
What is a viable alternative to basic income? - tanto
Assumption 1: Basic income is bad and will destroy the world economy.<p>Assumption 2: Automation of white collar jobs will happen at a scale of 99% of all white collar jobs (through AI or otherwise) and automation of low skilled jobs will be achieved for 99.9999% of all work through one or another way.<p>Assumption 3: 0.1% of the human population will be enough to do all work which machines can&#x27;t do to theoretically support all human life on earth.<p>Is A2&#x2F;3 exaggerated? Lets not dispute A1 even when its highly disputable. Just assume we can&#x27;t have basic income in any form.<p>My question is what are viable alternatives to basic income in this scenario?
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Someone1234
Money is a [bad] stand-in for value. If "AI" is doing most of the work we have
today both mental (programming, financial, etc) and physical (building homes,
unclogging toilets, picking up litter) then people would just shift to work
which does continue to exist (e.g. creative endeavours) and put value on that
instead.

No matter how much you automate and how many jobs are displaced there will
always be an infinite amount more work and different jobs will be assigned
different values artificially.

To get specific, very few people are needed anymore to supply all the
food/water/basics of life to a society. It is all already heavily automated.
But are less people employed or are working hours shorter? No. We just found
new ways to occupy our time and assigned those a value.

Take the Star Trek universe (where they got rid of money). There's a lot of
unanswered questions about that concept, for example how do you divide up
land? And who's to say running a wine vineyard is a more productive use of a
plot than building a science facility (in particular with replicators in this
context).

The more the deep you get into these questions the more artificial the way
human society is structured seems. I legitimately think that people will
always have jobs/work and there will always be some kind of compensation, but
that work will move further and further away from the core resources that keep
a society running (and the jobs themselves will have less and less actual
value).

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dragonwriter
> Take the Star Trek universe (where they got rid of money).

They didn't in the "Star Trek universe" \-- money is frequently used in the
_universe_ , and often things involving it are part of the plots of episodes.
They may (or may not) have done so on Earth or within the Federation more
generally (there are mixed indicators, but people at least frequently claim
that is true from Next Gen on [actually, I think the first reference is in
STIV, though in context that may be a joke more based on the character's
immediate circumstances]; its pretty clearly not in TOS, and I think that
there is a specific reference to a purchase being made on Earth in STII.)

~~~
pjlegato
Yes. See, for example, Ferengis, a Star Trek race that are obsessed with
money.

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runT1ME
Instead of income, what about necessities for a modern life? Shelter, safety,
medical care, nutrition and internet access? These could be provided at a
minimum instead of the income (ostensibly) designed to be used for these
things.

~~~
monknomo
Of course, giving people money to buy these things is easier and probably
cheaper than giving either the things themselves or special vouchers that the
merchants for approved necessities can exchange for money. Someone has to
administer all of these things and come up with rules for them and monitor
compliance.

I mean, look at SNAP and the ridiculous recurring argument over what parts of
a cow it is permissible to purchase with a voucher.

With vouchers, you are ultimately giving someone with a gun the power to
enforce that the voucher is spent correctly, with cash you are not (although
the why is proving hard to articulate, I'm pretty sure this is true)

~~~
runT1ME
No i'm literally talking about eliminating the free market from the equation
for the bare necessities. No vouchers, you give people the minimum required
nutrition, whoever wants it. Soylent or whatnot.

Not vouchers for housing, you build specific housing for this purpose.
Basically communism for the bottom rung of society, though anyone is free to
participate in the capitalistic parts of society anytime they wish. High
wealth individuals coudl just as easily decide to reap the benefits of free
housing and/or nutrition. Just a thought.

~~~
monknomo
That's even harder to do than vouchers. Instead of centrally managing
certificates you have an entire country's worth of logistic problems. I can't
even begin to imagine the government structure needed to buy store and cart
Soylent from Puerto Rico to Alaska.

Let alone government built housing keeping up with population distribution
changes.

I like how your proposal doesn't imply a big public -> private wealth
transfer, but I think what you are suggesting is much, much harder than making
it rain on everybody

~~~
monknomo
Hold up on my last line ^

Where do you get the soylent/electricity/housing/phone/internet from?

Are you proposing that the government fire up soylent plants, buy power
plants, build, own and maintain housing and become a telecom provider?

Or is the government going to buy from private companies?

