
Tim Harford – Article – Could an income for all provide the ultimate safety net? - lifeisstillgood
http://timharford.com/2016/05/could-an-income-for-all-provide-the-ultimate-safety-net/
======
realitycheckx
I don't get basic income. Why would someone get resources just because they
happen to be born as homo sapiens? It's not like they worked for it or
developed themselves into a homo sapiens. Just dumb luck.

Another thing nobody is talking about:

Slavery of robots. Why is it okay to enslave robots, use and abuse them,
buy/sell them and finally throw them into trash? But you can't do that with
certain members of homo sapiens species. I don't get it.

~~~
Pamar
To be honest, the questions seem a bit trollish, but I will try to answer
anyway.

a) Homo sapiens is a social animal (you can check this on Wikipedia if you are
unfamiliar with the term). Therefore it tends to confer special status to
members of its own species. I am not saying this is right or wrong - you asked
"why" and this is the answer.

b) In part this has the same answer as (a): we (humans) tend to privilege
other humans (or species we find socially valuable, like dogs and cats) and
have much less problems in using other animals as a fungible resource. But
even an ethical vegetarian or an animal rights activist would not say that
cars, toasters or macbooks should not be traded, used, and finally scrapped.

Why? Well, these things do not have consciousness and cannot experience pain.
There is nobody experiencing "abuse", not even enough "somebody" to experience
pain or discomfort. If you are ok with the idea of selling stones or kicking
sand around, you should be ok with scrapping laptops, too.

When (if) machines reach the point where they actually experience things, then
we will have to deal with that. Hopefully ethically. I doubt it will happen
soon, though.

