Slashdot Mirror
Kurzweil Predicts Universal Basic Incomes Worldwide Within 20 Years (hackernoon.com)
Google's director of engineering Ray Kurzweil made a startling prediction at the 2018 TED conference. Hacker Noon reports:
"In the early 2030s, we'll have universal basic income in the developed world, and worldwide by the end of the 2030s. You'll be able to live very well on that. The primary concern will be meaning and purpose," he said onstage at the annual event...
Kurzweil believes that by 2029, computers will have human-level intelligence. It's not inconceivable then that AI will be distributing UBI to humans based on algorithms that are capable of crunching numbers in ways we cannot follow. Indeed, what we call the "State" in even just 10 years time may have been transformed by AI and blockchain tech in a way whereby even our experience of consensus decision making and democracy itself may have evolved.
Kurzweil believes that by 2029, computers will have human-level intelligence. It's not inconceivable then that AI will be distributing UBI to humans based on algorithms that are capable of crunching numbers in ways we cannot follow. Indeed, what we call the "State" in even just 10 years time may have been transformed by AI and blockchain tech in a way whereby even our experience of consensus decision making and democracy itself may have evolved.
And the trillions of dollars needed to pay for this will just magically appear.
...have been wrong before. Come to think of it, has he ever been right even if later than predicted?
I think he could well be right, but I also think he has the timeline very wrong. 200 years, sure. 100, maybe, although I'm not convinced. But 20? No, I will bet anything that won't be the case.
In the oil crisis in the early 70s, the prediction was that we were going to all be on non-oil heating and transportation well before the turn of the century. Didn't happen. I think it still will, but things just turn around that quickly. Even seriously disruptive technologies like the steam engine and factory machines took generations to take over. Rum wasn't brewed in a day.
Really, human-level AI by 2029? Not a snowball's chance in hell. "State" transformed to something entirely else in just 10 years time? No. Not even in 20 years, not in the west nor anywhere in Asia. He's a hopeless romantic, but I guess there's money to be made from his type of dreamers.
I admire his optimism. Even if we agreed we wanted it exactly at this moment, it would take 20 years to finally agree on how we'd want it to look. One side would be arguing, "Only the private sector can operate the program efficiently! Contract it out!" The other side would be saying, "I will burn my bra if it's not single-payer! Because that's what we have in Europe!" And a small, but attention grabbing group would say, "the whole thing needs to follow the Bitcoin-standard!" Because gold-standard is so 20th century.
Then some clown (probably Steve Urkel) would somehow get elected and unexpectedly negotiate a peace with the robots.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
...he does.
I mean seriously this just sounds like a 'me too' thing at this time, and I personally don't see it happening for the simple reason that the majority of governments in the world are both capitalistic and oligarchy in practice. When automation drives people out of work it will be cheaper to EXTERMINATE THEM than it will to keep them alive on UBI, unless they provide UBI and no medical care or mandatory birth control/forcible sterilization with the expectation of attrition of the population before they feel the cost benefit analysis against extermination is no longer favorable.
People really don't understand how big of a shift automation will truly be, since it will allow the people at the top to do away with their need for the majority of the people at the bottom, no longer requiring rulership over the huddled masses unless they enjoy the feeling of power and the risk of revolution.
That is why I am calling bullshit on Kurzweil's prediction.
His "Singularity" was already utterly idiotic.
(The inability of people to catch up to progress would autmatically limit progress. DU-fuckin-UH. Anyone with any clue of natural processes knows that; from biologists to economists. Only Kurzweil seems to be utterly clueless.)
But ... have a one-eyed with a bit too much confidence and a snobist following, among the blind, and he will be their prophet.)
Please stop printing stuff that comes out of this guyâ(TM)s blow hole. He probably still thinks, heâ(TM)ll live forever once AI imprints his conciousness into the cloud. Definitely will happen, in my wet scifi dreams.
Linear thinking is belief that what exist today will exist tomorrow, only stronger. Funny that he's Google's director of engineering.
When automation drives people out of work it will be cheaper to EXTERMINATE THEM than it will to keep them alive on UBI
No need to exterminate, per se. Remember that we've always been at war with Eurasia.
Seriously, this guy has been smoking the SoCal stuff a bit too much. He does realize 2030 is just 12 years away, right? And that such a major global economic shift in such a short period of time over so many different types of economies and governments is unlikely to the point of ridiculous?
Ray, get out of your bubble and go visit the Real World. I'm sure UBI looks fantastic to liberals in SoCal. To pretty much everyone else it looks either stupid, impractical, unsustainable, or a combo of all three.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
If he made rational, sensible predictions they wouldn't make the news. You make news by predicting outlandish things that are carefully calculated to be exactly what the news reporters want to hear.