~~~
Grishnakh
Yep, this is a very bad idea for the most part; these things already exist
with private industry, so it's much easier for government to just allocate and
distribute money, and let people buy things from existing providers instead of
getting the government into the distribution of goods business. There's
definitely room for more government regulation, especially with housing (that
one's a mess, with all the foreign investors pumping up the realty prices;
some simple laws should fix that), and also telecom (basically we need to copy
whatever Europe's doing there).

~~~
monknomo
Euro-style telecoms do seem to be kicking US style telecom ass, from a
consumer perspective. I know I'm jealous.

I think it's hard to untangle foreign investment from local real estate prices
without running into some of the US's fundamental "freedom" tenets, but I
haven't looked very closely into what we might do. I feel like it is more of a
NIMBY problem, most places

~~~
Grishnakh
It shouldn't be that hard to enact some laws which make it really hard or
unprofitable to be an absentee landlord. Perhaps rules requiring property
owners to personally show up for annual property inspections? An easy one
would be rules preventing corporations from purchasing residential property
(after it's been constructed and on the market; it's normal for corporations
to own it initially during construction and first-sale). There should be some
other sneaky ways that localities could throw up roadblocks to foreign
investors and other absentee landlords, and use them to seize the property.

~~~
monknomo
I read about a Seattle law where non-code compliant rentals are forbidden from
raising their rent. That might help

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Mz
I blog about this sometimes. I think well designed gig work and more
affordable housing would solve this. I think if we don't tackle the affordable
housing angle, no amount of basic income (aka supplementing the income of the
poorest people) is going to be enough to solve the problem. Housing keeps
getting bigger and more expensive and there is no upper limit to how far that
can go. We need to put down a floor so housing is accessible for ordinary
people with ordinary jobs.

Here are a few of the posts I have written on this topic:

[http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2016/06/gig-work-
don...](http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2016/06/gig-work-done-right-
portable-income-for.html)

[http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2016/07/minimum-
dece...](http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2016/07/minimum-decent-
housing-not-minimum-wage.html)

[http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2016/05/gig-work-
tha...](http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2016/05/gig-work-that-works-
flexibility-and.html)

[http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2016/07/money-is-
not...](http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2016/07/money-is-not-
wealth.html)

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BjoernKW
You'd have to make additional assumptions in that scenario to come up with a
viable solution other than "Kill all the humans.".

Perhaps there is a category of jobs that hasn't been invented yet or that
already exists but under the current economic conditions can't support more
than a handful of people. White collar jobs have existed for millennia, too
(scribes, accountants, civil servants). However, it was only with the
Industrial Revolution demand for those jobs really took off.

Maybe, some day we'll all be some kind of artists or entertainers. On a more
sinister note, perhaps we end up like the humans in the Black Mirror episode
"15 Million Merits", where humans have to cycle on exercise bikes day in and
day out to generate power and receive credits in return.

Those are all very hypothetical assumptions, though. In my opinion, not making
any additional assumptions a basic income as of now is the by far most
realistic - perhaps even the only - way of dealing with such a - quite likely
-scenario.

~~~
sharemywin
I don't think an AI would need to kill them. Just ignore them because they are
uneconomic and they will die on their own.

~~~
jacalata
Depends how much damage they can do

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rskar
Could it be that humanity at large is doomed to repeat its usual method of a
"reset"? Planet Earth isn't getting any bigger, and if we're lucky worldwide
population may plateau around 11 billion. Per Wikipedia, "Global workforce":
"As of 2012, the global labor pool consisted of approximately 3 billion
workers, around 200 million unemployed." Per The World Bank
([http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.CACT.ZS](http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.CACT.ZS)),
labor force participation has dropped from a little over 66% in 1990 to barely
64% in 2014. They give a per-country overview of these rates, and also per-
income levels:

    
    
        High income	60%	60%
        Upper middle income	72%	67%
        Middle income	67%	63%
        Lower middle income	62%	59%
        Low & middle income	68%	64%
        Low income	77%	77%
    

High and Low income held steady, every other level shows decline.

Take a look at [http://www.mckinsey.com/global-themes/employment-and-
growth/...](http://www.mckinsey.com/global-themes/employment-and-growth/the-
world-at-work), which has this byline (June 2012): Strains on the global labor
force are becoming painfully evident. Market forces will fail to resolve
demand and supply imbalances for tens of millions of skilled and unskilled
workers.

As automation becomes ever more adaptive and versatile, it will be interesting
to see in what ways human employment may somehow remain economically of
interest. But right now the labor force participation trends downward, and the
only way that could be good is if the non-participation people are having
healthfully happy lifestyles - perhaps as retirees or married to well-to-do
spouses.

But if the social order of things is changing such that the prospect of
gainful employment becomes less tenable for most, here's to hoping that a
better world may yet emerge with minimal strife. Otherwise, it's all too easy
to imagine us collectively squabble and fret over moral hazards, free-loaders,
and property rights (including the intellectual kind), and that the crisis
must first reach a breaking point before any material changes can happen.

If UBI is a non-starter, I've got no ideas other than for maybe getting
serious about space travel and colonization.

