Comment by andai
3 days ago
Pretty simple: The centaur of big-tech/government will pay people not to eat them. (i.e. UBI)
The incentives are, how you say, aligned.
The deeper issue I see is the psychological crisis for a species who believes it doesn't deserve to live if it isn't performing economically valuable activity, entering a world where it is unprofitable for it to be employed. (If I were the AI, I'd come up with some kind of fake jobs to keep the humans sane.)
UBI is just a massive extension of the welfare state. Governments can’t afford the current welfare spending, so where is the money going to come from? What do you think is going to happen to the markets when a large amount of the middle classes get laid off and can’t afford to pay their mortgages? What do you think is going to happen to the tech companies built on advertising to consumers when no-one has disposable income?
UBI ain’t gonna be enough for most white collar types to maintain their current lifestyles.
This assumes costs won't drop. I'm not an economist but the theory I hear is that there will be massive cost savings at every single point in the supply chain. So the same way your money is now amplified by AI in code, eventually with robotics that is the case in every field.
This sounds a lot like UBI is an replacement for salary for many jobs.
UBI funding doesn't come from thin air, every job has to pay for itself, even if it's just UBI. Mixed costing wont hold up because every market, every company, every worker acts on it's own. So companies must pay extra plus UBI, which will only lower prices if the overall salary gets lower at the end of the day.
In my world UBI should be an psychological tool that empowers people. The way UBI is usually discussed, it's a magical solution to a very hard, incomprehensible problem and the simplicity of it just throws 70% of humanity under the bus. It's literally the same we have now, the only difference is that now everyone can claim that everything is fair because of UBI.
Also UBI will inevitably become as fubared as current tax law.
The current group of oligarchs pretty clearly disagrees with your perspective on their incentives. The big tech era has made people like Elon and Bezos some of the richest people in history and they have used their power for negative wealth redistribution. They give essentially none of their money away to the masses and instead use their power to weaken existing social programs and wealth distribution systems. I can't see those people suddenly doing a complete 180 as they amass even more wealth and power.