Generation X may be the first to need a universal basic income | Hacker News Reader

Generation X may be the first to need a universal basic income

thehill.com

15 points01-_-23 comments

Screw UBI, it's a dumb half-solution. AI should be fully nationalized to solve the problem. Socializing the benefits is the only way to realize a good outcome for this technology for the vast majority of people.

If you nationalize AI and distribute the profits evenly per citizen, you've created a basic income scheme.

> If you nationalize AI and distribute the profits evenly per citizen, you've created a basic income scheme.

You're kinda missing the point. I suppose what I propose would be a "basic income scheme," but not UBI ("Universal basic income (UBI)[note 1] is a social welfare proposal in which all citizens of a given population regularly receive a minimum income..."). I consider the essential feature of UBI that most of the profits from AI are reserved for the billionaires and other shareholders who own those systems, and only the minimum amount needed to prevent the extreme desperation that can lead to revolution is socialized.

I'm proposing all the profits from AI be socialized, and the billionares get no more than you or I.

We need to move away from the term "basic income" and towards the idea of "citizens dividend", taking the money issuing power away from the current private banking cartel:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_credit

Right-wingers generally love Friedman. We should use his term "Negative Income Tax". Not because it's a great term, but because it'll get a wider buy-in. That's what matters, not what it's called.

>Some estimates suggest that half of all white-collar jobs will disappear as artificial intelligence advances

I find this so odd. Is there an imagining that there is some imminent trivial threshold at which AI will stop improving?

If AI improves at the current pace, all jobs will disappear as the very minimal floor of change.

All jobs will disappear, possibly within one year? Um, no. No way. Not even all white collar jobs, and certainly not all jobs.

Unfortunately this is an argument from incredulity.

Well, you don't present much more than an argument from credulity, which isn't all that convincing either.

Even if I accept your premise (AI continues to improve at the existing pace), I don't see how AI is going to replace, say, welders, in a year. Or even bankers. (Yeah, an AI might be able to do the financial part. But bankers - as opposed to tellers - are about relationship with customers, and the AI isn't going to substitute there.)

I made two basic arguments:

1. The exponential curve of AI progress

2. The lack of any mechanism that will immediately wall off AI progress at this specific exponential part of the curve

>I don't see how AI is going to replace, say, welders, in a year.

This article is about white-collar jobs. However, if human-level intelligence (let alone surpassing human-level intelligence) just becomes a matter of compute, robotics will quickly follow. That being said I'd expect this to be years, not a year.

> But bankers - as opposed to tellers - are about relationship with customers, and the AI isn't going to substitute there

Are you sure about that? Because even GPT-4o is an example of how people are very hungry for relationships presented by these AIs.

There is one reasonable basis on which AI will not improve signifigantly. AI already effectively has access to all data ever created and it can't tell you how many Bs are in Blueberry.

> Is there an imagining that there is some imminent trivial threshold at which AI will stop improving?

AI seems to need more and more power and expense thrown at it to get from say a 70% answer to an 80%, then just as much again to an 85%, then just as much again to an 87.5%. Speed of progress in the lower percentages is not an indicator of speed in the higher percentages.

Whatever the power/expense GPT-4 -> GPT-5 is such a large improvement that I can scarcely say that it is very different from GPT-3 -> GPT-4. If this happens only one more time, you're going to see really large changes.

If AI improves at the current pace, then few jobs will disappear. Yes, I'm well-aware that some companies have engaged in cyclic belt-tightening and are trying to sound forward-thinking and say it was a result of AI, but there's no evidence that AI actually caused any of those job losses.

The United States will handle this crisis like they do every other crisis: ignore it and let the chips fall where they may. Besides, Gen X is too small of a voting bloc to effect change benefitting themselves. That's been a deciding advantage for the Baby Boomers.

This is true today, but only for about another 5 years. The Boomers are aging out. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/04/28/millennia...

The Boomers are aging out, but Gen X will still be too small a voting bloc to effect change benefitting themselves as the Millennials will be the largest voting bloc - and I don't think they're going to be a mood to save Gen X from themselves.

This article assumes the answer is UBI, and not existing social safety nets.

Why are these people so obsessed with creating inflation? What does inflation do for them? I suppose they expect all this money to trickle up?

Jobs taken by automation have always been replaced by jobs created by the economies resulted from automation.

> Jobs taken by automation have always been replaced by jobs created by the economies resulted from automation.

Completely irrelevant.

Just because something happened in the past, doesn't mean it will happen in the future. Especially when you're talking with vague generalities (like you are) about something where the devil is in the details.

And then there are the personal effects, which comments like yours completely fail to address. If you lose your job and end up working at Walmart for a 10% the salary for the rest of your a career, while some other guy someplace else gets a new job that pays 75% your old one, is that a good outcome? People aren't fungible, especially when thinking about themselves.

Your comment just shows the paroquialism of your knowledge of economics. Were the keelboat men affected personally when they lost their jobs to the steam boats? Yes. Did the benefits of the steam boats (10 times faster, can travel up and down river and carry more cargo) benefit everyone - including the keelboat men? Also yes. Economic growth will sometimes require pivoting of the economic agents' activities but they're always better off.

> Just because something happened in the past, doesn't mean it will happen in the future

Say no more, let's ignore what always happened and go in the opposite way.

> Were the keelboat men affected personally when they lost their jobs to the steam boats?

Oh come on man. The tech companies hope to create a technology that will automate the human intellect. I hope the fail, but we have to take the goal seriously. Don't talk to me about steam boats.

>> Just because something happened in the past, doesn't mean it will happen in the future

> Say no more, let's ignore what always happened and go in the opposite way.

How about you try to think about the this situation, this technology instead of essentially cargo culting and superficially reasoning "this is a technology and that was a technology 100 years ago, both technologies, so they'll both play out the same."

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