I think UBI will be necessary at some point, but I'm not thrilled with the idea of millions of us spending all their waking hours on Netflix and DoorDash.
Are you thrilled with the idea of more creative output being a result of UBI?
There's a lot of great stuff that could happen if people weren't chained to wage slavery and could lean on UBI to pursue passions. Sure there will be people that sit on their ass and do nothing, but there will also be people who use their new found freedom to create great things that wouldn't have happened otherwise.
I'd also like to point out that even the most radical UBI proponents aren't pushing for a truly substantial benefit. Most of the proposals I've seen are payments that would be near poverty level if it was treated as a sole income for any length of time.
Compared to today, where we do useless crap like making $5+ coffee cups or sort JIRA tickets or move numbers around from one database to another?
The assumption that a company cranking out an iPhone every year is inherently "better for the evolution of humanity" than more people writing or making videos is one I'd question.
Evolutionary pressure seems to mainly create animals that focus more plainly on food and reproduction than modern humanity, after all!
Except the tasks you name are manufacturing organizing, and preparing for workload. These are required tasks for a firm to meet their demand, even divorced from all other context and embedded in your specified tooling.
They are "required" in that they are useful to the business.
I'm suggesting that "useful to a business" is currently over-prioritized compared to "useful to an individual." (And yes, it's driven by consumers, but if one's basic needs were met without working 8+ hours a day, maybe those individuals would have different preferences.)
And I think the claim that it's evolutionary necessary for us to have today's model of firms and full time employment is particularly out there.
What part of useless jobs in a contrived economic system which forces people to grind their life away futily trying to get ahead is related to evolutionary pressures?
Unless UBI's crazy-high, it's still going to be plenty appealing to work to have money for entertainment, travel, social signaling, better services/opportunities for your kids, to attract mates, et c. I have exactly no idea where people worried about some mass refusal to work at all are coming from.
Sounds like projection, then. I chose to take 6 months off between contracts, and within a week I was bored. That period turned out to be the most productive period when it comes to my open source projects, and those projects now have thousands of users who find them useful. Most people want to feel accomplishment, appreciation and a sense of responsibility, and many people create or work towards that end.
I have a friend I made in college who is now on disability. She's using the time to learn and create, and preparing to start a business teaching others what they know. They could easily smoke weed and play video games all day, but that gets old very quickly.
Is that why stock trading and memecoins skyrocketed during the period where stimulus checks and enhanced unemployment benefits were rolled out? Or why video games reached record player counts during the pandemic (sure sounds like people who had nothing to do all day decided to play video games instead of do whatever productive thing you think they would have done!)?
And to add on to that - what makes you think UBI simply won't cause rents to go up to match? We have strong evidence from the current inflation situation that broad based wage gains get eaten up by price increases of goods with limited supply (i.e. the housing situation in every coastal city). Existing UBI experiments aren't widespread enough to materially shift the housing market. You can't go off evidence from giving a few hundred people extra money. And basic economics tells us that oligopolies (the rental market in coastal cities) extract all consumer surplus (the UBI money) because an oligopoly is not a properly functioning market.
Sounds like what I do every day after work, because I'm too beat to do anything else.
Given time off and no obligations, I always intend to use all of it on that... but damned if I don't start doing useful things on day 2, instead.
[EDIT] FYI, last I heard, states have been quietly letting people scam their way onto the disability rolls to make up for our official social safety net being totally inadequate, after the '08 financial crisis. You might look into that.
We have not escaped evolutionary pressures, and I'll argue that DNA-based life as we know it will never be able to escape them. Mutations will happen and selection will happen, even if those selection pressures fluctuate.
As natural life, everything we do is inherently natural.
It always amuses me to see futurists with no experience in biology or life sciences and a master's in CS try to extrapolate the future of humanity and society. Some of the worst trends in modernity are based around unqualified individuals with platforms trying to impose their will of the future on the masses (think Elon and his ridiculous tunnels, billionaires building "smart cities" in the desert, etc)
> We are the result of evolution and without evolutionary pressure we will fail.
Who cares if they do nothing, write blogs, and post to TikTok? This feels like a get off my lawn type of grievance.
We have endured far worse as a species than a mass of people with time and money to do whatever they want. It is pure arrogance to even meekly assert _you_, someone occupying such a thin sliver of time in human history knows what precise machinations will irreversibly ruin us as a species.
It’s not meaningless is someone else is willing to pay you a wage to do it. It may be repetitive, boring and crappy, but it has a meaning for the employer.
The Dole gave us Harry Potter, you know. It also gave us Oasis. I'm sure that Britons can give you lots more examples.
Given that most creative output comes from a very small number of people, releasing even a tiny fraction of those people from the basic drudgery of life should result in a cultural explosion.
I would even argue that it would significantly help our current political problems. A lot of political discourse is driven by people who have unstructured idle time--retired or unemployed. UBI would allow people who currently have to struggle to support themselves to engage with the political system.
I dont have sources but I've read studies of the creative output of people who only do work when feeling inspired creative motivated and whatnot vs those who do purely out of discipline and habit. And even same people in different moods. And there is no discernable difference in output.
Its a feel good assumption but you don't need any of those things to create beautiful things
Because a society in which everything that needs to be done is getting done - is stagnating. A progressive society always discovers (or invents!) new things needing to be done. And somebody needs to do those things.
> Because a society in which everything that needs to be done is getting done - is stagnating
Is that really the worst thing in the world? In an age driven by hyper consumerism and buying new shiny iPhones and other gadgets, do we really need to do more? Can't we just be happy with our accomplishments as a human race and just enjoy? I for one would welcome a stagnant society.
Maybe us or other citizens of the West can be happy and enjoy our immensely affluent life styles but the great majority of the population of this planet is far from this level and quite eager to reach it. The planet cannot support that.
Also, humanity's eggs are currently all on one basket - we're one major cataclismic event from complete obliteration.
No, the challenges ahead require us to keep evolving, we cannot afford to stagnate.
I know this is anecdotal, I know it doesn't matter. But I just have to say, I watch more TV and order more food when I'm working. When I take a long break, I tend to cook meals, bake bread, work in my yard, and work on side projects. When I'm working I'm too tired at the end of the day to cook, I order in, and I'm too tired to work in my yard, I watch Netflix.
I'm not thrilled with dividends and profits expropriated from the surplus labor time of those of us who work and create wealth by the
1%r heirs spending millions on ski slopes in Aspen, Zermatt or beaches on the French Riviera.
What you were doing before is still happening, if it was automated. Any small benefit you produce for society when you’re taking a break from smoking weed is a net positive for society compared to if you still had to spend all your time robotically doing your meaningless old job.
I do not think we’ll ever manage to automate everything. The more we automate, the more stuff to be done we’ll discover or invent. Not the old job, but many new ones.
This is true for tweaking and was certainly true for industrial automation.
However the danger is if you cut human input/involvement altogether. That is what AI will be if successful. Everyone except the business owner will be uninvolved (apart from futile protests).
Weed and games are fun. Spiritually fulfilling work is fun until about 10%, then you have to document the code, write tests, do marketing, answer support and so on…
> I think UBI will be necessary at some point, but I'm not thrilled with the idea of millions of us spending all their waking hours on Netflix and DoorDash.
Why would eliminating the benefit cliff produced by means-tested welfare result in fewer people working for income above the basic support level? Reducing the disincentive for additional work on top of minimum support is a major motivation for moving to BI from means-tested welfare.
Just because we all can think of millions of examples of humans acting terribly doesn’t mean we are vindicated in judging the character of hundreds of millions of people on the behaviors shown in videos of people on what is likely the worst day of their life.