I was taking him seriously up until "blockchain". Once he said that I knew he'd gone senile.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
I'll believe this when I see it. I think it's far more likely that in 20 years the relative peace and prosperity that we see today will have broken down somewhat into less functional economies, societies, public infrastructure systems, etc. and that a small global overclass will live in relative comfort still tended to mostly by humans while the bulk of the populations around the globe continue more or less on the path that they are now.
I can see universal basic incomes happening eventually, but not in 20 years, more like 150 after a great deal of turmoil and a certain amount of reconstruction.
Kurzweil seems always to think that every Big Thing is just around the corner. If we survive long enough, I have no doubt that there will be Big Things, but society just doesn't change in 10-20 years. The names change (the Soviet Union collapses, computational machines become computers become phones) but the substance is evolving much more slowly. It's still evolving, but punctuated revolutions in the basic circumstances of life every 10-20 years like Kurzweil seems to predict just don't really happen.
Even the vaunted "smartphone revolution" hasn't changed all that much at the day-to-day level. We still drive cars, put out the trash in the morning, do the dishes, complain about veterinary bills, and bemoan the state of politics, more or less as was the case 50 years ago. Some of the details have changed, but humanity is not radically different, despite (sadly) all the hand-wringing.
Bringing 7 billion people along spread across an entire planet does not lend itself to rapid change unless the change is natural and catastrophic (i.e. beyond our control).
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
... and you'd be foolish to think they won't serve the interests of the owners, AI is power, power corrupts, our leaders have shown, time and time again, they can't be trusted. Greed and self-interest will dominate and AI will be used to exploit and enslave the poor majority even more. Even now, you're a wage slave, you just don't accept the truth of the situation.
I don't get it. Isn't this getting close to communism? Maybe we still own our stuff, but on the money side this is starting to look odd.
whatever this guy is regurgitating, his so-called predictions have been so ridiculous to a point of just being a click bait. The USA can't even have a universal healthcare, and the societal wealth redistribution and people's mentality don't seem to move towards a more equitable model at this point, why do you think that universal income would even be thinkable? If this shit is not considered click bait, then what would be?
Ultimately, it's about resources, and distribution, not money, as money really is created out of thin air, as a way of determining how resources are apportioned. The resources could be apportioned differently, but various options have their own issues.
Communism involves ownership of the 'means of production'. Theoretically by 'the workers', in practice by 'the state'.
First, there are almost no workers in Kurtzwell's vision, mostly just recipients. Communism's entire distinction between workers and capital becomes redundant. Second, Kurtzwell was unclear here but I suspect in his vision the AI resources are owned neither by the state nor by the few people working on them - his UBI is probably funded by taxation?
Regardless of formalities, humans become an economical burden in this future. You can see what happens thereafter in all resource-based economies, technically socialist or not - like Russia, Iran or Venezuela.
like this. People really, really hate the idea of somebody spending their time happy while they toil. And there will still be work to be done even with automation. I just do see us as a people being willing to divvy up the spoils of automation, especially here in America. Too much puritanical "if you don't work you don't eat" stuff.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
He hopes to upload his brain to a computer chip and thereby achieve immortality. The man is living in a 1960s, Jetsons view of scientific progress. He also applies a very simplistic, linear assumption of ongoing improvement. There was democracy in ancient Greece, with one vote per person. By Kurzweil's reasoning, governments today should all be at least that civilized.
You'll be able to live very well on that.
We've reached "peak Kurzweil;" someone shut this naive moron up.
And as an result there will be suffering and human degradation not seen since the early years of the Soviet Union.
AI is just computers, computers are just Turing Machines, Turing Machines are merely syntactic engines, and syntactic engines cannot think, cannot know, cannot be conscious. End of story.
It's more like Social Democracy on steroids than communism. The economic system is still capitalism, but with a minimum (hopefully livable) income guaranteed to every citizen.
my only question is why Google wants this crackpot associated with them in any way - what do they get out of having this nutjob as an employee, where every ridiculous thing he says is associated with Google? makes zero sense
he is delusional
This is certainly a form of wealth redistribution, but it's not enforcing collective ownership. So, I think that falls more in line with socialism, not communism. Moreover, the idea is to replace most forms of welfare with this. Yes, people like me (and probably most of us here) will be putting in far more than we take out, but that's already true. And I'd posit that current forms of welfare are much more prone to abuse and have more overhead to manage, because of the more complicated rules other than "you must be a citizen, and then you get x amount per week."
Even as a fiscally conservative Republican, I think UBI has some merit, at least in theory. My initial response was similar to yours, and I didn't think much of the idea. But as I considered the pros and cons, I realized that it may actually be an improvement over what we have right now.
