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Comment by josho | Hacker News Reader

Current conservative influence will delay UBI adoption. We'll first have to experience years of massive unemployment with no signs of improvement before we'll see something like UBI be instituted. It's going to make for an interesting period.

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That seems like the only reasonable way to do it. Humans are terrible at predicting the future, and preemptively implementing UBI could be disastrous. What if you implement UBI and the AI future never arrives? Or doesn't arrive for 100's of years? You just made a massive mistake because people thought they were smart enough to "know" what AGI was going to look like and how it would impact society.

I think we've had a few small scale experiments with UBI that showed it likely improves the lives for many, while not acting as a disincentive for others. If nothing else, bad employers would have to improve how they treat their employees. That's not a bad thing either.

What will delay UBI adoption is that governments can't afford the current welfare systems, many of which are unsustainable, let alone a much bigger one. France can't even raise the retirement age by like one year due to massive protests but they have to, as the current retirement age is unaffordable.

No if we have fancy machines that can do all the work we are not very poor, we are very rich.

We should lower the retirement wage, or (better) reduce the work-week, to spread the work around more evenly.

We have more wealth in the world than ever before. The problem is that it's distributed through something like a power law curve where a tiny proportion keeps all the wealth. If we changed that wealth distribution to something closer to linear then we'd have plenty of wealth to fund welfare systems while the rich can continue with their lives of luxury.

UBI is good within a libertarian framework.

Actually, universal, unconditional.

Everything other version is totalitarian dystopia.

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