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Comment by whynotminot | Hacker News Reader

Are you thrilled with the idea of more creative output being a result of UBI?

There's a lot of great stuff that could happen if people weren't chained to wage slavery and could lean on UBI to pursue passions. Sure there will be people that sit on their ass and do nothing, but there will also be people who use their new found freedom to create great things that wouldn't have happened otherwise.

I'd also like to point out that even the most radical UBI proponents aren't pushing for a truly substantial benefit. Most of the proposals I've seen are payments that would be near poverty level if it was treated as a sole income for any length of time.

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I am willing to bet that most people will choose to do nothing. It’s being human after all to simply conserve your energy.

And most of the ones pursuing their passions will do redundant, useless crap like countless blogs and TikTok videos.

We are the result of evolution and without evolutionary pressure we will fail.

We have not escaped evolutionary pressures, and I'll argue that DNA-based life as we know it will never be able to escape them. Mutations will happen and selection will happen, even if those selection pressures fluctuate.

As natural life, everything we do is inherently natural.

It always amuses me to see futurists with no experience in biology or life sciences and a master's in CS try to extrapolate the future of humanity and society. Some of the worst trends in modernity are based around unqualified individuals with platforms trying to impose their will of the future on the masses (think Elon and his ridiculous tunnels, billionaires building "smart cities" in the desert, etc)

Think ideologs pushing equality of outcome because that is "fair".

> We are the result of evolution and without evolutionary pressure we will fail.

Dubious assumption indeed.

Compared to today, where we do useless crap like making $5+ coffee cups or sort JIRA tickets or move numbers around from one database to another?

The assumption that a company cranking out an iPhone every year is inherently "better for the evolution of humanity" than more people writing or making videos is one I'd question.

Evolutionary pressure seems to mainly create animals that focus more plainly on food and reproduction than modern humanity, after all!

Except the tasks you name are manufacturing organizing, and preparing for workload. These are required tasks for a firm to meet their demand, even divorced from all other context and embedded in your specified tooling.

They are "required" in that they are useful to the business.

I'm suggesting that "useful to a business" is currently over-prioritized compared to "useful to an individual." (And yes, it's driven by consumers, but if one's basic needs were met without working 8+ hours a day, maybe those individuals would have different preferences.)

And I think the claim that it's evolutionary necessary for us to have today's model of firms and full time employment is particularly out there.

> And I think the claim that it's evolutionary necessary for us to have today's model of firms and full time employment is particularly out there

Perhaps it's been a long day, and for some reason I'm not seeing this?

What part of useless jobs in a contrived economic system which forces people to grind their life away futily trying to get ahead is related to evolutionary pressures?

Unless UBI's crazy-high, it's still going to be plenty appealing to work to have money for entertainment, travel, social signaling, better services/opportunities for your kids, to attract mates, et c. I have exactly no idea where people worried about some mass refusal to work at all are coming from.

Personal experience. With just a little money I would never work - just stay home, smoke weed and play games all day.

Sounds like what I do every day after work, because I'm too beat to do anything else.

Given time off and no obligations, I always intend to use all of it on that... but damned if I don't start doing useful things on day 2, instead.

[EDIT] FYI, last I heard, states have been quietly letting people scam their way onto the disability rolls to make up for our official social safety net being totally inadequate, after the '08 financial crisis. You might look into that.

Sounds like projection, then. I chose to take 6 months off between contracts, and within a week I was bored. That period turned out to be the most productive period when it comes to my open source projects, and those projects now have thousands of users who find them useful. Most people want to feel accomplishment, appreciation and a sense of responsibility, and many people create or work towards that end.

I have a friend I made in college who is now on disability. She's using the time to learn and create, and preparing to start a business teaching others what they know. They could easily smoke weed and play video games all day, but that gets old very quickly.

Is that why stock trading and memecoins skyrocketed during the period where stimulus checks and enhanced unemployment benefits were rolled out? Or why video games reached record player counts during the pandemic (sure sounds like people who had nothing to do all day decided to play video games instead of do whatever productive thing you think they would have done!)?

And to add on to that - what makes you think UBI simply won't cause rents to go up to match? We have strong evidence from the current inflation situation that broad based wage gains get eaten up by price increases of goods with limited supply (i.e. the housing situation in every coastal city). Existing UBI experiments aren't widespread enough to materially shift the housing market. You can't go off evidence from giving a few hundred people extra money. And basic economics tells us that oligopolies (the rental market in coastal cities) extract all consumer surplus (the UBI money) because an oligopoly is not a properly functioning market.

> And most of the ones pursuing their passions will do redundant, useless crap like countless blogs and TikTok videos.

As opposed to the army of software engineers developing the platforms to post said useless crap?

> We are the result of evolution and without evolutionary pressure we will fail.

Who cares if they do nothing, write blogs, and post to TikTok? This feels like a get off my lawn type of grievance.

We have endured far worse as a species than a mass of people with time and money to do whatever they want. It is pure arrogance to even meekly assert _you_, someone occupying such a thin sliver of time in human history knows what precise machinations will irreversibly ruin us as a species.

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