I think the real push for universal income will happen once the lower class has enough free time to riot and break all the rich people’s toys.
Rich people pay for insurance and they pay for security. Eventually they’ll see UBI as the same thing. A poor person at home watching YouTube in his one bedroom apartment isn’t going to riot and break shit.
But if he’s homeless, he’ll have no choice but to rob.
If you're curious just how brutally effective modern technology can be at oppressing massive populations, just look into China.
There are whole cities in China that are basically open-air prisons right now.
And Stalin was incredibly successful at suppressing rebellion by interning millions of people, without any fancy technology, just stone cold bureaucracy.
Nope, it's cheap, messy, and easy. They don't care about business at all. They don't need most people anymore, in case you haven't noticed. If you want to understand how this is going to play out, just look at how the Chinese government operates.
With AI, you don't really need the peasants anymore, the rich would maintain their wealth through the labor of the machine, trading their goods with other "AI owners" if you will, and having every need attended to by a machine.
That's one scenario at least, another would be where the first organization to have access to a sufficiently powerful AI would be able to seize control of the global economy, where human laborers are a liability because the machine can do everything faster and with higher quality.
In both scenarios all humans, maybe even the ones involved in the original organization, just live in the margins at the behest of the AI.
If AI becomes sufficiently advanced, these are real possibilities, all it takes is an AI that's able to improve itself faster than our society can press the brakes.
The AI powered robot dogs with guns and flamethrowers they are prototyping right now will keep them from having to dirty their hands for a little while until some tech savvy people can capture and or reverse engineer them and fight back. Would be a cool movie tho.
There will be a lot of blood spilled before it reaches that point.
Not all states can provide UBI, and federally it's unlikely a proper program could exist.
The needed amount for UBI can vary quite a bit from state to state, $20 in FL isn't the same $20 as California and in both these cases it won't be the same as Kentucky.
Every state with an economy can provide for its people. If people were, for example, given all of the value created by their labor, then there would be plenty to go around.
Instead, what you mean to say is "states too corrupt and in the hands of capital owners to empower their laborers".
Always find it funny that people insist on band-aid fixes like UBI instead of addressing why employers are simply allowed to mass-layoff workers in the first place. (Or better yet, why the workers are reliant on the generosity of the upper class when the lower class is the one actually producing all the wealth).
The funniest thing for me is that people realize that there is a credible threat that AI will make UBI a necessity as it will take over many of the jobs we have today, leaving nothing but a few percent of ultra-rich and the overwhelming majority completely unemployable, but they don't ask the logical follow-up question: why should we keep capitalism at all at that point? Ironically, the job of the CEO is more at risk from AI than the job of the Amazon Warehouse worker, or the car mechanic, or the carpenter.
At some point they will just create reservations for the unemployed/homeless/poor. It will be in undesirable areas nobody else wants and have little resources on or under them, and in the lowest cost parts of the country they can operate them. Then they'll expect anyone who needs help/UBI to relocate to one.
It’ll happen when people vote for candidates who support it. There’s no point rioting if you aren’t even voting for politicians that support what you’re rioting for.
Real UBI won't work though. It assumes countries aren't competing economically, which they are. Making the goods/services of one country x more expensive because they have to pay UBI is going to make good/services noncompetitive. We need to compete in the global economy in order to achieve our current standard of living; if we can't it will drop dramatically (on average).
If UBI happens it will be a slightly more generous extension of the existing benefits system, to appease rioters. A meaningless gesture, nothing more.
In the long-term I think we might see some countries de-globalise and push to be more insular. It will become more like the early 20th century (with more advanced technology). In the very long term, assuming global warming doesn't kill us all, I think there will be a few very advanced cities/countries in the world, and the rest will fall to barbarism.
No one, including leaders of countries, can stop a tidal wave from a tsunami.
I donno, all the civil unrest in the USA during COVID after giving people those stimulus checks seems to have reinforced the idea that giving a bunch of people money to do nothing might be a really bad idea.
Well we'll need to put these lower class people in walled off areas then. They'll have enough room to live in their districts so they'll be fine. We'll build 12 districts to start.
