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Elon Musk Predicts Automation Will Lead To A Universal Basic Income (mashable.com)
An anonymous reader quotes Mashable's new article about Tesla/SpaceX founder Elon Musk:
Tech innovators in the self-driving car and AI industries talk a lot about how many human jobs will be innovated out of existence, but they rarely explain what will happen to all those newly jobless humans. In an interview with CNBC on Friday, Musk said that he believes the solution to taking care of human workers who are displaced by robots and software is creating a (presumably government-backed) universal basic income for all. "There's a pretty good chance we end up with a universal basic income, or something like that, due to automation," said Musk. "I'm not sure what else one would do. That's what I think would happen."
And what will this world look like? "People will have time to do other things, more complex things, more interesting things," Musk told CNBC's interviewer. "Certainly more leisure time." President Obama has also talked about "redesigning the social compact" with MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito, and in August predicted the question of whether there's support for the Universal Basic Income is "a debate that we'll be having over the next 10 or 20 years."
And what will this world look like? "People will have time to do other things, more complex things, more interesting things," Musk told CNBC's interviewer. "Certainly more leisure time." President Obama has also talked about "redesigning the social compact" with MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito, and in August predicted the question of whether there's support for the Universal Basic Income is "a debate that we'll be having over the next 10 or 20 years."
Money only has value if you can exchange it for other people's work. I'm not sure if machines will accept it...
From the 1930s Keynes predicted a 15 hour working week. In the 60s and 70s a three day weekend was predicted. What actually happens is that some people have to work harder than ever for fear of losing their jobs while others have no work and live in poverty.
The test is whether Musk would be willing to pay a significantly higher corporation tax to fund the basic income.
His job is to sell you the idea of his company. In order to do that, he comes up with fanciful notions that will make you feel good so you think good things about him and his company. This is just advertising and has the same truth quotient as politicians kissing babies in front of cameras when in private, they eat babies. UBI is the socialist dream repackaged, and will fail for the same reasons Venezuela has fallen. When you give out money, it becomes less valuable. When you make it more difficult to acquire, it becomes more valuable. This value is measured in terms of what people will trade for it, not the denominations.
Alternative Right.
The automation problem will end one of two ways.
Universal basic income or related economic solution.
OR.
A lot less humans thanks to automated killing.
Grim. But option 2 is far more likely given the people that run the world.
I am glad someone said this. I first read it in Houellebecq's Whatever, and was shocked by how flagrantly true it is. Most of what we do now is shuffling the desk chairs on the Titanic, hoping people will keep the money machine going.
A slightly more nuanced view: whatever everyone has becomes mediocre, partially from our pretense and partially because the wider the appeal of any given thing, the less quality is invested in it. People are working to rise above the Herd because the Herd converts everything it touches into mediocre variants of the original.
Alternative Right.
Re: living in a society with a basic universal income:
Who would want to live in a dysgenic, third-world, overpopulated pile of crap?
The effects of dysgenia are already manifesting and things are starting to get creepy...
First of all government does not spend tax. Never has in a fiat money system.
It rationalises spending against forward estimates of tax.
A government cannot ever go insolvent in its own IOU's (currency) in fact it can only voluntarily choose to go insolvent because it is a currency issuer not user. So if congress approves a UBI the keystrokes will create the money. (put on your maths hat: what if you subtract trillions from an infinite set)
Secondly: yes that is the problem with UBI is valid: So everyone is getting this income and productivity is not going up in parallel with it.
Eventually there can be inflationary problems such that the 30,000 does not buy anything of use or live on. Too many people trying to buy too few physical items is the worst outcome.
Thirdly: UBI would be beneficial with the current rate of private debt to disposable income.
Banks create deposits (loans) they don't BORROW funds to credit worthy customers. A bank makes profit not by the person repaying the principle but by the fees and interest accrued from the loan.
So if the banking system by aggregate provides too many loans the private sector by aggregate has to pay down its debt (which means they are not spending to buy real things)
http://www.cnbc.com/id/100497710#.
This is pretty much the whole great recession in a nutshell with the selling of loans (non origination) and the control fraud in both inflating market prices, fabricating documents to make people credit worthy etc.
Case in point giving people 30,000 who cant find jobs and have no savings will initially be benficial the UBI should be at most a 10 year plan.
..."People will have time to do other things, more complex things, more interesting things,"...
Really? Go ask those living under the current welfare state how "complex" and "interesting" their lives are based on a government-funded paycheck.
UBI will be nothing more than the current welfare program expanded. And if you think for a second any government will financially approve any more than BASIC bread-and-cheese income, you're delusional. This cannot and will not happen without a massive overhaul of unadulterated greed that has created the 1% elite class who care about themselves, not funding millions of humans to enjoy an "interesting" life sitting on their ass no matter how much self-education and groupthink may advance the human race. Greed always wins. Look at history.
At first, there may be some kind of pay scale to reward those with advanced degrees and careers (lawyers, doctors, etc.) as they're put out to pasture by automation. But once we realize that automation and AI have made educating a human an extinct concept, all humans will be pretty much treated the same way financially, for there will literally be no valid reason to reward one above the other.
Forget defeating unadulterated greed for a moment, an equally delusional concept is thinking that governments can afford to pay humans to have a complex and interesting life. Much like trying to extract taxes out of the wealthy, lobbyists and loopholes serving the elite class will ensure they take on the smallest burden possible, which translates to minimal funding for the UBI concept.
