I am mostly in agreement. And I suspect there are many folks that’re trying to ship something AI-assisted that’s sufficient to get to income security first, and who would use success there as a stepping stone to greater things.
If you can make it solo with an LLM then someone else with an LLM can copy it immediately
That happened at least 20 years ago. How many recent "this product did so great because of the care of software engineering, and now the creator is comfortable for the rest of their life without risk of it being copied" success stories are there compared to "this product chased some trends VCs were nuts about with a slapdash MVP and the founders took out 8 figures from their later fundraising rounds, but then the business sputtered out"?
I think there's an angle with AI tools where business-minded people will have a better chance of doing interesting things now than in the recent past, because you could potentially tailor much more deeply to individual customers with reasonable economics than in the past. There are fields where there's room for a garden of solutions from different small-team vendors appropriate for different use cases instead of a one-size-fits-all SaaS winner-take-all type market in the past. We could kill the old line about SAP around needing to change your business to accommodate SAP instead of customize SAP to accommodate your existing workflow.
But if you aren't business-minded at all there are likely less places that will need to hire as many careful maintainers or novel-software-writers, which obviously is a huge kick in the teeth to a lot of people.
You could also focus on problems. What are the actual problems you want to solve? Can you use software to solve them? Do you still need to buy that software from other companies, or is it now feasible to have sufficient in-house expertise to develop it yourself?
why are you here if you dont enjoy the solving of problems first and foremost?
Can we please, for once, stop trying to figure out how to "get ahead" of each other, and instead figure out how to build a decent and dignified floor for as many people as possible? Because I imagine that, "Ultimate power in the hands of anyone with enough VRAM to run GTAVI," works better when people are in a culture of looking out for each other, versus a culture of clawing their way to one of the limited lifeboat spots (under the mistaken impression that there ARE lifeboats, when, again, everyone potentially has the power to blow up the lifeboats).
You end up with the government deciding how much bread each person needs, how much the bread will cost, how much to pay a person so they can pay the defined price for the allocated amount of bread, etc.
Either utopian claims of an AI and robot-powered future are right and we don't need money because you can just have what you want, or money and resources will still be scarce and we will continue to compete amongst ourselves for resources.
2) America in 2026 is not the USSR in the 20th century, so even if they did, our circumstances are very different from theirs.
3) UBI was only the first suggestion; you completely failed to address the other and then jumped to a black-and-white conclusion.
The general thrust of my proposition was that people shouldn't have to submit to an artificial system of manufactured competition and unnecessary "productivity" in order to access goods that are objectively abundant. When people realize that and make the necessary compromises, they won't have to worry about shipping useless AI-assisted slop for "income security" and can focus on using AI to build consequential and useful software.
Please do not get bogged down in whatever kneejerk anti-UBI thought-loop your misaligned amygdala is screaming at you.
2) I didn't say the US is the USSR. I pointed to a clear example where a UBI-like structure was tried and failed. Feel free to call out specific differences that may help it work better today in the US, I'm genuinely curious despite my skeptism.
3) I can respond to the others as well, but that isn't necessary to have an interesting debate or discussion on any one topic. If one was required to respond to all raised ideas they could try to shut down all conversation by threading together a long list of hard to discuss topics, avoiding responses to any one topic.
I do agree people can avoid having to submit to AI or ML systems though. We ultimately all make our decisions, some more impactful than others, and if we end up in a dystopian future with no jobs and AIs/robots in charge of the world we made that bed for ourselves.
I'm not bogged down in any kneejerk reactions and I'm not parroting what I've heard air bags saying elsewhere. I've read up on the topic, the history of the USSR, and read Marx writings (well the translations, I speak some Dutch but no German). We may disagree, but my views aren't uneducated reactions.
2) >I pointed to a clear example where a UBI-like structure was tried and failed.
You did not.
3) That's not applicable here. Why did you respond to the UBI issue only?
>I do agree people can avoid having to submit to AI or ML systems though.
