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In terms of solutions: UBI is frequently proposed. Depending on the degree to which AI and automation obsoletes human labor and increases, UBI could become arbi

In terms of solutions: UBI is frequently proposed. Depending on the degree to which AI and automation obsoletes human labor and increases, UBI could become arbitrarily redistributive. Increased output would keep inflation at bay, and the reduced incentive to work would be mitigated by the fact that there almost wouldn't need to be any incentives remaining for wealth creation. Such an AGI scenario might also raise some old questions about the degree to which wealth disparity-as-an-incentive-for-success remains useful and justifiable. One wonders how Altman would receive this proposal.

kadushka 2y ago
I wonder what will happen to millions of people with $3k+/mo mortgages when they’re all unemployed and UBI is only $2k/mo.
- mitthrowaway2 2y ago
  Sounds like the mortgage market would go through a correction? Or UBI would be bumped up to $4k. Lots of possible outcomes.
  - hammock 2y ago
    Not without pain. Housing correction would lead to foreclosures. Bumping UBI would lead to mortgage rates rising due to the ensuing inflation
    - kadushka 2y ago
      30% of people in US pay mortgage, average payment is $2200. I have no idea where even $2k/mo of UBI will come from – when no one works, no one pays taxes. To avoid social unrest some new methods of wealth redistribution will have to appear. Why is nobody talking about this?
      - mitthrowaway2 2y ago
        If no one works no one pays income taxes; this is one reason why I mentioned sales taxes in another comment. Income taxes are complicated to administer and a bad incentive structure anyway. Traditionally, sales taxes have been considered regressive because they are linear; you can't bracket them like income taxes, so they heavily burden the most poor. But a UBI is progressive enough that a flat sales tax to fund it should still leave society more equal.
        kadushka 2y ago
        OK, so everyone gets UBI check today. Let’s say 10% of that check will be spent on sales tax. Where the next month check is coming from?
        mitthrowaway2 2y ago
        The UBI check goes out every month; the sales tax percentage is adjusted until the revenue matches the amount sent out as UBI (or more optimistically, adjusted until inflation is kept to a stable target). Let's say that the sales tax reaches as high as 40%. This means that if you are unemployed and destitute and the UBI represents your entire spending power, ~40% of your UBI check goes back to the government when you spend it. If you are a rich guy living the good life on your property portfolio rental income and MSFT dividends, 40% of your spending also goes back to the government, which is many multiples of your UBI check (which constitutes a trivial amount of your income). Remember, the UBI doesn't amount to all gross income, even if nobody is employed. When you spend money to buy furniture, somebody gets it as their income, even if it's the shareholders of the IKEA robofactory. The people on the top will end up paying more into the system than they get out.
        kadushka 2y ago
        So you’re assuming rich guys will spend so much that 40% of their spent money will cover 60% of the entire UBI budget? Or do you also want rich guys to pay income tax? No matter how I look at this I don’t see it working without a massive forced wealth redistribution from rich to poor.
  - camgunz 2y ago
    There's ~127m households in the US. At even $2k/mo (read: roughly the poverty line) that's over $3 trillion, which is half the US annual budget. UBI as a justification for throwing millions of people out of work is a joke. But this is obvious: far and away the markets for these companies are other companies looking to replace humans, not humans looking to kick back and let AI make their money for them. No one running any of these companies seriously thinks there's a policy to ameliorate the effects of what they're building, let alone a policy that's actually achievable. The entire stance is "progress gonna progress, figure it out suckers". Not great!
    - mitthrowaway2 2y ago
      > UBI as a justification for throwing millions of people out of work is a joke AI is the justification; UBI is just the tourniquet.
      - camgunz 2y ago
        Sure, sorry, but the point still stands. Both these ideas (replace the workforce with AI and UBI broadly) are entirely disconnected from reality. Fortunately it looks like AI is hitting a ceiling so we'll probably avoid broad social destruction.
- lmm 2y ago
  They'll probably go bankrupt and have to move to flyover country. But if you've got a steady income and don't need to work then living in flyover country isn't so bad.
guybedo 2y ago
yes, UBI is the solution usually proposed but i guess there's a few problems. First problem i see is UBI is gonna be paid by governments when it's (mega-)corporations making (disproportionate) profits thanks to AI and not employing humans anymore. Something would need to compensate for this.I guess a new taxes scheme based on the number of AI agents a company would employ ?
- mitthrowaway2 2y ago
  If you ask me? A very large consumption tax would probably handle most of it, as well as some form of asset taxation (eg. on land and voting-rights shares, in terms of their equivalent rental value). This would basically amount to a leveling function across society: people consuming less than the mean earn (much) more in UBI than they pay in sales taxes. Wealthier people who consume more than average would pay in more than they get out. With wealth being power-law distributed, the wealthy would end up paying a lot more. Then you just tune the UBI value to achieve any desired balance of equality vs incentive to work, while adjusting the tax take to control inflation. The megacorp wealth flows back to the shareholders, who eventually will want to spend it on something.
