> Tens of millions of people are going to wake up [this morning] to find that they don’t live in the country they thought they did. Liberals, classical and otherwise, will discover overnight that they’re now outnumbered by a coalition of earnest fascists, partisan Republicans who’ll rationalize literally anything, and millions upon millions of less tribal voters who don’t care how corrupt Trump is or which laws he breaks or whether he overturns elections or not so long as they get the results on their pet issues that they’re hoping for.
> That’s an identity crisis. A big one. And a lot of people are going to be having it at the same time.
> If the technology really advances to that point it will be very cheap to live.
Yes. But the flipside of that is that it's hard to earn money. The cheaper it is to live, the harder it is to make money.
The problem UBI solves is when most humans can no longer compete with machines in the economic system. Once that happens there are only a few options, and the least unpleasant is simply to give them (us) money tokens.
Humans don't need to compete with machines in the economic system. Machines aren't out to make a profit. Only humans are. The truth is if this technology really advances to the point we are talking about money won't really be a relevant concept. Money at it's essence imho is a claim on future labor. If that labor is extremely cheap, then all money is nearly worthless.
But LLMs/transformers are not this technology. We need some significant advancements before we start seeing things like this.
Machines aren't out by themselves for anything. The machine owners on the other hand, they are out to make a profit. So human workers compete with machine workers for the profit f the owners, and at least here I'm sure we can agree who wins in the end. Because as popular the comparison with the horses vs cars might be, at some point the machines will be smarter than humans with or without AGI. From that point on, any job a human would be able to do, and I mean any job invented or not, a machine would do cheaper and probably better. Zero options for the jobless humans from that point on, zero money to spend except welfare/UBI. And even that doesn't sound very appealing, because humans will look at the machine owners with jealousy and yeah I expect quite some fuss with many only unpleasant outcomes.
UBI assumes the entire financial sector doesn't exist. That companies grow like plants without agency. That everyone just accepts UBI as an equal portion and that the future is rosy and fair.
The predatory institutions will still be there in the UBI future and price things accordingly, do a little hostile takeover here and there, bribe some politician and get a totally not monopoly started in as many sectors as they can.
For UBI to actually work it needs to spring out of the goodwill from a monstrous institution that brutalizes all other financial entities or from a financial apocalypse that leaves virtually no one standing.
A much more likely entry point to "free living conditions" is free as in advertisment driven data mining and resale. Think of Google being your landlord, offering free Google fiber with some extra packet inspection clauses. McMeta down the street offering free fastfood adhering to the latest "dietary meta" catchphrase. And Palantir hands out free phones with preloaded internet and bomb homing beacons to streamline military interventions against you when the gov decides you're a terrorist.
That's a more likely "UBI scenario", simplified by a few steps as whatever UBI money you'd get in a cash scenario would end up pocketed by the usual suspects anyway
Money will still exist. Maybe you don't have any but other people might run around with pocket change. You'll be able to get a free meal from the poverty bot serving A/B testing burgers and cataloguing your emotional responses to receiving and eating them and giving up the rights to your footage for use in advertising material.
Good business.
Right! Also note that some concerns in this thread include displacement of humans in jobs that are likely to be automated first. UBI mitigates a lot of those concerns.
How do you know which person is the pseudo-intellectual. At least one gained professional expertise in chemistry and did an actual scientific experiment. The other posted their 'opinion' on Threads saying it is all wrong.
Yes, that's my point. I'm complaining about the one idiot pointing to the other idiot crapping on science and boasting about eating toxins being top comment on this fractally appalling story.
> In Gavin Newsom’s book Citizenville he talked about how, after becoming [San Francisco] mayor, he discovered that fare collection cost as much as the revenue generated from fares. He started the process of making the bus free but was told by so many advisors that the busses would become “dumpsters on wheels,” from a combination of homeless people using them for shelter and people not respecting services that are free, that the plan was scrapped.
Don’t compare TfL to buses or the BART in San Fransisco. The transit system the TfL operates makes US transit look like a toy.
London busses arrive every 5 mins not every 30 mins. At high throughput bus stops busses arrive pretty back-to-back continuously. Trains arrive every 90secs not every 15mins, often the next train is waiting just outside the station for the previous train to depart.
There are over 500 different bus services in London managed by TfL. 11 Tube lines covering over 200 miles of track and 272 stations. 6 suburban rail lines covering over 100 miles of track and a 113 station.
TfL is a major operation, and its fare collection system is one of the most efficient and technically capable systems in the world. So good they sell it to other cities like New York. I can absolutely guarantee that the cost of TfL fare collection system will be an insignificant fraction of the £2.2 billion that TfL collects annually.
(SF is 150 years old and 7x7 miles in size, we do not compare to London on any dimension. My whole city could be a borough of London!)
(This one time I was at a party (it was a long time ago) and these Italian dudes were there, and when I mentioned that I was from SF one of them said, "Nice town." ... I was a little miffed, but they were from Rome, so... *shrug* )
I would guess that technology has already caught up with that. Tie it all to a phone app to track abuse and give a city services only data plan to anyone who asks. Give it a basic three strikes where the driver logs complaints or you need a remedial how to properly use city services class.
Given the license tracking already going on for bridge tolls the infrastructure may already be there.
Just a head's up for those of us on the West Coast of N. America, every so often it rains for forty days and forty nights and the whole place floods.
> The Great Flood of 1862 was the largest flood in the recorded history of California, Oregon, and Nevada, inundating the western United States and portions of British Columbia and Mexico. It was preceded by weeks of continuous rains and snows ...
> An ARkStorm (for Atmospheric River 1,000) is a "megastorm" proposed scenario based on repeated historical occurrences of atmospheric rivers and other major rain events ...
The Central Valley (of California) becomes the Central Sea. Sacramento would be washed away, as would most of the communities in the lower-lying areas.
The time to deal with this is now. (E.g. if you live in these places move away!)
> Untouched and eighty years old, it was supposed to have been built by men with carts and horses during the Roosevelt years in the 1930s.
> The soil was springy and spongy when you walked on it. Like an uncompacted garden bed it was full of mulch captured by rain water. Eighty years of humus was deposited here during flash floods, without any help from mankind.
> The trees were all self seeded.
> Geoff plunged his hands into the soil and went down 8 inches of moist, black, rich, composted soil. It was still damp.
I thought this was a good idea too but then a scientist pointed out that those areas radiate heat into space at night and the last thing we want right now is less of that.
It's a little like a bald person putting on a wool hat: great if you're cold, but counter-productive if you're already too hot.
- - - -
In the next twenty years we will build as much city as we have so far. In other words in the next twenty years the amount of urban area will double. We've gotta design and build these new cities to be in harmony with the global ecosystem that maintains life support for everybody.
The primary "pressure" at the moment is to develop species-level self awareness to stabilize the planetary life support system before we crash civilization.
> Tens of millions of people are going to wake up [this morning] to find that they don’t live in the country they thought they did. Liberals, classical and otherwise, will discover overnight that they’re now outnumbered by a coalition of earnest fascists, partisan Republicans who’ll rationalize literally anything, and millions upon millions of less tribal voters who don’t care how corrupt Trump is or which laws he breaks or whether he overturns elections or not so long as they get the results on their pet issues that they’re hoping for.
> That’s an identity crisis. A big one. And a lot of people are going to be having it at the same time.