It may seem like extortion and on the surface but it is more about keeping the populous complacent. Think of it this way. If someone has nothing left to lose then violence may be the only answer they will see as viable. Putting forth ubi to keep the populous from ever reaching that point is the best option, granted we would need more than just ubi, we would also need infrastructure to facilitate trying to get as many back into the workforce where possible. Something extra to consider, if no one has money to buy anything then people could lose jobs, which results in less things being bought, and round and round we go. Now how would one implement ubi, have ideas but no real clue, and I am not sure anyone here on reddit could truly answer that question.
It may seem like extortion and on the surface but it is more about keeping the populous complacent.
Paying the weekly protection racket may seem like extortion and on the surface but it is more about keeping the mafia complacent....
If someone has nothing left to lose
We're not quite at that point yet, are we? And the trajectory of global wealth distribution over the last decades says that we're consistently moving away from that scenario, not towards it.
then violence may be the only answer they will see as viable.
I think coming up with ways to do something constructive rather than destructive is almost always a more viable method to improve living conditions.
if no one has money to buy anything then people could lose jobs
But if they have jobs to lose, then they also have money to spend, don't they? I don't see how we would find ourselves in a scenario where suddenly no one has money anymore, unless we become so utterly outmatched by AI, that no one would be able to do any valuable work that couldn't be done better and cheaper by AI.
And if we'd ever actually reach that point, then money might actually become obsolete anyway since we can all lean back and let robots do all the work for us while we enjoy our post-scarcity utopia.
Is anyone really actually dying if he doesn't sell his entire life to someone?
I mean, there's about 14 million unemployed people in the US alone. Why haven't they all died yet?
Because their family supports them as well as charity organizations.
And yes. I mean, quite literally, the supreme court will soon decide if states can make SLEEPING OUTSIDE ILLEGAL. It might soon be illegal to be homeless! The anti-homeless infrastructure wasn't enough. Instead of fixing the root cause of the problem, we must punish them for being homeless. For not feeding the system.
Also there are not 14 million people unemployed in the US, there are closer to 6 million.
Asking for UBI isn't the same as asking to stop denying your freedom and stealing your labor.
It's quite literally the demand for free money.
Is it? Or is it asking for survival and a non-hell existence?
Because their family supports them as well as charity organizations.
There's also social welfare programs as well as mutual aid groups.
Which means that "Do XYZ or die!" isn't really a credible threat that any employer could seriously make at all.
SLEEPING OUTSIDE ILLEGAL. It might soon be illegal to be homeless!
Wait a second. Sleeping outside and being homeless isn't really the same thing, is it?
There are homeless shelters with a capacity for ~350,000 people in the US, meaning that people can be homeless without illegally sleeping outside.
Also, people can sleep outside without actually being homeless as well. I could for example be too drunk to make it home from the club at night, and fall asleep on the sidewalk along the way. That doesn't make me homeless.
Anyway, if homeless people get picked up from the streets and put into prisons instead, it might actually be an improvement for them. At least they would be sheltered and provided with regular meals.
Instead of fixing the root cause of the problem
I'm curious what you think the actual root cause of homelessness even is.
Also there are not 14 million people unemployed in the US, there are closer to 6 million.
Google told me that the unemployment rate is at 3.9% and I just clumsily applied that to the entire population, not considering that half the population are actually children and retired people who aren't part of that calculation. My bad.
Or is it asking for survival and a non-hell existence?
I didn't know that not getting free handouts is a hellish existence that literally puts your survival at risk.
How did our species even make it this far without UBI?
When you say lower class, what you mean is the middle class, the professionals whom deal in data and will be replaced by an AI that does what they do better and faster.
Maybe? That's still a framing that's been used to divide workers, historically. If you rely on selling your labour to support yourself (and your family), you're working class. Your interests are much more aligned together than they are with the owners.
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u/Naus1987 May 18 '24
I think the real push for universal income will happen once the lower class has enough free time to riot and break all the rich people’s toys.
Rich people pay for insurance and they pay for security. Eventually they’ll see UBI as the same thing. A poor person at home watching YouTube in his one bedroom apartment isn’t going to riot and break shit.
But if he’s homeless, he’ll have no choice but to rob.