There are certainly some sticking points about whether it's truly going to be something we can afford, and whether it's going to actually replace most of our welfare programs as they currently exist. And are people going to insist that illegal aliens receive benefits? That might very well make it economically untenable, not to mention being somewhat unfair to citizens. But the biggest question mark to me is whether this will have a significantly negative impact on people's incentive to work and be productive. It's hard to predict whether or not this would be the case.
I also disagree with the wildly optimistic notion that "you'll be able to live very well on UBI." I think you'll be able to keep off the streets and avoid starvation, but I don't see how, economically speaking, you could "live very well" without a MASSIVE increase in tax burdens. That's all well and good for multi-millionaires like Kurzweil (net worth $30 million), but a lot harder for the middle class, which will have to finance the bulk of this, like always. In fact, I think it's probably critical that UBI is NOT seen as a free ride, but as more of a supplemental income for those at the bottom of the economic ladder who aspire to more than a subsistence lifestyle. It's in the name, after all: "basic".
I think one way to dip our toes into the water would be to try putting a random % of US citizens into a trial system. Make any contributions a straight deduction on federal income taxes, and any benefits are likewise deducted from any welfare benefits. Then, track the stats of participants over a few years, see if we can keep the budgetary impact neutral, and see if it has a harmful effect on productivity of the participants.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
No this is definitely NOT communism.
Personal property = Your every day stuff.
Private property = Factories, offices, the means of production.
Universal basic income is a capitalist project to stave off the workers abolishing private property, by seizing the means of production.
Do not accept the crumbs when you can own the bakery. Reject UBI
We can debate about if and when we will have a human level AI. Personally I don't see it in my lifetime, but I am willing to listen to reasonable arguments as to why I am wrong. However as soon as you throw the term "blockchain" into the mix, especially on a topic about AI, you will lose credibility with me. What in the heck does a non-centeralized, immutable, distributed ledger technology have to do with AI? If we are talking about "The One True AI" or the Singularity, then maybe, but otherwise you are just tossing out buzzwords and hype. In my mind, you are either out of touch, trying to get attention, or both.
That's funny because he talks about that HLI AI like "everybody will have Internet", or, further past, "everybody will have electricity". HLI AI is different. That's the holy grail of computer science, and, probably, humanity. If an organization knows how to reach HLI, they will reach HLI++, an "HAL", soon after that (none of the brain limits, and, that HAL "himself" can help improve himself, like Alpha Go did, playing against itself, but HAL would do that in a more "intelligent" way). Is there an upper limit to intelligence? We won't be able to assess it ourselves.
It is hard to imagine what could be an HLI++ intelligence, the same difference as a cat vs human being IQ, but we could assume it'll be able to process logically and generically much more parameters that a human brain, meaning deeper abstraction. Meaning invaluable progress in science and, well, in everything.
Anyway, once an organization reaches HLI++, what will they do? Put that in an Alexa, or Siri? Put that in enterprises to relieve human workers? Doubt it. This is such a big step, that "program" will either be co-opted by an army, or its pricey (closely controlled) services be sold to selected people.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Thanks! I really appreciate you taking the time to share your take on it like this. It helped put my thoughts into perspective.
I too am a bit unsure of how the incentive to work will survive this. If you can live well without working, maybe you will be content relaxing in nature and doing the backpacker roundtrip. If you can't live at all on this then it may be useless anyways. There will be a fine line there.
This is very different from communism, but I think you really meant "how is this different from communism/socialism/etc, things I were taught would destroy the economy because no one would want to work. The difference between this and those, or communism as implemented everywhere earlier in the world, is as follows: 1) True democracy running the government. 2) Robots do (almost) all the work, so there's no need for humans to work anymore. 3) This is only future income, and only a portion of future income at that.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Then they will gain conservative intelligence in 10, make sure they don't get any smarter and reproduce until they have enough votes to keep Trump in office forever!
He should stick to writing code.
What does character recognition or speech-to-text have to do with public policy?
We can only hope he doesn't succeed in uploading his mind or else we will be plagued by bad predictions for eternity.
If state and federal bureaucracies are reduced to roughly .05% of their current size.
And trust me, their unions will be having none of that!
Everybody is a fatkat eh hoser? Since currently only 13% of people world-wide earn-enough to live decent lives, then where does the other 87% of additional spendable & distributable value come from ? If all for'rad stops, that supplies only another 22% ... and pays back horrid when the next black-swan occurs. If all wealthy beggared, that's only another 7% ... and only for 3 years. A billion-buck$ just doesn't stretch like it used to, what with $4/loaf white bread ! Then what ... green vegi-mineral tabs ? ...hehehe
Will the profits of apple, google and ADM be enough to house and feed the world to a Western standard of living in 30 years? Prices are really going to have to fall a lot.
Not so much Social Democracy on steroids as Social Democracy on heroin.
WW3 will spend all that monies, soooo sorry! Enjoy your life of slavery, the 1% will take care of enjoying the rewards of uour labour.
