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Comment by _yosefk | Hacker News Reader

Indeed, technology leading to unemployment is happening right now while a Skynet-style AGI is IMO tremendously unlikely.

However, "everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared" depends on someone maintaining the machines and the distribution of produce. (Because the opposite of Skynet - an AGI that maintains itself and keeps every human satisfied - is even less likely than Skynet.)

And who is going to work for free while keeping everyone else's best interests in mind?

The fact that, well, nobody would, not really, is somehow missed by people who blame "capitalism" or whatever instead of blaming human nature.

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I think basic income would do a lot to resolve this tension. People can work towards their own interests with a flat tax on their income and capital gains. Those tax dollars are redirected to an electronic deposit given to everyone for the same amount every day. Lets say $35. You could vote to allocate the usage of those dollars. Like 30% has to go to housing. Then everyone is free to use additional income however they like. It's a sustained capitalistic representation of basic human interests. I suspect it'd do a lot for the economy too. Both by increasing demand (poor people actually buy things) and decreasing fear.

IMO very few people who could become good engineers would choose to do so with basic income available that essentially lets them live a so-called "life of the mind." Just an opinion, of course.

IMO those very few people would benefit tremendously from a less diluted workplace. Such that they may actually seek it out were it not for the forces that drive them away. The modern startup is essentially this. It just takes a VC to make it a reality. We're a few technical iterations from essentially deprecating everyone else. We ought to start talking about this. A "life of the mind" in a world with seamless VR and other escapes could actually be wildly more productive than our current life in the world. We should just start trying to make people more comfortable. The engineering mindset seems inherently rare. I suspect distributions converge such that it simply CANNOT be pervasive in a population. What then? We're making everyone else redundant to a degree that we don't even need the entire engineering-capable subset. Honestly I think the money is and will-be potent enough to attract the capable.

Ideally we would find creative ways for other people to work if they desired it. But these may become increasingly rare and undependable. People need a safety-net they can actually reason about. Modern welfare isn't it. They could relax and think MUCH more productively if it were simply: I can live in this tiny box and eat/sleep/internet indefinitely while I learn whatever I want. $35/day buys you that.

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