TL; DR - Either figure out another way to pay for it, or call a spade a spade, and drop the delusional dreamspeak.
Not surprising that a corporate welfare queen like Musk thinks it's fine and dandy for everyone to get money for doing fuck-all.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
UBI still seems better to me than your tax suggestion, because it also increases consumption and allows people to flourish without constant fears about the future. It fosters unusual career paths and would result in many successful small companies and more creative "content producers". More education, music, writers, more handcrafting of luxury goods. These things are good for a modern industrialized society and the calculations of UBI costs I've seen are not that bad at all in comparison to expensive wellfare systems. (Arguably, the debate in the US is always a bit special, though, because an astonishingly huge number of people there seem to be willing to reject basic wellfare and just let people die in the streets.)
"our civilization is collapsing"
This dire opinion is only true if you ignore the history if the US in it's entirety. People complain that some how the US has declined as if the US achieved some model society.
The US has been fighting in one war or another since the inception of the state.
The US suffered through a civil war that tore the country apart. During this war Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and jailed journalist who were publishing news he determined were fanning the north-south hate. Still he is remembered as one of the US's best Presidents.
FDR violated several US laws prior to it's entry into WW2. The lend-lease act was a blatant end run around the Neutrality Act. An act that was widely support by the US citizens. He wanted to wire tap suspected German agents in the US but Congress passed a law to prevent him from doing so. He ignored that law and did it any how. If the US had lost the world, and he had not died before the end, would most likely have faced impeachment proceedings. In hindsight his actions setup the US to go from a mediocre international player to the strongest country on the planet. Still he is remembered as one of the US's best and only 5th term President.
The turn of the century saw true monopolies that have no comparison to any company today.
The Constitution's "all men are created equal" was never really implemented but that goal is still being pursued.
In the 1980's it was common thinking that Japan was going to over take the US economically forcing a decline in US manufacturing jobs. And while Japan made great strides they didn't over take the US in anything.
The US suffered through the Great Depression were up to 50% of the people were unemployed and people were living in shanty towns in NYC park and bread lines were a common sight throughout the country.
These are just a few examples of US history that don't make the US look like a perfect society that we are some how declining from.
So if you feel the need to complain about the decline of the US you need to take in to account the totality of it's existence. To do other wise creates a picture that is misleading and self defeating.
cheaper then jail / prison that some use for there needs at a much higher cost.
$31,286 or more per inmate vs just giving people UBI
Well we certainly won't have to worry about it in the U.S. We can't even get universal basic healthcare, much less a universal basic income.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
People keep saying something like this whenever the government talks about raising minimum wage, and although it is true that costs do go up somewhat, the net long term effects on society as a whole have historically always been an increase in the standard of living for those on the lowest rungs of the earnings ladder. Why would a UBI be any different?
Because a scary amount of people in this country take a shattered economic theory as gospel. No amount of evidence that it is wrong- to the point in many instances of reality being a diametric opposite of its predictions- will ever convince these people, because they were raised believing it, and few people ever throw the yoke of the beliefs they were indoctrinated with as children. Cognitive dissonance is real, and it is strong.
Society is evolving, not collapsing. In better parts of the world life has never been so good.
Your mistake is in conflating "human effort" with "Income."
History is replete with individuals who did valuable, and/or worthy, and/or artistic, things because that was what they wanted to do, and not because someone was paying them (and in many cases, no one was paying them.)
I write SDR software. It's pretty good -- in fact, a lot of my users say it's the best in the world. Guess what I get paid for doing that? Nothing. Zip. Nada. I do it because I like doing it. And, of course, because I can do it. In my case, it's because I've done some other things that got me the financial wherewithal to do what I want, instead of what I had to. But I assure you, if I'd been able to do my own thing sooner, I would have done so.
Frankly, if the only thing motivating someone to do something is money, they could be doing something better. Also, there is a distinct possibility that the job isn't being done as well as it could be.
We should get away -- entirely -- from the idea that human worth is tied to constant wage slavery.
Here's something else;
Used to be we swept the floor. Someone had to do it, right? Then along came the vacuum cleaner, some time was saved, and the brooms got put away. Then along came Roomba, almost the entire tasl now requires no attention, and the vacuum cleaner got put away. What was lost? Not a damn thing. What was gained? The freedom to do do whatever you wanted while your floor got vacuumed. All that's left is emptying the Roomba's collected grit and grime; and how long do you suppose it'll be before the hardware doing the job can do that too? And again, what is lost? Nothing.
Labor-saving devices most critical value is that of relieving us of drudgery. Not that of freeing us to do other drudgery.
That's what everyone has to wrap their head around.
If I don't have to drive, mostly, I won't. If I don't have to vacuum the floor, I won't (and I do, in fact, own and appreciate a Roomba. I clean it once a day, takes about thirty seconds.) If I don't have to clean the catbox, I won't. Go shopping. Take out the garbage. Wash my clothes. Mow the lawn. And so on. And yes, that absolutely includes working for a wage -- when machines can do it, they should do it. It's not a bad thing. It's a wonderful thing.
We're a long way from this, but it is exactly where we should be trying to head. Money isn't a good thing. Money is what is holding our society in its current, stressed, divisively classed form.
It's going be very rough getting from here to there. I can't say I feel very good about watching the process, but the game is very much worth the candle. Let's not hang on to drudgery. Let's reach for freedom to do whatever we want.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.