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Comment by dawhizkid | Hacker News Reader

This assumes basic income won't become law

I can't imagine a more grim scenario than whole populations being entirely reliant on government money.

I'm not decided on where I sit on basic income yet, on the one hand, it might become a necessity as jobs vanish, but on the other hand, it consolidates a lot of power into a benevolent state, one which has not shown it's ability to stay benevolent.

I would love to have enough money for basic living necessities (healthy food, rent, utilities, clothing, healthcare) provided by the government. I'd never work again.

That's a very honest answer and is also one that argues against such a system. I also wonder if you feel the same way about a true BI of maybe $10K per year plus the equivalent of Medicaid (very limited doctor network) in the US.

At $10k/year I would move somewhere cheap in the midwest and use my savings to buy a home with cash. I require expensive prescriptions to live and if those were covered I'd be fine. If not, I'd stay put, continue to work for decent insurance, and just bank the $10k/year.

I can absolutely understand, if we aren't capable of producing anything of value, forcing us to work doesn't do any good for society beyond putting every working age person in a skinner box.

My issue is more that I'd be putting a lot of trust in the government to provide for me for (avg lifespan - X) years of being a net drain on the system.

Ultimately, I don't think it's a choice I'll get to make though. Taking it to the cynical conclusion, I'd be better off with living a few years of living off BI before the government killbots come compared to working those same years and then getting killbotted.

> I can't imagine a more grim scenario than whole populations being entirely reliant on government money.

Your imagination is lacking.

We aren't there yet, but something like basic income is an inevitable necessity if automation really takes off.

In the past, automation created more jobs that it destroyed. Horse whip and buggy manufacturers went out of business because of the automobile, but the automobile created tremendous opportunity, for example.

But we are closely approaching the point where additional automation destroys more jobs than it creates, if we aren't there already. There's a McDonalds near my house that has replaced a large number of their workers with computer screens. I really don't think there's anywhere else for those former employees to go, and I don't think touch screens at McDonalds is going to have the kind of civilization-expanding power as the internal combustion engine.

I know it's a bit cliche to ask what we will do when the robots take our jobs, but ... what we will do when the robots take our jobs. There are a lot of people whose only skills can be trivially mechanized. How are we going to take care of them? And are we going to take care of them before their misery sparks some kind of a culture-wide uprising?

To me basic income seems like an incredibly -bourgeois- solution. Accepting it as a solution accepts that the current economic practices are not working for large swaths of the working-age population.

I don't think they are

Basic income is such a fundamental societal shift that until society starts to make actual headway towards it, discussions of the future shouldn't take it into account unless that's the premise of the discussion. It's just too big of a "what if" at this point. It's like hypotheticals about the 2020 presidential election. Regardless of the plausibility of any specific outcome, there's just too much between here and there for it to be a useful discussion yet.

Accurate assessment given current political structure.

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