody lives paycheck-to-paycheck What impact would UBI have on inflation? I've read some things about minimum wage increases largely going to landlords. If everyone has 30k, 30k is not worth much, right?

Raptor22 4y ago

This is a simplified version of the argument, but basically: right now, I am dependent on an employer for my survival. Keeping a roof over my head depends on my being competent at my job, AND my employer not deciding to fire me. One of those I can control - the other is completely outside of my control. If instead I was dependent on a democratic government for my survival and keeping a roof over my head, at the very least I and other citizens would have a say in the direction and decisions of that government every time an election happened. Your point does stand in autocracies and dictatorships though.

vasco 4y ago
You are not dependent on your employer. You're dependent on society having enough employers at any point that would match with the skills you can provide in exchange for salary, you can switch employers at any time you want. It's not 1-1, it's 1-many right now. By moving that to the government you're actually going from 1-many to 1-1 and getting a way worse deal. Worse deal because the many employers are in competition against each other so you can rely on their self interest to remain in business, whereas the people that get government jobs, their self interest doesn't have an incentive system where it would benefit me.
- Raptor22 4y ago
  On the surface, yes, there are many employers. How's that going for the folks that have been recently laid off from checks notes... Amazon, Facebook/Meta, Twitter, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, EA, Indeed, Yahoo, Github, Zoom, Dell, Paypal, IBM, Spotify, Goldman Sachs, Coinbase, HP, Cisco... I'm not really sure that going from many possible employers who cannot guarantee my job to a single entity who can is a way worse deal, but ok.
  - vasco 4y ago
    > How's that going for the folks that have been recently laid off from checks notes... Amazon, Facebook/Meta, Twitter, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, EA, Indeed, Yahoo, Github, Zoom, Dell, Paypal, IBM, Spotify, Goldman Sachs, Coinbase, HP, Cisco... They are applying to different companies? Do you believe these employees made a decision to work for one of these companies for life and will now never again get another job? What is your point with this part? > I'm not really sure that going from many possible employers who cannot guarantee my job to a single entity who can is a way worse deal, but ok. I do not want to work for the kinds of jobs "a single entity who can guarantee" jobs can offer me. You know what happens in that world? You receive a note from your teacher when you are in school, telling you that based on what they saw, you are going to be studying X for the rest of your schooling. After studying X the government will send you a letter assigning you to the job where you are needed, wherever it is, and assign you a home near that job. You have no agency in this world. I'm not making this up, this is the only practical way such systems have worked. "Guaranteed work for life from a single entity" also means the guy that runs the "assignment office" for the government will now place his friends in good jobs, and you in bad ones. People who are against corporativism and capitalism have a way of forgetting that if there's "bad people owning companies and houses and stealing our labor", those same defects would be in the people who would work for the government. Bad people don't go away because you change the system, so does your system keep them in check?

IIAOPSW 4y ago

Hard work is only seen as a virtue and sloth a vice because of the context of the world we are currently stuck in. You assume a system of value which might not make sense in the future.

noduerme 4y ago
On the contrary, it's the natural state of all thriving organisms to do some form of constructive work. It has also been the human condition and the condition for prosperity as long as we've existed. That isn't to say that leisure and play and pleasure have no value. Not at all! But it's axiomatic that nothing has value without its opposite. And if you look at the wealthy who do not work (as opposed to the ones who do), it's clear that nothing is valued by people without the sense that they've earned it.

K0balt 4y ago

I think what you are missing here is that we are quickly entering a time where employing humans for almost the entirety of management work will be unnecessary, as will a large swath of low hanging creative work, and in a short period of time, most manual labor. The cost of maintaining a human being will exceed to cost of automation in perhaps as much as 75 percent of the workforce. How does an economy function when the surplus value of labor is derived from machinery instead of humans? I know the past answer to this has been that people will just shift to operating or maintenance of the machines, but this shift is fundamentally different because the shift is of mind-power. We have been able to build machines that can deftly do anything that a human can do, and even replicate this capacity in human morphology. The problem has always been operating these machines in a way that replicates or improves upon human ability. Now that we are building machines that can be trained on existing data and synthesize novel solutions based upon that training, the need for human intervention in automated processes, including in the maintenance and repair of this processes, will drop precipitously. Let us consider the economics of a robot, assuming a general purpose anthropoid robot that ca be trained in most commercial processes, and presuppose that the mind for such a device will soon be available either by subscription or in an embodied form. We might see something like this: Mass produced cost will probably be similar to an automobile, at 20-200x the cost per kilogram of automotive engineering so about 30-300 thousand euros. Service life between overhauls at the indicated forces and speeds should achieve approximately 1 billion pivot revolutions if we assume the surface sliding/rotation movement durability of modern mass produced machines. This would translate to about or 8 billion steps or 1/8 rotation gestures. If we assume 1 such gesture or step per second, that translates into a mechanical service life of about 2.2 million hours, or a mechanical cost of 0.014 to 0.14 euros an hour. Now let us consider the cost of batteries, assuming that cost per capacity remains flat. Current production technologies allow for about $100 per kWh of battery capacity, with a 4000 cycle lifespan. If we assume that the robot exerts an average of 500w over its lifespan of 2.2 million hours, the battery maintenance cost of maintaining that output will be approximately 30,000 additional euros in battery replacements. The electricity itself, at .10 per kWh, will cost more at about 100,000 euros over the useful life of the robot. If we add all of this up we end up with 300k in machinery (200x as expensive as a car, or 1/3 the cost of a fighter jet per kg), 30k in batteries, 100k in electricity, and 3000 months of mind subscription at 100 euros a month per unit, we end up at about 750k lifetime cost for a machine that should be operational for about 250 years if it operates 24 hours day. Now, let’s assume that those same energy, compute, battery, and mechanical costs are compressed into only 25 years of useful service. That would be about 3.25 euros an hour. But that assumes that it is 1/10 as durable as modern automotive machinery yet costs 200 times as much per kg, costs 1000 a month in compute costs and consumes 5kw 24/7. -a pretty pessimistic figure. So we can say that GP anthropoid robots will probably cost between 0.33 and 3.30 euros per hour to operate and is less costly to acquire than a front end loader or a farm tractor. And it will be built and maintained by the selfsame machines. This is what we are facing. New solutions are needed.