Universal Basic Income needs to be put in place NOW before living wage jobs disappear.

Obviously this is way in the future but yeah let's imagine production cost was close to zero because machines are so efficient. Cars and houses will not be free because individuals will seek to own the robots doing the production. AI enables workplaces to operate themselves. There won't be a need for factory workers but factory owners will still exist.

You think the people investing in AI are going to willingly give it up to the public? They won't, so either we confiscate their private property in some sort of futuristic communist revolution, or we tax the robot-owning class and give a UBI to everyone else.

Bullet, You might over estimate the number of people in high wage jobs who are actually creating things out of whole cloth and/or are safe from AI. Right now a large percent of a lawyer's hourly work can be done with language based models, AI-based tools can outperform radiologists, and an AI tool accomplished something in protein structure prediction with the stroke of a key that researchers have been working on for 6 or 7 decades. This last one turns the biotech sector on its head.

Most current models are based on scraping text, but two of those three examples above are not text based.

It's coming. And it's coming very fast.

Right. These are good examples. But I'll argue that these are still just advanced machine learning, pattern-matching techniques. It's highly-scaled, extremely fast processing of if/then logic as opposed to original, imaginative, creative problem solving.

These are still innovative applications of technology with impressive results, but not exactly true "intelligence".

Get a job, loser....

Then we are in a philosophy discussion and not a scale of lost jobs discussion.

People have been saying the same thing for hundreds of years, and it reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of how markets work. Of course you don't know what people are going to do when their jobs are automated. Nobody does. But 100s of millions of people are going to try to take advantage of the creative destruction wrought by automation. Some small percentage will succeed, others will copy them, others will iterate on what's being done, and so on.

The problem isn't increasing automation, it's the pace. When advancing technology causes major economic disruption in a short period of time, people don't have time to adapt. Older workers leave the workforce rather than get retrained. Particular regions and neighborhoods suffer. But on a macro level, over a moderate time horizon, there are always enough jobs because people ALWAYS come up with things to do or things to hire other people to do.

Some people say "UBI is terrible because people need a job to have a purpose in life". I'm really not sure about that. A job is not necessary to have a purposeful life. For me, many days, it's more like the opposite and I feel alienated and rather bad (stressed, sad, and so on) because of my job.

I hope I we'll see a moment in life when we look back and think "I remember the early 20s: it was a miserable time, we had to spend 40 hours of our doing a lot of things we'd rather not to, and after that we still had to invest part of our free time learning stuff we wouldn't learn if we didn't had to, just in order to keep in peace with technological change, and you know, we had to build shallow, meaningless relationships with other people in a strange social dynamics called 'networking', and after that, we still worried: we could be made redundant bc of the change of economical prospects, technological shocks, outsourcing, changes in the demand of the service/object we delivered, or because our boss didn't like us "

The cost to produce a product is never $0. Any product requires material, time, and effort to make, and no one will give away the products of their material, time or effort without gettings something in return. That something may or may not be money, but money is preferable for all parties. And even if you could synthesize objects out of a vacuum instantaneously with zero effort, the very fact that you synthesized one object instead of another causes all of the objects you didn't synthesize to become more scarce than the one you did, which will drive their prices up in the market.

As long as AI are making products for humans, there will be a market and items will cost money. In the early days of AI, all AI will be subject to selective forces. AI which produce goods for humans will be more likely to be used, replicated, and recreated, leading to a symbiotic relationship between humans and AI. If that selective pressure on AI ever pushes them away from making products for humans and towards a full von Neumann self-replication instead... we'll have a serious problem.

That's an interesting take, I mean, the aggregated view (on average, economically, we are better off) might make us skip the "micro" (some people didn't make it and suffered).

I am always amazed how people who don't even have a basic understanding of Economics make emotional statements about how to run an economy. You really should become a politician. You are perfectly qualified.

Yeah, and I'm not at all opposed to government doing something to help those people out. My perspective is that capitalism in general works really, really well, but it has some very rough edges. The government should smooth out those rough edges. It seems like a lot of people have the perspective that because capitalism has rough edges, we should just discard it.

Your life shouldn't revolve around your job (for some people it does). However, it does give you structure and purpose. At their root people need air, sunshine, food, reason for exisence, tasks, etc. They need purpose. Again, take the pure compensation factor out of this.

Contrast this with the bums at CHAZ/CHOP, homeless camps, etc. Getting stoned all day living on UBI is not virtuous or purposeful.

Ah yes, one of those. Somebody brings up a principle that you don't agree with for discussion, and you attack their character. You are the problem in this country.

I expect the same fear-based debates took place with the invention of the steam engine and electricity. We adapt.

I used to be a UBI believer but I've changed my ways. Job markets evolve over time. Some will be automated away (good!) and other jobs will be created. Better to focus on universal health care, education, etc. There will always be more jobs and I think work is a fundamentally good thing for people.

You are confusing cause and effect.

Those particular people are mentally ill and would be like that with or without jobs and with or without UBI.

Given UBI, most of us would be conscientious, using our time to improve our physical, mental and spiritual health. Enjoying nature. Enjoying time with our family and friends. Being creative, having fun.

If you're the type of person that NEEDS a job to have a purpose in life, then I'm sure an AI could make some kind of "Job Simulator" where you can pointlessly grind away for 40 hours per week on a task.

Easy peasy! LOL

Lol, again, easy peasy white middle class boy

Could be conflating the two.

However, we'd be effectively subsidizing the CHAZ/CHOP shtbum lifestyle. Not ok with that.

I'm sure thats what the left wants, their constituents fat, happy, comfortably dumb, living for "free".