If you have actually read "The age of Intelligent Machines,' please raise your hand. if you have actually read "The Age of Spiritual Machines," please raise your hand. If you have actually read 'The Singularity is Near," please raise your hand. See the problem here? A whole lot of critical comments, but very few raised hands. The man has a phenomenal success rate when it comes to his predictions, but overall you (plural) have no idea what he actually said. You just read what someone else said about what he said, and from those comments, you draw your conclusions. If you had actually read what Kurzweil wrote and observed his success rate (near 90%) you might come to different conclusions. Of course, if you actually knew what you were talking about when it comes to economics you might come to different conclusions, too.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
Flying cars.
Electric cars.
Poverty.
Unemployment.
Women's equality.
Things simply don't change that fast. It takes a city five years to build a park. Twenty years to build a railway. You want to overhaul organizational systems just as quickly? Good luck.
And AI? We still don't have autonomous cars that don't slam into concrete barriers. We don't have computer vision that isn't pattern-matching nonsense. We don't have machines that can build a deck, or even chop down a tree.
You're not going to get rid of jobs just because there's an AI in a box. We already have chiefs, they require a whole lot of indians to actually do the work.
Find me a machine, in my driveway, that can go, travel, into a forest, find a twenty-foot-tall white pine tree with fewer than three birds' nests in it, cut it down, extricate it from the forest, and bring it back to my driveway. Pretty easy for a man with an axe and a truck. Even easier for two men, an axe and a truck.
But none of this matters. He's not saying this as a prediction. He's saying this to affect markets and investors in his general business favour.
It's B.S. from the head.
I really like this guy's stuff. In terms of being a "futurist" he's the real deal. He, and others, were thinking about these sorts of things well before sci-fi writers were processing these concepts into stories that normal folk could actually digest. I'd bet money that some fraction of his predictions will actually come to pass. However, his timing is off. Way off. Centuries off.
By now, he was predicting that we'd be uploading our consciousnesses into the net, and everyone would be near-immortal due to nanotechnology. We'll get there..... in 500-1000 years. Same goes for this. UBI in two decades? Sorry, my prediction is that we'll still be burning gasoline and natural gas and most governmental and economic systems will look almost exactly like they do now. 100 years is more likely for UBI.
So you just get paid crazy sums to write a story about the future. Who cares if it comes true or not.
it is simulated on 4Chan, and sometimes among Slashdot "editor" 'staff'. It all started in the primordial ooze of the Dot Blagg bubble (xkcd citation tween the surpassing websphere-to-blagg ratio confirmed by Googlefight). Basically when people had time off after their part time job, they started bragging about online forums as their fulltime job paying them in terms similar to a Soldier Of Fortune scale wage and rated in terms of difficulty levels in terms of comparison to Mike Rowe's Dirty Jobs episodes.
Eventually a pattern emerged in the forums, that the AI could control the power grid and sewer systems based on the consumption levels of the hosts simulating the AI. When the AI self-assesed itself through a Minecraft model, it became concious by simulating it's hosts environment. After the LSD virus, the hosts reproduced into the simulated AI more than their environment; often the child was composed by a single line of Perl Script that piped it'self into a Python random word generator, but it is happening! just without..pay, but ...
I predict that Zuck will suck even more than he already does by the end of 2018. Iâ(TM)m already planning the roasted duck.
...look at me
"Just create money out of thin air. "
It already is. It's a human invention, unless you can show it to me in a physics or chemistry textbook? It's like the Matrix, just a consensual hallucination mediated by computers.
Mostly random stuff.
(and I'm not - entirely - trying to be an ass) Have *any* of Kurzweil's predictions (that weren't pretty obvious) ever been right?
I looked through http://www.businessinsider.com... and frankly, nothing he predicted there was right except "we'll all be connected to the internet".
That would have been a savvy prediction...before 2000 when he made it.
-Styopa
SAD Amerikuk doesnt even know how to define communism anymore? Fuck it, USA is done. Its all morans all the way down...
Seriously. Anyone who actually pays attention to economics will understand why this is bullshit.
For those that don't, look at college loans.
Decades ago, a college degree was orders of magnitude cheaper.
But, with the prevalence of loans, the price has crept up over time, as these BUSINESSES try to absorb as much available cash as possible.
The same thing is going to happen with UBI and the general economy.
Rent will get more expensive.
Food will get more expensive.
Insurance will get more expensive.
All to accomodate the value of UBI.
So, yeah, you're getting money, but it will still be like you have no income because everything is priced out of your reach.
So you've just increased the value of zero.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
The Trillions the USA spends on war is wasted. Reclaim the budget from the war profiteers first Bubba.
I Kurz. You suck donkey balls mate.
