That's just unrealistic. They'll strike and shut down all shipping before they just roll over
We need to keep in mind the scope and scale of the environments in which this UBI experiment is being tried in.
The temporary success or failure of the UBI experiment seems entirely dependent on whether the country is a major currency, a manufacturing base, a service oriented economy, etc, etc, etc. and it doesn't seem likely to work for everyone, or for any individual small nation for an indefinite period of time.
> there is realistically no way to retrain this cohort. [truck drivers]
I disagree. They had to attend class and pass a test to get a CDL. They were trained to drive a truck, they can be trained to perform another task. Truck drivers are not lobotomized.
The U in UBI stands for universal. That means that former truck drivers (aka the unemployed) get it but also everyone else to include CEOs making millions. The expectation is that those with other income will give back their UBI and then some via taxes.
This is better than policies that create stupid incentives like in your example.
I wasn't aware that I promoted a policy. Can you point it out for me ?
I think these small scale experiments have value, and that its part of the process of adapting to our environment.
What I can say with absolute confidence is, the post Bretton-Woods financial system promoted by my government, the only one I know, has increased wealth inequality spectacularly, and I expect any changes to the system to continue this trend.
And thats why I want to grow onions. I can eat them. They keep vampires away.
1) it creates dumb incentives
2) it gives the govt more levers they can pull, which leads to more corruption and worse outcomes
I don't think the difficulty is with the drivers, more with the logistics of retraining them all at once. As a cohort they came up through their class and training nicely spread out over, what, a 40 year period? Making sure there are that many training spaces for other trades over a much more condensed period is non-trivial.
The only events that happen "all at once" are in our heads as hypotheticals.
In the real world, every change takes time to propagate.
It stands to reason, all of the "experts" of the world are going to be in less demand than they were before, because some percentage of people, will replace them with AI, for some percentage of tasks.
Stated another way, each of us will be consulting with AI more, and assigning some number of tasks to a non-expert, with the help of expertise from AI, and talking to human experts less frequently.
Interactions will decrease in frequency. In the commercial space, this means transactions will decrease in number and amount. This is "bad" for everyone, in the financial sense. Corporations lose revenues, governments lose revenues, employees get pay cuts, etc.
But downward trajectories on financial charts have been a problem for every fiat based economy we know of, long before AI came into the picture. The only thing people universally agree upon when sales, taxes, salaries, etc start going down, is that "confusion" is the first response, followed shortly by "panic", followed by "doing something to fix it" followed by "pretending it worked, even if it didn't."
Maybe AI will teach the world what to do when the charts turn down instead of up.
Infinite growth doesn't exist in a closed ecosystem, and we arent expanding into space yet.
For decades magazines and other media have promoted the idea that some day, technology will relieve us of the base burden of existence, and free us to do all those wonderful leisure activities we enjoy.
Now that AI seems to be able to deliver on the promise, the thing we seem to fear the most is the deflation of our own egos.
A conversation with an AI agent carries as little as $0.00 transactional cost, with a few cents in electricity expense, after the small fixed capital outlay for the computer.
A conversation with a consultant costs $200 an hour, and benefits taxing authorities, gas stations, phone companies, etc etc etc.
Again, it stands to reason, if we replace an expensive form of communication, with one that is almost free, that people are going to use it, and all those "expenses" they save on, were someone elses income.
The end game ... most of us will adapt, and some of us will self destruct during that process, and in 1 or 2 generations, everything will be "normal" again, and AI will be taken for granted, and we'll all be worrying about the new crisis.
Lets all remember, "the economy" as studied by economists, is the study of human behavior at its core, and its generally agreed that the human animals greatest natural defense is its intelligence and ability to adapt to its environment.
Keep calm. Carry on. This isn't a scarcity problem. It's an abundance problem.
Related point - if the truck drivers aren't where the new jobs are located, that doesn't work. We should subsidize their move (via increased taxes on AI or corporations or whatever) but like WV, we probably won't. Assuming they even want to move.
