
Elon Musk: Robots will take your jobs, government will have to pay your wage - joeyespo
http://www.cnbc.com/2016/11/04/elon-musk-robots-will-take-your-jobs-government-will-have-to-pay-your-wage.html
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internaut
I am uncomfortable with the second part of this equation.

I would prefer instead of a wage, the distribution of shares that produced a
dividend.

If AI and robotics really will produce all this new wealth, then that capital
can be symbolized (Urbit could create such a system
[https://www.urbit.org/#learn](https://www.urbit.org/#learn)) & represent
this.

The basis for my reasoning is as follows.

We have already had a system that had the same effects as a 'UBI' system. We
used to call people in that system aristocrats.

Suppose we enabled all or most people in our society to become aristocrats?

When we look at aristocrats of the past, we see two things.

A bunch of people who don't think mostly in terms of work/money for survival.
This appears to produce two distinct genres of behavior.

Much of their time is spent partying and socializing.

Some of them greatly further the political, the artistic and scientific.
Others gamble away their fortunes.

Obviously it is more complicated than this but that is the impression I'm left
with when I visit the great houses. Aristocrats were continually throwing
themselves into various projects. Sometimes virtuous, sometimes not.

So I was thinking about what creates an aristocracy in history, and of course
the answer is mostly indentured labour or slaves.

The word robot originally comes from a slavic word for slave. Presumably a
more humane aristocracy could be cultivated on the back of AI and robotics.
This is what the Elon Musks and Sam Altmans point to, although they don't call
it an aristocracy, what UBI advocates promote as their values (individual self
empowerment, holding society to higher standards) does smack of the original
meaning of the word aristocrat.

An aristocracy could never have existed were they reliant on a supply of money
from the King. The popular culture idea 'the king controls all' is naive. It
were never so except in certain extreme local cases. Without independent
wealth (from being Landlords), the political economy would be one giant
monopoly. The State would have total power in the same way the Soviet Union
did over the lives of its citizens. Its too much power in one place.

This is the trouble I have with UBI. I can see scenarios for which it could
work. I cannot see any of them working in which there isn't distribution of
the wealth producing assets. The AI and the robots. Jaron Lanier has been
saying similar things for a while now.

The left and the right, Nicolas_Colin correctly noted
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12473112](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12473112)),
will tear a government funded UBI apart in trying to use it as a political
weapon against each other. That problem can be ameliorated with property
ownership.

