Comment by ANewFormation
21 days ago
I don't think most are primarily concerned about war applications, but simply driving mass unemployment.
This even seems to be the exact goal of many who then probably imagine the next step would then be some sort of basic income to keep things moving, but the endless side effects of this transition make it very unclear if this is even economically feasible.
At best, it would seem to be a return to defacto feudalism. I think 'The Expanse' offered a quite compelling vision of what "Basic" would end up being like in practice.
Those who are seen (even if through no fault of their own) as providing no value to society - existing only to consume, will inevitably be marginalized and ultimately seen as something less than.
To expand on ‘The Expanse’ “Basic”.
The expanse was a 9+ book series that won several literary awards that takes place in an interplanetary humanity several centuries in the future.
Roughly one half of the population of earth, or 30 billion people, live on basic assistance from The United Nations. The only way to leave basic is to get a job or get an education, and there are significant hurdles to both of those routes. People on basic do not get money, but they do receive everything they need to live a life. A barter economy exists among those on basic, and some small industry is available to those on basic if it flies under the government’s radar. Some (unspecified population size) undocumented people do not receive basic, and may resort to crime in order to make ends meet.
I love The Expanse and it gets things right more than other sci-fi. However, I think it vastly _underestimates_ the amount of injustice than can be caused by powerful people with the help of advanced technology and ML.
1) You can literally cover the planet with sensors and make privacy impossible. Cameras and microphones are already cheap and small. What will they look like in several hundred years? You can already eavesdrop on a conversation in a closed room, e.g. by bouncing a laser off the window to amplify air vibrations. What will be possible in several hundred years?
2) Right now, suppressing the population by force requires control of a sufficient number of serviles. These serviles are prone to joining the revolution if you ask them to harm their own friends and families (Chine only managed to massacre Tianennmen square after reinforcements from other regions survived because the initial wave joined the protesters). They are prone to only serving as long as you can offer them money or threaten then credibly.
In the near future, it will be possible to suppress any uprising (if you're willing to use violence) by a small number of people controlling a large number of automated tools (e.g. killbots, the drone war in Ukraine is a taste of what's to come).
Spoilers ahead.
The story vastly underestimates the competence of state level bad actors.
In the books, Holden and his group were attacked on Eros by a small number (single digits) of covert agents and only managed to survive thanks to Miller. In reality, you don't send 4 people to apprehend 4 people, you send 40.
Later, Holden and other people were apprehended on Ganymede and again, managed to get out of it by overpowering their captors because the government just didn't send enough people. This is not gonna happen in reality.
(Though you might be able to kill one if you're also willing to die in the process. A Belarusian citizen had several KGB agents break into his flat but because it took them a while to break the door down, he managed to grab his gun, ambushed them and shot one in the stomach. The aggressor later bled out but the citizen was also killed.)
It's also worth remembering that in "Expanse", there'a also Mars, which is a separate state that does not have this arrangement - everyone is employed, but conversely there's no unconditional welfare.
However, it is made pretty clear in the books that the reason why this is possible for Mars is because they have this huge ongoing terraforming project that will take a century to complete. So there's always more jobs than people to fill them, basically, and it's all ultimately still paid for by the government, just not directly (via contracts to large enterprises).
Proper UBI is absolutely economically feasible if we start taxing things like, say, capital gains properly.
"The Expanse" shows the kind of UBI that Big Tech bros would like to see, absolutely. Which is to say, the absolute minimum you need to give people to prevent a revolt and maintain a status quo. But you shouldn't assume that this is the only possibility.
As far as "seen as providing no value to society", that is very much a cultural thing and it is not a constant, so it can and should be changed. OTOH if we insist on treating that particular aspect as immutable, our society is always going to be shitty towards a large number of people in one way or another.
The fallacy most people make is assuming the status quo, making a change, and imagining that there are no other resultant changes.
A change like this would be a dramatic shift and the indirect economic consequences are mostly impossible to foresee.
For a simple example the overwhelming majority of jobs that involve unpredictable physical labor aren't going anywhere - everything from janitors to plumbers to doctors.
But in this brave new world these workers, especially the lower paid, would likely require dramatic pay increases, when they have the option of simply not working for an at least comparable 'salary' (and presumably much more if former white collar workers expect their basic to provide more than a janitorial salary). So now you end up turning the labor market upside down with dramatic changes in the overall economic system.
And keep in mind how finely balanced economies are - most Western economies, if growing, are only growing by a couple of percent by year. And now imagine hitting them with this scale of change.