I didn't speak to this at all. The "artificial system of manufactured competition and unnecessary 'productivity'" is independent of AI and ML and has existed for several decades.
>my views aren't uneducated reactions.
See 1.
My conclusion is that you actually aren't interested in a conversation. You haven't responded earnestly or considerately to anything in my initial post except the portion suggesting UBI, which you dismissed with a faulty presence.
Here is my suggestion: talk about something else from that post. Anything else. Do not revisit the UBI topic.
I did respond earnestly, whether you accept it or if I'm explaining myself poorly. You have yet to propose how a UBI would actually work, or pointed to an example of it ever having worked in the past. Socialism and Marxism have been tried, the don't work. And yes, UBI is an idea that goes back to Marx's writings.
1. “The Soviets tried a UBI-like system and it failed”
The Soviet system was the opposite of a UBI in almost every defining respect.
It was conditional on work. During the 1929–35 rationing period, rationing applied only to people employed in state-owned industries and their family members, and politically disenfranchised “lishentsy” were deprived of rations entirely. There were four ration tiers, and the lower ones couldn’t get basic items like meat and fish. That is a tiered, employment-linked allocation, not a universal one.
Work was legally compulsory. The 1936 Constitution made work an obligation of every able-bodied citizen, on the principle that those who don’t work don’t eat. It also defined the system’s distribution principle as payment according to one’s work. A 1961 RSFSR decree went further and targeted people avoiding “socially useful work.” Joseph Brodsky was tried for “parasitism” in 1964. A system that punishes people for not working can’t be called a UBI.
It wasn’t cash, and it wasn’t the standing system. Rationing was in-kind and episodic. Bread rationing ended in early 1935 and all food rationing by October 1935, then returned in wartime and again during perestroika.
_heimdall’s fallback (that the Soviets lacked a “true UBI” only because they needed people to work, which was “an implementation detail”) concedes the point. Unconditionality is the defining feature of a UBI, not a detail. His causal logic also fails. The Soviet economy’s problems came from state control of production and prices, and a cash transfer leaves prices to the market. That is why Milton Friedman backed a negative income tax: he thought it would address poverty without expanding the state bureaucracy he opposed.
His claim that UBI “goes back to Marx” and so shares socialism’s failures is also unsupported. The histories I found trace the idea through Thomas Paine’s Agrarian Justice (1796/97), Thomas Spence, Joseph Charlier, and later Friedman and Stigler’s negative income tax. In 1968, more than 1,200 economists, including Tobin, Samuelson and Galbraith, signed a call for income guarantees. Marx isn’t in that lineage. Even if he were, a policy’s origin doesn’t determine whether it works.
2. “No one has shown a UBI working” Alaska is the best long-run case. Residents have received a universal, unconditional dividend since 1982, and a peer-reviewed study found no effect on employment and a 1.8-point (17%) rise in part-time work.
3. Other claims _heimdall’s AI/ML reply: fuzzythrowaway’s point was about an economic system that forces people into manufactured competition. _heimdall answered a different claim, about submitting to AI and ML systems. _heimdall’s false dichotomy: he says either post-scarcity utopia or continued competition for resources. UBI proposals assume scarcity continues, so the dichotomy doesn’t engage with them. _heimdall’s “top-down help never lasts”: he gives no evidence. Alaska’s dividend has run for over four decades, and the Social Security Act dates to 1935.
Claude correctly understands my earlier points and expands upon them with the history I was referencing and the rationale I was constructing. Perhaps it puts it more persuasively.
I 100% agree people need a culture of looking out for each other. I'd argue that has only successfully happened sustainably in smaller communities, and from the bottom up rather than the top down.
Take care of your neighbors, and ask them for help when you need it. You aren't proposing this here so I'm not arguing with you, but it never works for long when the "help" comes from the top down. For a short period we may actually see the government take resources from some to help others, but eventually that is corrupted and they stop at the point of taking resources and power.