  - oefrha 2y ago
    You think voting and taxation is gonna work if Altman and co. achieves and monopolizes AGI? They can have autonomous soldiers and weapons while precisely controlling information intake of approximately everyone. You only need be diplomatic when the power imbalance isn’t too huge. I assume in that case they will pay everyone a small allowance so that people aren’t too much of a nuisance and resistance is limited. As predicted by sci-fi.
    - mitthrowaway2 2y ago
      I think there are a lot of plausible dystopian AI outcomes, up to and including the extinction of the human species. But that won't stop me from providing my preferred policy recommendations for dealing with the impacts of unemployment caused by automation.
s__s 2y ago
UBI is nonsensical. Give everyone 5k a month, and everyone is not 5k richer. All you’ve done is decrease the value of the dollar. Would love to be proven wrong.
- lxgr 2y ago
  Your assumption holds in exactly one scenario: One where everybody is currently earning exactly the same amount of money and has the same net worth. Otherwise, such an UBI would indeed cause substantial redistribution, even after accounting for inflation and prices recalibrating.
  - s__s 2y ago
    To clarify. If everyone in the US is given an extra 5k a month do you believe that the price of goods and services remain the same as they are at present? If my landlord is charging me 2k for rent, does she not increase it knowing I now have an extra 5k of UBI monthly? Or, if there’s a bidding war on a home that might typically sell as high as 300k, does that still hold true now that everyone has an extra 5k, or does the house sell for more? Will a plumber still charge $30 an hour when he has a guaranteed 5k on top of what he’s making? Or will he start to bump his price up to make it worth his while? I really don’t see how prices don’t just climb and re-equalize so that we’re back at square one. And your response didn’t address that concern.
    - wat10000 2y ago
      Prices would climb, but not "re-equalize." Let's say everything got 2x more expensive. People currently making very little could still afford much more. People currently making a lot could afford less.
    - mitthrowaway2 2y ago
      There's a lot to unpack here, so I hope you don't mind a long and nuanced reply. UBI on its own is obviously inflationary, like any other government spending. But it can be combined with taxes to reduce the growth in the money supply, as necessary to keep prices stable. Those taxes will tend to be aimed at the wealthy, and will take more than $5k/month away from them, so people bidding for a $300k home might have less purchasing power, not more. But also, AGI-fueled unemployment is likely very deflationary, and that is the premise of this conversation. Let's talk about your landlord's situation. Sure, your tenant is now getting $5k/month UBI, but they've also lost their job, and so has most of the population. There might not actually be more juice to squeeze out of that lemon than there used to be. Plus, workers won't be bidding up rents in (formerly) high-wage cities for jobs that don't exist anymore. Your unemployed tenant is only staying in town because they like the weather. They could move elsewhere if you charge too much rent; it won't affect their commute. The effect on prices will really vary a lot by type of good. For things that get effectively automated by AGI (let's say, for example... legal services and architectural drawings), the price may drop precipitously due to increased productivity. For other things (plumbing), the price would go up a lot. It would become quite rewarding to be a plumber. Lastly, depending on the types of goods demanded, prices can be quite stable. If you give everyone $1k and they use it to buy an iPhone, the price of iPhones might not even go up that much, because it gets cheaper to produce in large quantity. In fact, they may even get cheaper. However, if you give one person $100M and they use it to buy a yacht, you don't get the same efficiency benefits from economies of scale. A more even wealth distribution favors mass production of goods, which keeps prices low. We don't end up back at square one because: 1) The goal of UBI isn't to make everyone $5k richer, but to shrink the gap between rich and poor in a world where a few people are very rich from owning capital and many are poor due to a decrease in demand for labor. 2) We don't end up back at square one because at the end of the day, an unemployed person getting $5k/month has more purchasing power than if they got $0/month, even if prices do increase. 3) But aggregate prices don't even necessarily have to increase, because of changes to taxes and productivity, and also because of economies of scale.
shridharxp 2y ago
It would be interesting to consider where humans would find fulfillment when what they have done every day for years is rendered worthless.
- lamename 2y ago
  Some would pursue less lucrative passions. Some would spiral into lazy Sunday behavior every day.
- JohnnyMarcone 2y ago
  I like to think about what I did before I had to work. Young me would never worry about finding things to do and none of those things were economically valuable.
gnuly 2y ago
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kadushka 2y ago

