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Comment by keybored | Hacker News Reader

You’re posting on a site where many people think that for-profit employment will be replaced with UBI in the sense of a stipend which will free most people up to pursue their dreams and desires.[1] So 200+ years of for-profit employment and wealth extraction which created a very impressive wealth disparity until One Weird/Genius Policy proposal by Andre Yang/Musk will usher in the post-scarcity era.

[1] As opposed to something that will keep you alive but perhaps not give you any means of expressing or pursuing your interests. If UBI even becomes a thing.

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> You’re posting on a site where many people think that for-profit employment will be replaced with UBI in the sense of a stipend which will free most people up to pursue their dreams and desires

Sure, but until you actually see evidence that this will become a reality instead of a pipe dream, you should be planning accordingly, right?

Even the most UBI optimistic people should expect there to be a very painful period of time where things are being automated and people are unemployed en masse which could last a long time before any kind of UBI is enacted

There's already UBI. It's called fake jobs. Programming has already mostly automated itself out of existence for a long time. Very few developers ever get the opportunity to write data structures and algorithms, because most of what they do is just slapping together glue code for existing libraries at cushy sinecures at places like Google, where PhDs are paid to write HTML and play air hockey. If the machine can write the HTML and glue too, then there won't be much left over about the job aside from the ideology and politics. People will be given positions not for their skill but for their loyalty to land owners. The only solution I feel is to use technology to make sure our brains continue to be smarter than the latest $300 graphics card.

I was not exactly writing approvingly of that particular delusion.

Step 1. AI Step 2. ??? Step 3. UBI

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