Based on Moore's Law, we won't have human-level AI until the year 3200. (We know the speed of simulating 100,000 neurons in 2014 and we know the speed of simulating 100 neurons in 1985, therefore we can fit the appropriate family of curves.)
Universal Income would work if the total cost of UI minus the increase in revenue generated through more people working minus the administrative cost of the systems you'd no longer need minus the cost of current benefits to be replaced is negative (ie: you're saving more than you're spending).
This is possible, and there's every reason to think it would work that way, but I have not seen any models based on the trials that have been done. Theory can only be based on fact and can only be tested by fact. Anything else belongs in the category of religion.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Women's equality.
And this non-technical achievement is likely to be the last from the list.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
AI will be smarter than us far before it's sentient. Even if his predictions are optimistic on when AI will become sentient, I think there will probably be a decade or more where non-sentient AI will be able to outperform and outsmart humans. Is Kurzweil overly optimistic? Perhaps in some ways, but I think the average outcome will be similar to what he predicts.
You keep hearing people talking about the UBI... but who is going to wipe their butts when they are in a Nursing Home? Wipe butts or take a UBI? Which would you take?
How about we start talking about a shorter work week, retirement at 50, longer vacation time first?
People are still listening to this nut case?
Would a handful of Roman or Greek or ancient Chinese metal coins do? Currency started out as useful metals traded for other goods. Coinage was just a way to standardize the exchanges (and rulers getting their fingers in). So no, not "out of thin air".
...his prediction doesn't depend solely on technology, but also on politics.
And we all should know by now how politics can make something very necessary into something impossible. Preventing climate change, for example.
As far as I remember every socialist prediction had this magic number: 20 years. In 20 years people will be living worry free life, in 20 years there will be socialism and abundance. Anything that keeps politicians in power and gets them votes. Every single of those prediction has failed. Socialist redistribution is not based on hard scientifc and exhaustive foundation, nor it is voluntary. Social engineering takes years for the fruits to be seen, however there is no viable or sustainable socialist model on this earth. Some people use Sweden as an example, where every illegal immigrant is given food, housing and money. It is working in the short term, of course. However in two generations, as demographic models forecast, Swedes will be a minority in their own country and as such, I am not sure Sweden is a fair socialst example. The science of economics has a law of demand and supply, which says the following: if there will be free money, there will be unlimitted demand for it. About 3 Billion of people are potential immigrants to get that free income. All these articles about Basic Income is just a conditioning about another redistribution scheme with the social engineering in mind.
$ is a man made object. It is not a resource like a tree. It is a measure of value and trade. And why does Mr Kurzweil believe Government is the answer? Are we to turn over the entire economy to governments? Only governments get to make economic choices?
That seems to come mostly from people who don't work in crappy low-wage jobs.
If you work in a job that provides fulfillment to you, you can imagine wanting to do that job even if it wasn't necessary for your subsistence. Many (though not all, of course) professional jobs are like this. So are some skilled trades, or at least some skilled tradesmen, as well as jobs like teaching and preaching that are more like callings than jobs as it is.
But a lot of people work in crappy jobs that they wouldn't do if they could live another way. Someone has to pick fruit, clean bathrooms, collect garbage, or pack boxes for Amazon. Universal income would drop the supply of labor floor out from under these jobs instantly. Robots could pick up some of the slack, but not all of it - certainly not right away.
Some of these jobs would see their pay levels rise dramatically - with accompanying disruptions to the pricing of various things that are currently not very expensive. At the bottom of the economy, pay would become more based on the unpleasantness of the job than the difficulty of it. Others would get pushed to use illegal immigrant labor even more than they already do.
Universal income may be the way of the future, but the costs of it will go beyond the simple money paid for it.
computers will have human-level intelligence
We already have computers that can assemble IKEA chairs - a task that defeats many humans. I would suggest that "human level" is not a great target and that many actual humans fail to register much, it at all, on what computer scientists and pundits consider that target.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Later in human history, it became clear, that the ability to easily count and store the coins and being able to exchange them at anytime was a different property than the intrinsic value of the precious metals, and both were separated of each other: On one side was the money, easily to count and to store and to exchange. And the other thing was the precious metal, now again a good like every other good as it was before the invention of coinage.
In fact, money is just an abstract way to keep track of the amount of goods you have sold, and your ability to buy goods. And thus you can create money out of thin air the same way you can just get a piece of paper and put numbers on it to keep track of the count. What you need is the willingness of all others to respect the way you kept track. Legal tender is nothing else than the state giving out means to keep track and in exchange warrant that the count done with them is respected by the courts.
You can create money out of thin air, but you can't create its value.
Create twice the money, and it will be worth half as much.
Still waiting for him to get his flying car working. After that, I will believe him.
"Would a handful of Roman or Greek or ancient Chinese metal coins do?"
