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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."
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.
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 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.
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.
LOLOL... mod me down all you want; UBI may be coming... and no, you won't live "very well on it" - seriously now, how fucking gullible is considered too much??
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.
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.
You seem to think that animal brains are capable of things that Turing machines are not. I wonder why you think that.
The Chinese Room argument only demonstrates that a calculator (e.g. - ALU, FPU, etc.) isn't intelligent. I agree with that. The intelligence lies in the software.
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!
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!
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.
"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
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!!!
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...
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 hate to support parasites when the family they are responsible for has needs, yes.
starvation for the useless is fine.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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!!!
We need to stamp out the last remnants of the Protestant Work Ethic
But Neural Networks can be built using a Turing Machine. While such a neural network can never develop sentience, it is possible for it to develop intuition, which is basically just a form of pattern-recognition.
However, it is not completely wrong: the value of something exists because people want it. You want what you have not got, and someone else has: all value essentially derives from jealousy.
The stinking rich mostly believe that wealth can be created, sometimes because they actually created some themselves. At other times, because they can't tell the difference between creating wealth and stealing other people's.
The main problem with genuine communism is that the state is chronically risk averse, and consequently not creative, and therefore cannot create wealth. it also does not stop people from being jealous.
America is totally fucked: the wealth is in the hands of the few because almost everybody is jealous as fuck of a bunch of greedy half-wits.
In reality, if you share out the existing wealth, the creative can always create more and improve their lot, and will always be in a better position than those who only consume. The lazy will continue to be poor and jealous, but possibly marginally less so. They will definitely be less hungry, and a hungry man is an angry man. Angry men are dangerous. Somehow, most people find this hard to understand. As someone else said: the point of UBI is to prevent the peasants revolting, but it might benefit everyone as a side effect.
The idea that you help those in need because one day you might be in need has actually worked OK in Europe. Obviously it is not perfect, but the reality is that, mostly people are protected from dire poverty by the system. Some of them live their entire lives in poor conditions, and some manage to climb out. It is work in progress. And sometimes it goes backwards a bit.
The current problem we have in the UK is the system has become corrupt so property owners can milk the system at the expense of everyone else. This could be fixed, but obviously won't be while the party in power mainly represents property owners, and the opposition is mostly people with no understanding of reality at all.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
>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.
Yes, exactly.
He might think he can predict the rate of improvement in information technology (e.g. - exponential), but that doesn't translate directly to politics and society almost at all.
Correct. UBI is a form of Social Democracy, not Socialism nor Communism.
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).
Why could it not develop sentience ? Especially if you put it into something like a humanoid robot. So it can develop a sense of self, etc.
New things are always on the horizon
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.
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
"... 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
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.
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.
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.
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