You let them retrain themselves.
People in "coal country" who can't get a job in a mine, do something other than mining. Hunger is a powerful motivator.
A $10 a month cell phone plan is all it takes to get 24/7 access to all the worlds information, and AI's intelligent queries into it.
And yes, you will have millions who never learn how to use said information to their own benefit, but we've known for awhile that poverty is a behaviorial problem as much as it is a resource problem.
No, at least not in the US.
A corporation has a primary fiduciary responsibility to its shareholders.
Every promise ever made by a corporation to an employee or customer was just "so much bullshit, subject to change" in order to fulfill their legal obligation to the shareholders.
It's always been this way, no matter how many employees or workers actually believed said promises.
People still think the grocery store sells food as well, when the reality is that the nutrients are removed and sold elsewhere, reducing satiety, increasing sales due to intentional malnutrition.
And your doctor isn't sending you down the road to wellness when he prescribes you GLP1 antagonists instead of a proper diet and exercise.
The cold hard truths of reality.
"Everybody Needs a Thneed"
Only because Friedman told us so and we believed him. It's not some immutable natural law.
The CEOs and boards who operated this way survived.
The ones who didn't, didn't.
I don't know how you are going to change the dynamic.
Any change will have to be approved by the powerful survivors, who know exactly how their behaviors have benefited them.
You're asking the king(s) to step down as king(s).
Accomplishing it historically has required force and rarely ended as planned.
But overall I agree with you, that if we are going to make a systemic change, the change should benefit those with the least, at the expense of those with the most, because that is a path towards equilibrium, not away from it as we have been progressing since the mid 70's.
And, AI may actually reduce the status of the wealthy the most, given, the more the individual can do for his/her self, the less we need a "corporate brain trust" to make a widget for us.
Economically, AI could play out to be the force that reduced the oligarchs to the same status as the common man.
We all shall see.
No they don't, they vote for someone to open up the mines again and keep the immigrants out.
Yep: meth. Source: extended family in coal country where everyone has massive substance abuse problems.
Deer hunting and leather working is a better synergy than ammonia and used batteries.
If kids had more video game exposure they would know this. :|
Did you mean the part where I said millions will never use AI to benefit themselves ?
We've had libraries for centuries. Millions chose not to use those as well, because they wanted a beer instead.
Its normal human behavior.
The proverb "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink" exists for this reason.
Will we say the same thing about the 4 million software jobs? When we're doing landscaping work in our 40s for 1/10 our past salary is that improved economic efficiency at its finest?
In other words, if I can do more for myself, I require less interaction with commercial and governmental institutions.
Since money is a form of communication, if I am conducting fewer financial transactions because I am solving problems on my own, my standard of living doesn't necessarily decline with reduced income.
30 years ago, if you needed a one off plastic part by tomorrow, you were most likely simply screwed.
20 years ago, if you needed a one off plastic part by tomorrow, you could probably get it at a fairly high cost.
10 years ago, if you needed a one off plastic part by tomorrow, $10 worth of gas across town and back and you had your part for an affordable price.
The world never ended, people just adapted to the new environment.
Today, if you need a one off plastic part by tomorrow, you ask AI to crank out a 3D file, its in your hand in a few hours, and you crank out 4 more parts in the remaining time.
If the individual is more productive on his/her own, he/she will naturally conduct fewer commercial transactions with his/her neighbor or neighboring tribe, and the forces of supply and demand do exactly what we know they do.
Some numbers get smaller, some numbers get larger, and we all wake up tomorrow and eat breakfast.
Having food you can eat is wealth.
Having 100% of your time at your own command is wealth.
AI is doing what every politician promised, and none could deliver.
It just made everyone (potentially) wealthy.
And it will only get more interesting in the Confucious sense as more people realize this.
Dare I say it .... world peace ? ( dependency on others as a source of fear and insecurity -> AI reducing dependency to minimal amounts -> every individual confident and secure -> ego death -> world peace ... the presumed potential path )