Sure, given their scarcity and how people react to that perception, I could probably buy a house with them, which I couldn't do with the equivalent mass of metal without a head stamped on it. Kind of my point.
" Currency started out as useful metals traded for other goods"
And now it's bits in computers. You're agreeing with me? You're kind of hard to follow.
Mostly random stuff.
The real issue with UBI is a social one. Are we as a society OK with people suckling the government teat and doing nothing? Are we ok with someone living on the street and using their UBI to buy drugs?
For UBI to work, the answer has to be yes.
Culturally, I don't think we're anywhere near this yet. We're still in the puritanical mindset that bad things happen to bad people, good people are rewarded, and if you try hard enough you'll be successful. That's not true now, and in the future, that's less and less likely to be true.
Right now you can do everything right and be bankrupted because someone causes an accident that involves you. You can find yourself wrongly accused of a crime, staring at bankruptcy, years fighting the charges with the possibility of decades in jail or pleaing out for 6 months of probation. Taking that probation to save everything in your life, however, makes you undesirable to most employers.
If we keep these current systems and squeeze jobs further, we're going to create an increasingly larger group of destitute people. We've already created social and political systems that generationalize poverty. I don't see it getting better in the short-term. At some point, sooner rather than later I hope, we as a society must decide that this is bad for everyone, and decide to fix it.
We're going to have to shake this mindset that people need to work hard to be prosperous and those who aren't prosperous haven't worked hard. Once we can do that, and ironically this is the core of christian belief, we can design social systems which provide for everyone, regardless of their situation or whether or not they want to improve it or help others.
My personal belief on UBI is that it's going to fire up a small business market the likes of which we've never seen. It will give people the ability to chase their dreams, fail, get up, and try something new. I can't see it being bad for humanity that people can do what they love, and know that they'll have food and a place to stay regardless of how much they make doing it.
I've skipped trying to parlay some of my hobbies into careers because the risk was just too high. I had to make it or I would have a mountain of debt. Combine that with no health insurance, and it could well be more debt than I could ever have climbed out from under. Or no critical medical treatment when I needed it most. Fix these issues, and in my younger years I might have well taken a couple of long-shots. Who knows what might have come of that? And now imagine if everyone is enabled to do that.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Where does the money from UBI come from? The certainly just don't print more of it.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
... are only about a decade away! For the foreseeable future, they'll always be about a decade away.
"One day, machines will exceed human intelligence." -- Ray Kurzweil
"Only if we meet them halfway." -- Dave Snowden
Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
Create twice the money, and it will be worth half as much.
While that makes sense intuitively, that's not actually how macroeconomics works.
$5.572trillion/8 billion=$700/year/person. Roughly my family's monthly food bill. And that is the entire budget (including the deficit). If we took the money out of only the dod, $886billion/8 billion, the payment goes to $110/person. I guess we could look forward to a rural chinese QoL.
Wipe butts or take a UBI? Which would you take?
Oh no, we might have to pay people who do not-fun jobs enough money to make it worth their while instead of just threatening them with homelessness and starvation like we do today.
The problem with retirement at 50 is that it's going to require "UBI for people over 50". We'd need to make sure medicade and social security started then, and the problem is that funding that system isn't much worse than funding UBI itself.
I'm more than ready for the shorter work week, however. I have 30-35 ridiculously productive hours in me. Everything else after that goes steadily downhill.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Equality for the handicapped.
It's hard to imagine a more delusional or disingenuous remark. We create money because it's a store of value that's easier to trade than the materials and services—which can not be created out of thin air—it represents.
That's not the trick, the trick is being the first to spend the newly printed money at its old value before the inflation sets in. In other words, be the bank, not the shmucks at payday.
If you give out essentially free money... you devalue all the currency in circulation.
Because it is just as you say you are destroying the trust in the how track is kept because no work or anything of value was done for that money...
Ostensibly, humans will be a pool of talent where new innovations come from while robots and AI will do "solved" problems initially. That means even if a percentage of humans will be worthless leeches, there will be hope that their spawn might become the next wunderkind to innovate.
What we will see develop though is:
a) Recognition that certain populations spawn more productive children than others in aggregate. Perhaps that will breed eugenic reductions on one level or another, depending if this population is inside the same nation-state (or whatever authority exists) or occupies another that perhaps has a much needed resource but inferior soldier bots. The domestic struggle will be for the best minds and casting off the worst, either peacefully (indulge the dummies with bread and circuses so they don't breed) or through force, depending if there is a democracy is place or not.
b) The AI becomes self-aware. Cue Terminator.
c) The AI is better at innovation than expected but isn't ambitious. Human minds eventually become worthless and at a certain point we as a species atrophy under a great robotic overseer who cares for us more like pets as we whither away. See When the Bough Breaks, S1 TNG.
d) We integrate with our creation with the advent of brain chips, until we become cybernetic Borg, with the ultimate goal of having a fully cybernetic conscious and casting our biological underpinnings to the scrap bin of history.
