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."

Comments

Ever the optimist is our Elon

[bigHairyDog]

There's a history of visionaries predicting utopian scenarios including a greater share of leisure time as a result of automation. John Maynard Keynes famously predicted a 15 hour working week.

It's based on the idea that there's a certain amount of work that needs to be done, and once it's automated people have nothing to do. However, the work that really that "needs" to be done was automated away during the Agricultural Revolution in the 1700's and 1800's. 90% of the work we're doing now (and probably closer to 100% of slashdotters' work) doesn't *need* to be done, but we do it anyway.

What the visionaries don't take into account is that the top two levels of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs don't work like the bottom two levels. The first small part of our work fulfils the basic needs like food water and shelter, then we carry on working in pursuit of higher needs, such as prestige and a sensation that we're fulfilling our potential. These needs are relative to what everyone else is accomplishing.

This is why people will carry on working long weeks long after automation takes away their manual labour jobs. In fact, automation has lead to longer working weeks, as manual labour is replaced with office work that can physically be done for longer. People will work for as long as they can to compete with their peers

Back to Elon's preiction. What will actually happen is that in the short term, people laid off as a result of automation will suffer and be angry, and in the long term the economy will adjust to the excess supply of cheap labour and invent new ways to use it, not necessarily as pleasant as the old manual jobs.

America 2018

[alternative_right]

unless you can get the tax abse to impliment it, it's a pipedream.

On Tuesday, November 8, 2016 enough people voted for Hillary Clinton that she won the presidency. During her first three months of office, she implemented a UBI and raised taxes to pay for it.

Under this plan, every household in America receives $30,000 a year. The USA is able to keep borrowing on the basis of the strength of its brand, and the $28 trillion debt is not going to be a problem because the government is in fact making money from this scheme: it borrows, pays out benefits, the population grows, and it gets more taxes, so it can borrow more.

However, the problem is that since $30,000 is pegged as the entry level that people can pay, costs catch up with this rate. Apartments that were once $500 a month are now $800 per month. Food prices go up as well. As a result, to live comfortably, you need about $40,000 per household minimum per year.

In 2020, the people will vote again. Whoever promises $40,000 a year in UBI will win, even though this is obviously a financial disaster for government as spending will have outpaced the borrow-spend-tax scheme.

Another problem has reared its head. Because America is now giving out free money, people are flooding across the borders. This means that government will need to pay more, to more people, just in order to keep this program going.

Parallels to Obamacare are mentioned for the first time.

Others point to the failure of European socialism. Yes, yes, there are all these great benefits... but we have to constantly bring in new people to work and be taxed to pay for the previous generation, which means that if population rises, the government goes bankrupt. The same problem afflicts the USA as it considers how to pay for the Millennials, the second-biggest generation ever.

Gift-giving programs like this always turn into runaway spirals.

Re:America 2018

[mcvos]

Taxes are decided by the House of Representatives. If you want change, you need to vote all those lazy incumbents out.

Re:America 2018

[Anonymous Coward]

$500 a month for an apartment is cheap. I pay 860 euro for a 1 bedroom apartment in an economic deprived region in Western Europe hit hard by an outgoing brain drain and an incoming wave of unschooled third world social welfare check hunters who get an apartment double the size of mine for free. More than half my generation has emigrated to the US, Canada or Australia, but also to Spain and amazingly enough, eastern Europe. Migration to Eastern Europe is not migration out of economic perspective but out of self protection. Eastern European countries know what it is to live under state controlled thought police or political correctness. They will not allow this to happen to them again. This year alone 450,000 highly educated young people emigrated who were replaced by 45,000 Eritreans, 30,000 Somalians, 60,000 Afghan, 25,000 Sudanese, 5,000 Syrians, 8,000 Bangladeshi, 18,000 Pakistani, 3,000 Iraqi, ...

High income tax nor high cooperate tax is a good idea. Punishing working or successful people is the key ingredient to let people emigrate. Filling up the empty spots with third world people is even worse. We no longer have public transport for the simple fact that bored third worlders simply destroy public buses whenever they see the chance, yet we pay an increasing amount of taxes to pay for that non existing public transport.

We give free money, but not to productive Europeans. We give free money to people who don't work. Not working is encouraged. Everyone who is successful is looked down upon as someone who cheated with his taxes. Old family values are replaced by extreme equality and individualism. The biggest victims are single mums who simply can't afford to work and pay for child care, since child care costs are too high thanks to high income/cooperate taxes, while the net income is too low thanks to high income/cooperate taxes. While the idea was to support single mums, the money goes to support the 6+ children of third worlders who enrich our society by importing third world problems.

The newest buildings in our region are shopping malls and mosques. No new factories (only empty factories from a prosperous past), no new offices, no new hospitals (they are closing at a rapid tempo), only a streets full of empty shops with big medium sized but empty shopping malls in between and large shopping malls that don't attract enough people to survive outside the city centers. The cities are filled with third world people that often form the majority in those cities. With a 80% unemployment rate they don't support the economy but add to the problem of empty shops.

Voting for Clinton will be supporting this kind of politics. The 'gone with us' politics as we call it over here. What are the biggest enrichment projects brought by the third worlders? They got rid of Saint-Nicolas because it offended them. They also successfully abandoned Christmas markets in the cities, they are the majority and are offended by all the idolatry. They also successfully destroyed the emancipation of women and single handily put all gays back in their closet and managed to get crosses, holy marry statues and paintings removed from the Churches because it offended them when they needed that room to pray. And politicians? They say this is only good and if you don't agree you are an evil person.

