Comment by Timwi
3 days ago
I'm not sure I agree. You make it sound like you think the idea of UBI is for the rich to pay it out to us, the plebs. That's us-vs-them thinking. The idea is for the society as a whole, democratically controlled by everyone, to pay it out to everyone equally.
Obviously that can only work in a real democracy that is really controlled by everybody, not a fake one where you technically vote but it's really controlled by rich people. That's oligarchy.
I think the distinction you make is a fig leaf in a world where the rich control AGI.
If they are in control of superhuman abundance machines, where does the money paid out come from if not them?
What would it do to a democratic society if a few people have control over this machine god? How would that society be able to do anything (including raise taxes to pay for UBI) that the owners of productive force disagree with? What leverage does it have?
Once control over AGI is centralized, whoever controls it can just tell a democratic state to kick rocks and because of the dependence they've built, there's nothing the state could do about it.
In other words, once you have this sort of power centralized in a few people, democratic rule over them becomes a polite fiction they go along with as long as it's not too inconvenient at best.
I don't think you can have a real democracy unless society owns AGI. If rich people control AGI, they control society.
I think we're in agreement except in mere terminology. I was disagreeing with the characterization as a “distraction”, but I was also saying that if techbros pay out something for the plebs and call it UBI then it's not really UBI. I wholeheartedly agree with the last sentence of your post, and I think it won't be real UBI without a real democracy.
Ah, then we might be on the same page after all. The reason I used the "distraction" wording is because I feel like the techbros that are centralizing power around themselves often talk about UBI as a way to avoid the more pertinent questions of power and ownership.
It can be an implementation detail once we have public control of AGI. But the public control is the important part, otherwise its just another mechanism of control.