I wonder what will happen to millions of people with $3k+/mo mortgages when they’re all unemployed and UBI is only $2k/mo.

mitthrowaway2 2y ago
Sounds like the mortgage market would go through a correction? Or UBI would be bumped up to $4k. Lots of possible outcomes.
- hammock 2y ago
  Not without pain. Housing correction would lead to foreclosures. Bumping UBI would lead to mortgage rates rising due to the ensuing inflation
  - kadushka 2y ago
    30% of people in US pay mortgage, average payment is $2200. I have no idea where even $2k/mo of UBI will come from – when no one works, no one pays taxes. To avoid social unrest some new methods of wealth redistribution will have to appear. Why is nobody talking about this?
    - mitthrowaway2 2y ago
      If no one works no one pays income taxes; this is one reason why I mentioned sales taxes in another comment. Income taxes are complicated to administer and a bad incentive structure anyway. Traditionally, sales taxes have been considered regressive because they are linear; you can't bracket them like income taxes, so they heavily burden the most poor. But a UBI is progressive enough that a flat sales tax to fund it should still leave society more equal.
      - kadushka 2y ago
        OK, so everyone gets UBI check today. Let’s say 10% of that check will be spent on sales tax. Where the next month check is coming from?
        mitthrowaway2 2y ago
        The UBI check goes out every month; the sales tax percentage is adjusted until the revenue matches the amount sent out as UBI (or more optimistically, adjusted until inflation is kept to a stable target). Let's say that the sales tax reaches as high as 40%. This means that if you are unemployed and destitute and the UBI represents your entire spending power, ~40% of your UBI check goes back to the government when you spend it. If you are a rich guy living the good life on your property portfolio rental income and MSFT dividends, 40% of your spending also goes back to the government, which is many multiples of your UBI check (which constitutes a trivial amount of your income). Remember, the UBI doesn't amount to all gross income, even if nobody is employed. When you spend money to buy furniture, somebody gets it as their income, even if it's the shareholders of the IKEA robofactory. The people on the top will end up paying more into the system than they get out.
        kadushka 2y ago
        So you’re assuming rich guys will spend so much that 40% of their spent money will cover 60% of the entire UBI budget? Or do you also want rich guys to pay income tax? No matter how I look at this I don’t see it working without a massive forced wealth redistribution from rich to poor.
- camgunz 2y ago
  There's ~127m households in the US. At even $2k/mo (read: roughly the poverty line) that's over $3 trillion, which is half the US annual budget. UBI as a justification for throwing millions of people out of work is a joke. But this is obvious: far and away the markets for these companies are other companies looking to replace humans, not humans looking to kick back and let AI make their money for them. No one running any of these companies seriously thinks there's a policy to ameliorate the effects of what they're building, let alone a policy that's actually achievable. The entire stance is "progress gonna progress, figure it out suckers". Not great!
  - mitthrowaway2 2y ago
    > UBI as a justification for throwing millions of people out of work is a joke AI is the justification; UBI is just the tourniquet.
    - camgunz 2y ago
      Sure, sorry, but the point still stands. Both these ideas (replace the workforce with AI and UBI broadly) are entirely disconnected from reality. Fortunately it looks like AI is hitting a ceiling so we'll probably avoid broad social destruction.
lmm 2y ago
They'll probably go bankrupt and have to move to flyover country. But if you've got a steady income and don't need to work then living in flyover country isn't so bad.

guybedo 2y ago

yes, UBI is the solution usually proposed but i guess there's a few problems. First problem i see is UBI is gonna be paid by governments when it's (mega-)corporations making (disproportionate) profits thanks to AI and not employing humans anymore. Something would need to compensate for this.I guess a new taxes scheme based on the number of AI agents a company would employ ?

