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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.
...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."
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.
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.
With apologies to Michio Kaku (again), but Ray Kurzweil is still the biggest hack on the planet.
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.
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...
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.
"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.
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)
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?
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.
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
It really doesn't have to be that drastic.
Just eliminating our current social welfare systems (which is what UBI is supposed to replace) covers 1/3 to 1/2 of UBI. And yes, the government does shrink rather a lot by doing that. But probably only about 20%. Still, that frees some federal taxes to support UBI.
Cost savings by going to single payer health insurance should be able to add another 10-20% of what we need for UBI.
A reduction in state and local taxation can go to UBI, as we'll be able to replace most state social welfare programs with UBI, and theoretically we'll need less police, courts, jails, and social workers because we'll have less destitute people. And with single payer health insurance we should get adequate mental health care, the lack of which drives a significant amount of these expenses currently.
We can fill in another few percent of what we need by legalizing and taxing marijuana.
But I feel the lion's share will come from taxes on the massive increase in economic activity that we'll see with UBI. Now instead of commuting 4 hrs a day to a crap job, a mom stays home with her kids. (See also the mental health and policing/jail cost reductions above.) Maybe she likes baking, and takes the time to bake bread. And gives it away. And someone pays her for a few loaves. A few years later, we've got someone making a living as a baker. If you absolutely have to work to support your family, you can't necessarily follow your passion. UBI can let a lot of people do that, and there's a good chance that we'll see a lot of economic benefits due to that.
In all of this, I don't really see unions coming into play. Their days are numbered. Automation, AI and robotics mean that humans aren't required. They're why we need UBI sooner rather than later.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor