Look, I read the article and inferred that he feels guilty. There isn't really any substance there and it is full of ridiculous assertions indicating that his labor, willingness to live in Qatar and stewardship of capital all have essentially zero real value and, thus, do not justify his cushy existence. This is a bad path forward for how to make the world a better place. If no one is doing any labor and no one is acting as a good steward, the world rapidly goes to hell. Even if you posit that all our jobs will be replaced by robots, we will need good stewards if we want good quality of life generally for all people. Someone will have to make decisions about the robot factories, etc. Given how widespread an impact those things would have, these would need to be wise to a very high standard in order to not be disastrous.
Then you come in and mirror my language and start off with "guy..." I am an active participant on HN and open about my gender. You referring to me as a guy tells me you don't actually recognize me or know who I am. It also tells me you didn't so much as click through to my profile. It is trivially easy to determine my gender and you didn't do that much. That means you know literally NOTHING about me, thus all statements that follow your description of me as a guy are made up out of thin air. They aren't any kind of valid criticism with any kind of basis in actual facts.
As for UBI, I am not closed minded about it. I am willing to consider a good argument for it. In fact, I would love to see a good argument for it. But I don't think an experiment like the one being done by Sam Altman tells us anything useful. It is obvious on the face of it that if a small subset of people get extra funds for a specified period or time, they will tend to do better than most people around them. This is not real world conditions for what will happen if UBI becomes a reality.
I think there are much better proxies to look at for trying to infer what will happen with UBI and these are real world examples. This includes things like what happens when someone wins the lottery (2/3s are bankrupt within 5 years) and actual historical efforts to share and share alike (communism, which was supposed to be a peasant paradise, but was a disaster). I have had pertinent classes in things like Social Psychology for trying to gauge what is likely to work with actual human beings in actual reality, not some experiment. I also write about my thoughts on UBI and related matters here:
Then you come in and mirror my language and start off with "guy..." I am an active participant on HN and open about my gender. You referring to me as a guy tells me you don't actually recognize me or know who I am. It also tells me you didn't so much as click through to my profile. It is trivially easy to determine my gender and you didn't do that much. That means you know literally NOTHING about me, thus all statements that follow your description of me as a guy are made up out of thin air. They aren't any kind of valid criticism with any kind of basis in actual facts.
As for UBI, I am not closed minded about it. I am willing to consider a good argument for it. In fact, I would love to see a good argument for it. But I don't think an experiment like the one being done by Sam Altman tells us anything useful. It is obvious on the face of it that if a small subset of people get extra funds for a specified period or time, they will tend to do better than most people around them. This is not real world conditions for what will happen if UBI becomes a reality.
I think there are much better proxies to look at for trying to infer what will happen with UBI and these are real world examples. This includes things like what happens when someone wins the lottery (2/3s are bankrupt within 5 years) and actual historical efforts to share and share alike (communism, which was supposed to be a peasant paradise, but was a disaster). I have had pertinent classes in things like Social Psychology for trying to gauge what is likely to work with actual human beings in actual reality, not some experiment. I also write about my thoughts on UBI and related matters here:
http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/p/ir2.html