mitthrowaway2 2y ago
If you ask me? A very large consumption tax would probably handle most of it, as well as some form of asset taxation (eg. on land and voting-rights shares, in terms of their equivalent rental value). This would basically amount to a leveling function across society: people consuming less than the mean earn (much) more in UBI than they pay in sales taxes. Wealthier people who consume more than average would pay in more than they get out. With wealth being power-law distributed, the wealthy would end up paying a lot more. Then you just tune the UBI value to achieve any desired balance of equality vs incentive to work, while adjusting the tax take to control inflation. The megacorp wealth flows back to the shareholders, who eventually will want to spend it on something.
- oefrha 2y ago
  You think voting and taxation is gonna work if Altman and co. achieves and monopolizes AGI? They can have autonomous soldiers and weapons while precisely controlling information intake of approximately everyone. You only need be diplomatic when the power imbalance isn’t too huge. I assume in that case they will pay everyone a small allowance so that people aren’t too much of a nuisance and resistance is limited. As predicted by sci-fi.
  - mitthrowaway2 2y ago
    I think there are a lot of plausible dystopian AI outcomes, up to and including the extinction of the human species. But that won't stop me from providing my preferred policy recommendations for dealing with the impacts of unemployment caused by automation.

s__s 2y ago

UBI is nonsensical. Give everyone 5k a month, and everyone is not 5k richer. All you’ve done is decrease the value of the dollar. Would love to be proven wrong.

lxgr 2y ago
Your assumption holds in exactly one scenario: One where everybody is currently earning exactly the same amount of money and has the same net worth. Otherwise, such an UBI would indeed cause substantial redistribution, even after accounting for inflation and prices recalibrating.
- s__s 2y ago
  To clarify. If everyone in the US is given an extra 5k a month do you believe that the price of goods and services remain the same as they are at present? If my landlord is charging me 2k for rent, does she not increase it knowing I now have an extra 5k of UBI monthly? Or, if there’s a bidding war on a home that might typically sell as high as 300k, does that still hold true now that everyone has an extra 5k, or does the house sell for more? Will a plumber still charge $30 an hour when he has a guaranteed 5k on top of what he’s making? Or will he start to bump his price up to make it worth his while? I really don’t see how prices don’t just climb and re-equalize so that we’re back at square one. And your response didn’t address that concern.
  - wat10000 2y ago
    Prices would climb, but not "re-equalize." Let's say everything got 2x more expensive. People currently making very little could still afford much more. People currently making a lot could afford less.
  - mitthrowaway2 2y ago
    There's a lot to unpack here, so I hope you don't mind a long and nuanced reply. UBI on its own is obviously inflationary, like any other government spending. But it can be combined with taxes to reduce the growth in the money supply, as necessary to keep prices stable. Those taxes will tend to be aimed at the wealthy, and will take more than $5k/month away from them, so people bidding for a $300k home might have less purchasing power, not more. But also, AGI-fueled unemployment is likely very deflationary, and that is the premise of this conversation. Let's talk about your landlord's situation. Sure, your tenant is now getting $5k/month UBI, but they've also lost their job, and so has most of the population. There might not actually be more juice to squeeze out of that lemon than there used to be. Plus, workers won't be bidding up rents in (formerly) high-wage cities for jobs that don't exist anymore. Your unemployed tenant is only staying in town because they like the weather. They could move elsewhere if you charge too much rent; it won't affect their commute. The effect on prices will really vary a lot by type of good. For things that get effectively automated by AGI (let's say, for example... legal services and architectural drawings), the price may drop precipitously due to increased productivity. For other things (plumbing), the price would go up a lot. It would become quite rewarding to be a plumber. Lastly, depending on the types of goods demanded, prices can be quite stable. If you give everyone $1k and they use it to buy an iPhone, the price of iPhones might not even go up that much, because it gets cheaper to produce in large quantity. In fact, they may even get cheaper. However, if you give one person $100M and they use it to buy a yacht, you don't get the same efficiency benefits from economies of scale. A more even wealth distribution favors mass production of goods, which keeps prices low. We don't end up back at square one because: 1) The goal of UBI isn't to make everyone $5k richer, but to shrink the gap between rich and poor in a world where a few people are very rich from owning capital and many are poor due to a decrease in demand for labor. 2) We don't end up back at square one because at the end of the day, an unemployed person getting $5k/month has more purchasing power than if they got $0/month, even if prices do increase. 3) But aggregate prices don't even necessarily have to increase, because of changes to taxes and productivity, and also because of economies of scale.

shridharxp 2y ago

It would be interesting to consider where humans would find fulfillment when what they have done every day for years is rendered worthless.

lamename 2y ago
Some would pursue less lucrative passions. Some would spiral into lazy Sunday behavior every day.
JohnnyMarcone 2y ago
I like to think about what I did before I had to work. Young me would never worry about finding things to do and none of those things were economically valuable.

gnuly 2y ago

[dead]