It sounds like we agree on what the threat of AI is economically, as far as falling wages due to people gradually losing their ability to compete with AI that o

It sounds like we agree on what the threat of AI is economically, as far as falling wages due to people gradually losing their ability to compete with AI that only gets smarter and never tires. So I'll just try to add some context around how I arrived at my position: Our productivity is measurable and has always been the benchmark for which we have been compensated whether self-employed or employed. This hasn't been my experience. I learned to program 35 years ago and have seen pretty much everything under the sun. I've had multiple tech jobs, been involved in some promising startups, but never had a single win in all those years. Because I'm a people-pleaser due to growing up as a "gifted" kid who was good at art and science but not negotiation, communication or setting boundaries. My experience of tech has been primarily one of exploitation. I have unusually high intuition, so am cursed to see the solution to problems instantly, then spend the remainder of my life implementing those solutions at a glacial pace with wholly inadequate tooling and an utter lack of time, money and resources. Meanwhile business people make billions of dollars from uninspired and mediocre software, often by stealing other people's work and manipulating the conditions of the game to enrich themselves. Secondly, a system in which humans are given more than their collective productivity (economic value) will always be unstable. Why? I believe that this thinking may be a fallacy. If we imagine two people, one a farmer and one a banker, the farmer self-evidently is materially productive while the banker obviously produces nothing material. The banker's productivity is in matching wealthy lenders with poor borrowers to catalyze the productivity of farmers. Yet bankers make far more money than farmers. This economics of siphoning productivity from workers to capitalists has grown to such a degree that farming is only 2-5% of the US economy while finance is 20%. And the rest of the economy is mostly paper-pushing and middleman activity that keeps people busy rather than giving them time to invest in endeavors like gardening, installing solar panels or creating residual income streams. We're all literally busy making other people rich, while our personal financial situations have been in decline since Reaganomics arrived in the 1980s, loosely when the national debt passed $3 trillion, which at the time felt like an intractable sum to overcome. We feel this today as the lion's share of productivity going to the top 1% who doesn't want to pay their taxes, so we have to. Then they have the unmitigated gall to capture government through lobbying groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). On top of that, we have the erosion of public education in the form of centralized control of teachers and trading critical thinking skills for standardized testing. What's changed today vs say the 1980s is that the US population doesn't have the time or wherewithal to know when it's punching down. So it blames welfare recipients, immigrants and the poor for being unproductive or taking a handout (never mind that they do most of the work) while the true fleecers like health insurance CEOs and hedge fund managers get off scot-free. So for me, this idea that those who are productive will be rewarded is maybe the most misguided and damaging propaganda around. It quite literally works just exactly the opposite way in real life. A government doesn't really create any value in an economy. The US government is of the people, by the people. It's us. A strong argument could be made that all economic productivity is due to government policy. Otherwise we'd be a banana republic where one man owns the entirety of the economy and pays out the citizens with the smallest handout that prevents revolt. Although we're headed that direction, and it's not that outlandish to imagine that the 2024 election could be our last one. It would take so little sabotage by financial elites at this point to plunge us into WWIII and a one-world government that we can no longer scoff at that possibility. It's staring us in the face now. For example, how do you propose we "overthrow" a government in a world where we're all government dependants and out gunned by the government? Are you going to go on a hunger strike or something? Our most powerful tool is noncooperation. For example, when the next president tries to install more neoliberal/corporatist justices on the Supreme Court, leaders of US labor unions could say no by halting all shipping everywhere. All nations are only 2 weeks away from revolution when the grocery stores stop being filled. The power has always been ours, but the problem is that we only see our dependence (how you said "go on a hunger strike") because most of us are on the receiving end of a paycheck. Our brains are conditioned to not see how easy it is to slash tires, to drain storage tanks, to light more buildings on fire than there are fire departments. Sabotage is so easy that it's unthinkable, except for politicians and economic hit men (see the book by John Perkins). Simply demanding UBI can not work. We must first ensure humans retain their economic power or humans collectively have no leverage. I agree actually. The central irony is that better tech has brought more dependence on the system. I like the analogy of phantom wealth vs real wealth. An example of phantom wealth is when a musician releases a hit and receives $1 million, buys a $750,000 home with cash, then gets hit with $500,000 in taxes and has to sell and lose everything. Whereas real wealth looks like owning a chain of laundromats that generate $10,000 per month for life. So today phantom wealth is represented by FAANG. It's supercomputer cell phones that can't load your dishwasher. It's endless $10 streaming services with a smaller selection than BitTorrent that have the audacity to force commercials onto us through their monopoly power. It's electric vehicles that cost more than gas-powered, running without a national charging station grid, where the electric company charges a connection fee even for people with solar panels who put more energy into the grid than they take. It's plainly obvious what real tech looks like. We're just conditioned not to see it. It's labor-saving devices that do the things that we currently must do by hand to survive. Real tech would earn money for us, perhaps as virtual agents we could recruit to work at Amazon Mechanical Turk. Real tech is solar panels. It's automated robotic hydroponic gardens. It's standardized electric vehicles chassis that cost under $10,000. It's lead-free drinking water. It's non-GMO wheat that doesn't trigger gluten sensitivity. It's universal healthcare that costs half what we pay now. It's all the things that centralized corporations deny us because they aren't profitable and politicians don't want us to see because it would reveal how corrupt they are. But because of our momentum and so many people invested in the system, UBI is a virtual impossibility right now. Not because it's inefficient or unfair or won't work or anything like that. But because we don't see it as an option for ourselves at an individual level, so we don't work towards manifesting it for others. In a roundabout way, I guess we've derived that the only way we'll get UBI is to recruit tech for ourselves that removes our dependency on the system and lets us go off-grid. So true financial freedom and UBI are effectively synonymous. One of the differences being that currently financial freedom depends on the exploitation of workers, while UBI exploits robots. That's why personally I choose UBI over something like financial Independence, Retire Early (FIRE).