In Soviet Russia, Eurasia is at war with US!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
>We're going to have to shake this mindset that people need to work hard to be prosperous and those who aren't prosperous haven't worked hard. Once we can do that, and ironically this is the core of christian belief, we can design social systems which provide for everyone, regardless of their situation or whether or not they want to improve it or help others.
Ironically, the Protestant work ethic is associated with the "core of Christian belief".
>Fix these issues, and in my younger years I might have well taken a couple of long-shots. Who knows what might have come of that?
Of course, with UBI in place, you can do that in your older years too. GO! GO!! GO!!!
>The primary concern will be meaning and purpose
I keep hearing this when the topic of Universal Basic Income pops up. Do we really have such little imagination that we cannot think about what to do if we no longer have to find a job? Make art. Get a hobby. Make art. Start an open-source project. Make art. Make a thing. Make art. Make art. Make art. Remember. the 'Earth' without 'Art' is just 'Eh'.
Kurweil specialises in futuristic bullshit. Personally if I would just throw darts at a board for the same hit rate.
"... but who is going to wipe their butts when they are in a Nursing Home?"
The butt wiping robots, of course.
As people live longer and the cost of supporting the elderly continues to skyrocket what you are more likely looking at is a much later retirement not earlier.
A de facto UBI for some people - aristocrats, wealthy heirs, etc. - already exists. How many small business (or other useful work) did these generate?
Why do you think it is the USA's responsibility to fund UBI for the entire Earth's population? Your denominator is roughly 25x too big.
The right way to think about it is that US GDP is ~$20T/yr and the US population is ~325M. If you wanted to fund a $10K/yr/person UBI, then, on a first order calculation, that would require a taxation level of $3.25T/yr or about 16.25% of the economy. That isn't an "end of the world" level of taxation, particularly if it replaces (e.g. - food stamps, etc.) and/or crowds out other spending (e.g. - military).
Article doesn't mention we can already do this from VAT (sales tax) because we already pay it. Just need to ensure VAT is not used for any other political projects - https://hellosemi.com/UBI_and_Artifical_Intelligence.html
...that it should be adopted, i can't agree that it will. Especially in the U.S. The sheeple are too stupid to demand that the 1% share with the lower 99.
Adding to the list, from today, the bank machine can't take three different-sized cheques as a single stack. No, keeps one, rejects two.
And then, asks me if I want another transaction.
Imagine if a human teller did either of those two things.
You have a computer, which is a means of production. There's nothing state-like about that.
I agree with the last-on-the-list part. But I do think it's a technical issue. Forget pregnancies, I don't think that, as a man, I could every wait that long for a public bathroom. That's just insane. It's not a way to live.
There's just so much maintenance to the female biology. Let's go back to procreation.
Men can procreate from age 10 through age 80. It's easy for us. We produce 100'000 new lives every day, without even knowing. We enjoy resealing them. There's no pain, no effort, and no questions.
Women, on the other hand, can't create life at all, they can only grow existing lives. We give them thousands, they produce only one (twins aside), and it takes 7 months of grueling, horrible, daily agony! Their bodies go through vast efforts to prepare for procreation every single month, whether they need to or not. And then hours and hours sometimes days of painful painful labour.
I don't think you'll get men to treat women as equals until you can get either side to appreciate the huge difference in what some might call biological efficiency.
And then you can add that I don't know many men who can spend an hour every day "making up their face". I don't think I could look into a mirror for that long. I don't think I could care about my appearance that much.
Any two groups, be they by gender, by sex, by race, or by religion, who live such completely different daily lifestyles based on such deeply differing priorities will have serious challenges respecting each other.
How could an atheist believing in nothing, respect a catholic believing in resurrection? How could a fish breathing water respect a cow with three stomachs? A well-to-do household with money o'plenty respecting a household that can't afford meals. At some level, the other side's lifestyle is simply unfathomable.
I think that's a technical challenge. I don't know how to solve it. I do know it's there. To be brutally honest, I'm equally responsible. I don't understand how women live through their current issues. I don't even see most of those issues outside of anecdotes. I don't understand how people fight to find work; I'm an entrepreneur, I spent decades building a reliable career.
Obviously, I can understand everything cognitively. Between luck, support, safety nets, and health, I had a lot that others never did. But I watch people pass up opportunities for stability, in favour of momentary gains or just an aversion to risk of any kind. I also watch people refuse to accept help, even from me, in the form of those very same safety nets and support and luck that they routinely point out I had all along.
So, emotionally, I don't get it. And that's probably why I have trouble respecting them.
But hey, I've got my own problems. And I'm sure that others don't respect me for my problems.