.
When you look at the history of the Roman Empire, you see there was a moment when the Christian minority demanded that the statues were removed from the courts and governmental buildings because it offended them. You see that Christians demanded that Isis celebrations where banned because it offended them. They even managed to ban the very important Saturnalia festivities. It only took half a century to let the Roman Empire implode and be sacked by Christian barbarians which started the dark ages and stopped all progress. And Romans? They said it was only good and if you didn't agree you were an evil person. Look at workers paradise USSR... the managed to create a new soviet man by killing mi

Re:UBI is unavoidable in the long run

[Anonymous Coward]

When most of the work is automated,

... there will be fewer and fewer people living to enjoy it.

TFTFY

Let's face it, as more and more stuff gets automated, there is less and less need for living human beings other than those needed to maintain the machines.

Thus, more and more machines equals more and more pressure to FORCE birth control and reproduction rights on the entire human race.

If you hate big government now, just wait for the advent of machines that decide how many humans are really needed to live and maintain them.

Re:We heared the same over and over again

[Kiuas]

The test is whether Musk would be willing to pay a significantly higher corporation tax to fund the basic income.

You're very correct that all models of UBI require fundamental changes to taxation. However I'd argue that in the long term it's not even about the will of the companies, they'll be forced to. The alternative is to have huge masses of people living in poverty, which is bad for business in numerous ways. Firstly if people have little to no money there'll be little to no money to consume, which will eat at the profits of companies. Secondly the political instability that such a situation would cause is also damaging for corporations and wealthy individuals.

If we look at times when income inequality has been even higher than today, the 1800s are a good example: the wealthy elites enjoying the fruits of the industrial revolution paid little attention to the poor and starving masses, which eventually backlashed and lead to, among other things, the Russian revolution.

If you think about a situation wherein something like 10-20 % of the population is working full or part time and the rest are unemployed, that's not exactly something that can just be ignored. And absurd as that may sound now, that's the direction we're heading in a few decades.

Point being: if the people at the very top of the income and ownership classes have any sense of self-preservation, they'll realize that it's easier to spread some of the wealth and well being around voluntarily, because if that is not done eventually it will tear societies apart and endanger the elites themselves.

Idiocracy + Brave New World + Camp of the Saints

[alternative_right]

The effects of dysgenia are already manifesting and things are starting to get creepy...

Things are getting creepy in general because our civilization is collapsing, and when that happens, only untruths are tolerated which means that almost everything is a lie.

We have not only homegrown dysgenics (Idiocracy style) but the effects of a consumer population bent on pleasure (Brave New World style) combined with a constant third-world influx so that we may virtue signal our way to social success (see Camp of the Saints).

The result is that there is no way for this society to survive. The babbling over the UBI is just a way of keeping the groundlings fascinated and thus distracted while the kleptocracy takes anything of value that is left before the edifice falls.

Re:Numbers

[tricorn]

I did do the research about a year ago, but I don't have all the numbers at hand anymore.

UBI of $2000/month per adult, $800/month per child, flat tax of about 45-50% on all income, pretty much no deductions, no taxes on capital gains or interest/dividend income (but no deduction on interest/dividend payments or capital losses), elimination of gift/estate taxes, a VAT of about 25%, instead of deducting charitable contributions the organization gets a percentage of all contributions in additional funds directly from the government, eliminate welfare/SNAP, eliminate minimum wage. Single-payer universal healthcare would be available.

If we want to continue to subsidize certain things like home loan interest, they'd be direct reductions in the interest rate rather than deductions from your taxable income. All income, except the UBI itself, would be subject to the flat tax, paid directly by the employer.

Corporate taxes would be at the same rate as the personal income tax rate, with only direct costs deductible (not business lunches or advertising or corporate jets except to the extent they can be shown to actually save money over alternative transportation). This is where capital gains and dividend payments are taxed. Depreciation of actual working assets would be allowed as ongoing expenses as long as any resale of those assets is counted as income.

The income tax (personal and corporate) would be automatically set to provide 50% of the annual budget needs, while the VAT would provide the other 50% (based on the previous two-year period's numbers or similar).

Most individuals would never need to file a tax return. Payments would all be electronic to save on costs to administer.

Eliminating capital gains and dividend income is reasonable because you're collecting the taxes through a different route - and basing the country's budget and economy on the vagaries of the stock market is insane. Taxing everything at the source eliminates most ways of avoiding taxes. If a business is paying someone under the table to avoid taxes, they are just going to be paying a higher tax themselves since those payments won't be legitimate business expenses. Etc.

Yeah, living on $24000/year for a single person might not be great, but it would give people the freedom to move to places where prices are lower without worrying about whether there will be jobs there to support them. Once they move there, of course, then more jobs will become available as the economy picks up in the low-priced areas.

A UBI turns a flat tax into a progressive tax. UBI of $24,000 and flat tax of 50% means someone with income of $48,000 is paying 0% tax, $100,000 is paying 26% tax, a couple earning $120,000 total is paying 12%, a couple with two kidswith $250,000 total income is 30%, at $1,000,000 for one person the effective rate is 48%.

UBI will be a disaster

[little1973]

The complete naivete of the slahdot crowd concerning UBI is beyond comprehension.

It looks like most slahdotters think a simple tinkering with the taxation system (which will mostly affect wealthy corporations and individuals) will bring universal joy to everyone.

I tell you what. It will absolutely do no good. It looks like everyone thinks that wealthy men keep their wealth in some kind of vault like Smaug. This is not the case. Most of their wealth is already in the economy, there is basically nothing you can get from the wealthy by taxing them more.

At best UBI will create a society similar to the one in Atlas Shrugged. I do not like to live in such society.

So, what is the solution to the problems UBI is supposed to cure? Most probably the answer is WAR. Currently, nobody dares to comprehend this possibility.