Comment by Analemma_
4 days ago
What is your alternative, when the price humans can sell their labor at dips below what is necessary for them to survive? All these takes about "UBI will demolish the human spirit" or whatever are just ridiculous when the alternative is "starve to death".
Just doing nothing isn't great for the "human spirit", but UBI doesn't mean people can't find their own goals to pursue. The idea of something where people are not longer required to work to survive is hard to accept since many people haven't seriously considered how they could meaning outside of their careers
I could ask every one of my coworkers what they would do and they would have a realistic answer.
I don't really have sympathy for people attached to their careers. They did that to themselves.
counterpoint : my father had realistic expectations for what he wanted to do post-retirement.
what actually happened was that he sat around purposeless because it turns out that the motivation of producing a paycheck or product was actually the reason he did things. He stopped showering, became depressed, and neglected his health.
And this isn't an uncommon reaction to the open-ended 'free-form' life post-retirement. Some people very realistically need to have some level of structure imposed on their life or otherwise be taught how to create that structure themselves. I think this will be a very real problem whenever UBI gets closer to reality.
I see two alternatives, one that people find new ways to do productive work with or in the presence of LLM, or massive social unrest, rebellion, war and/or starving to death, followed by a reset. I.e. the way human nature has responded to similar imbalances in the past.
So, you have no actual thoughts on this topic other than "UBI is bad" is what I hear.
My thoughts are that UBI is not compatible with human nature. It cannot work at societal scale. I'm not sure how I can state it more simply.
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