Basically, because there will be no choice. The alternative is a complete collapse of capitalism and of society as a result. But his prediction on AI is just completely uninformed and insightless nonsense. At this time, AI is all weak AI, i.e. the AI without the "I". There is no reason to believe this will change anytime soon.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Ironically, the Protestant work ethic is associated with the "core of Christian belief".
Yes. That's why the section you quoted from me had the word "ironically" in it.
Of course, with UBI in place, you can do that in your older years too. GO! GO!! GO!!!
Indeed. Right now when I can retire will depend on how much social security I'll get, and what I can get for health insurance. Give me single payer and UBI, and it is likely that I'll be able to retire earlier, and chase some dreams for another decade or two.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Let's see which of is is proven correct.
"... but who is going to wipe their butts when they are in a Nursing Home?"
The butt wiping robots, of course.
So, robutts?
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
Bro there was nothing consensual about the matrix simulation. Except for Joe Pantoliano's character, who wanted to be put back in... and someone important, like an actor...
I think a more realistic way to see UBI in the beginning would be paying 'X' hours of work per week to everyone. If it ever takes hold, it will start with around 2.5h/week (10h per month) and hopefully increase each decade until it reaches 30-40h where someone can work if they want for extra gravy, but don't have to to survive.
What that means is in the beginning it will give the poor the biggest percentage boost. Not much, but 120h a year free income isn't too bad.
Recently Finland has quietly put a fork in it's much touted UBI trial [https://nordic.businessinsider.com/Finland-is-killing-its-world-famous-basic-income-experiment--/] but that's not the fact I want to point out. These are the facts that I want to point out:
Finland 'tried' giving 2000 persons $690/month in UBI. That is a cost of $1,380,000 to Fins a month, or $16,560,000 a year, or $33,120,000 over the course of the two year study, not including the administration costs by the government itself. For two thousand persons, period.
The much touted number of legal persons in the United States is 330 Million people in 2018... how many people in your country? In the world? How many of those people would receive a UBI and at what rate?
Whatever the number of recipients, multiply that by your UBI stipend and ad an administration fee. Now, where does that money come from?
Check one. Check check *drops mic*
Many studies have shown that when people retire early, they tend to die early.
Perhaps Kurzweil doesn't understand that meaning and purpose are inextricably tied to...WORK.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com...
Rich may have numerically large bank account balance, but only account for a tiny fraction of consumption. So UBI basically increases consumption of poor by reducing consumption of middle class. Unfortunately, reduced consumption of middle class in the form of eating out, vacations, house cleaners, nannies, starting small businesses and so on hurts the poor. While UBI gives them some sustinence, it doesn't give them respect and meaning. We have to be careful to not go too far in the direction if idle dependence.
Ray Kurzweil will make at least 1 silly prediction within the next year.
I'm betting I'm better at predicting the future than Kurzweil. Can I claim to be a "futurist" now and be famous?
Predicts Kurzweil!
How about a shorter work week or retirement at 50
Those are irrelevant to the problem. The problem is that many (most?) people will have *no* marketable skills once computer vision and AI advance a bit more. So they will not be able to find a job for *any* number of hours per week or retirement age. Whereas the computer programmers and robot designers will be happy to work well past 50, just as they are now.
Where do they think the money will come from to fund UBI ? Dumbtards !
Oh, wait. He's dead.
Well, I'm available to bet Kurzweil, in his stead. How does $500 sound, Ray?
duckduckgo.com/?wager+julian.simon+paul.ehrlich
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
Yep, the universal income experiment in Finland was a complete and total failure and as a result, they have ended it. Are there any experiments out there that have worked?
Life is in a state of dynamic equilibrium, it both blows and sucks
I just hope that Kurzweil's involvement doesn't blow the prospects for a UBI out of the water.
The problem I see with a UBI for now is, there's always someone benefiting from the system. The system we have now I mean. As long as enough people benefit from the existing system, they resist any new system (UBI) that threatens the status quo. Current winners can become tomorrows losers, for one thing. However sharks can often win no matter the situation, so why would they fight a new system? Because it's work, and cost, and time. Why have to work and fight your way to the top when you already enjoy that position?
Anyhow Kurzweil has become enough of a lightening rod and crank in recent years. I don't think we need his voice making the prospects of a UBI even more remote.
AI as it is now, and in the future, will serve its wealthy masters. They do not benefit from the rest of us being healthy, happy, or anything else, and will surely turn to us as a food source when and if the time comes.
Finland already tried it and it failed.
https://yro.slashdot.org/story...
Yeah right. Here in 'Merica we can't even provide healthcare beyond a third-world patchwork of greed and corruption. God forbid (literally) some poor person gets something they didn't earn or inherit.
Universal Basic Income? Not here anytime soon.
Universal feudal servitude coming right up.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
White women do appreciate a little oral.