~~~
Grishnakh
There's absolutely no economic rationale for space travel and colonization. If
you have automation doing all the lower-end jobs, and no way of transitioning
society past the current system where you have to work to support yourself,
it's very simple: all these extra people will have to be eliminated. So we
have 3 choices: 1) start up death camps and start transporting unemployed
people to them for disposal, 2) undergo a violent economic collapse with food
riots, uncontrolled crime, etc., or 3) institute a UBI. Only one of these is
humane and rational.

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petra
I actually think what will happen is a combination of a welfare state with
some type of "jobs program" even if the job is just something useless or "
study in university" etc.

But one thing is very worrisome - this all depends on the power of the people
to rule , but companies seem very good at resisting that power (for ex. Tax
loopholes, lobbying) , and if companies and psychopathic tendencies have their
way - it would be pretty bad .

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Zelmor
Here's some food for though:

When the automated looms were invented, people thought all jobs would soon go
away to the machines, with nothing to do. Surprisingly, new jobs were invented
and people have been busy since then. I bet there was something similar
happening in ancient Egypt as well, knowing how there are writings about how
"the youth do not write properly these days, and the world is going to the
dogs soon. Everything was better during my childhood." Look it up.

So I would suggest you clean your pants and don't worry about automation. Just
go with the flow and keep an eye open for the radically new form of jobs that
will open up.

Also, most of you folks work in services. You build webpages, web
applications, SaaS, corporate software or consult on their integration, yada
yada. You will never go out of work. This is a big world, and opportunity will
remain plenty. It's just changing like it was changing in the early days of
industrial machines. Put in the effort to find new frontiers.

~~~
dTal
>in ancient Egypt ... there are writings about how "the youth do not write
properly these days, and the world is going to the dogs soon. Everything was
better during my childhood." Look it up.

When people claim something dubious and back it up with "look it up" and no
further sources, I reach for my gun. Most of those supposed ancient quotes
about youth are modern nonsense, and as Google returns no results for your
particular quote (and "going to the dogs" is a 16th century English idiom
anyway) I'm going to go with "you made it up". Please don't make things up and
exhort people to "look it up".

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bbctol
Income-less, post-scarcity society, where the limits of what goods/services
you can access are so much higher than you could ever need that the only
limitations put in place can be set democratically?

That, or just increase typical socialist democratic welfare state principles,
tax the hell out of the .01% and invest in public goods.

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sharemywin
it could be more distributed. currently, if you own about $1,000,000 US in
assets you can probably live of your return on your assets. what if you could
retire on 10k or 1k in assets because of massive deflation and control of
information(patents, copyrights) was loosened or replaced.

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jomamaxx
The industrial revolution had a much greater impact on labour than anything we
are seeing happening today.

Previous to this era - humans and animals did _everything_.

Can you imagine how many buggies the steam engines put out?

But the factories employed a lot of people who would have been doing other
things.

Since then, we've constantly been going through this process.

Moreover - the biggest impact on labour today is _not_ automat ion - it's
cheaper labour in the rest of the world.

As factories become a little more automated, it will start at the bottom -
with the simplest tasks. Those jobs are already mostly outsourced.
'Automation' is going to hit China harder than it hits the US.

As for 'basic income' \- even applied in a normal context without the treat of
disastrous unemployment ... 'means tested welfare' is one option. If we
adjusted it a little so that people could possibly find work while still on
welfare without losing benefits, this would take away some of the limitations.

~~~
aminorex
The difference is that the industrial revolution amplified labor, while AI
actually replaces it in many cases. AI + human is less productive than AI sans
human. It's not just a difference in magnitude, but one of _sign_.

Cheaper labor elsewhere does not obsolete labor itself, it merely implies
repricing or arbitrage.

It doesn't really matter how hard the labor market is hit, once it is already
dead.

Means tested welfare fosters dependency, crime and generational poverty, and
implies support of a vast administration and enforcement apparatus. It is used
as a coercive stick to compel behaviors, and often those behaviors are harmful
to the individual recipient - e.g. families that go fatherless, to protect
AFDC.

~~~
jomamaxx
"AI + human is less productive than AI sans human."

This is totally speculative on your part and it depends on the task.

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debacle
Social darwinism (our current system to some degree) is viable for a certain
continuing percentage of the population.

The social darwinists are in charge of a society that benefits them. Changing
that reality is going to be prohibitively difficult.

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niftich
Resource contention with coercion, violence and/or warfare, which AFAIK is
something we've had for thousands of years.

