I’ve been worried about AI for longer than is reasonable. My worry spiked when I watched the Humans Need Not Apply video by CGP Grey which lays out a very compelling case that this time it’s different, based on first principles.
It seems that at the time of this writing, we are on the brink of imminent jobs disruption for the professional class which is leading people to start thinking about what a world would look like where humans are unemployable through no fault of their own.
Universal Basic Income is probably the leading idea. I get why. At first glance is seems like a straightforward, elegant solution. You get to keep most of the systems of society the same. You take care of the people who are displaced and find themselves unemployable. People who have accumulated wealth can continue to live lavish, resource intensive lives and last if you want to earn more beyond UBI nobody but the market is stopping you too from becoming rich.
Sounds great, except for one catch. The people who own land and rent it to those who need a place to live. What stops them from just jacking the rent to match UBI leaving very little or nothing left for other necessities. Increasing UBI also increases what these folks charge, and they just keep capturing everyone else’s UBI without having to do much themselves other than be ok with impoverishing others. It’s actually exactly what we see happening in many places today.
We would need either regulation or public housing to ‘fix’ this issue, which starts to make UBI less straight forward to implement as a solution. I’d go so far as to say the extent to which we’d have to start regulating prices is sufficiently high we’d probably be better off just trying to figure out how to live without money in a world where AI embodied in robots do all of the economically valuable jobs.
I think instead we should be actively working towards a future as depicted in Star Trek. One without money, where technology like replicators frees humanity to pursue our interests on their own merits.
