Comment by acdha
2 days ago
That’s unproven, but suppose it’s true: what’s your alternative? If we are in fact facing widespread unemployment, what’s going to be better than UBI at avoiding societal collapse? Billionaires paying private armies to contain poor people is a straight-up sci-fi dystopia but even that depends on enough people having money to buy things from their companies.
If we truly hit the point where we have more people than jobs. That we hit AI improving at miraculous paces that we cant even reskill people. I think it would be better to essentially have make work programs. Have basic qualification programs where you are guaranteed a job. People need a purpose. Throw every person capable of getting an engineering or science degree into labs. Massively expand teaching, nurseing and medicine so there is extremely personal care just by the sheer numbers.
retraining programs are famously both failures and mostly absent for this sort of disruption.
displaced factory workers mostly drift into janitorial or cab driving sorts of work. Why would it be different for other sorts of workers?
This is so fucking dumb. I hate when software engineers try to solve problems. You are good at one thing, do that.
The rest of us will struggle without your help because that's what we been doing. We are literally struggling to fulfill our purposes because we have jobs.
TAX. THE. FUCKING. RICH.
Then use it to pay for services like healthcare and education so that everyone has a safety net and opportunity to thrive without just giving everyone enough cash so that they are incentivized to slack.
DDT has been banned, cigarettes are all but banned, leaded fuel has been banned. Nuclear energy has been banned in Germany.
The industry wanted all of that and did not get its way after some time. You can ban "AI", make companies respect copyright. You can do all sorts of things.
Since "AI" can only plagiarize, countries that do the above will have an edge (I'm not talking about military applications that can still be allowed or should be regulated like in treaties for nuclear weapons).