If we get a UBI, I'm quitting my developer job and just going to coast the rest of my life. I don't care how many corners I have to cut, lol. Gonna milk that cow as hard as I can.

My dad used to ask to be laid off jobs (blue collar) so he could collect unemployment for a few months. He did that off and on for years.

When there's too many cooks in the kitchen, we all benefit when there is less people trying to cook.

We will not benefit from fewer people working..

Well you won't have any coworkers who are just there for the paycheck and actually have zero interest in solving the company's problem.

People don't need to be motivated by high-minded ideals to make useful contributions.

Of course they don't - and that's fine. All throughout our evolution we would of had children and elders who would have had limited productivity. Now with automation, how many less people do we actually require to work? It will be very few - it will definitely be more people than the minimum required.

The upcoming AI/robot automation apocalypse means that we are going to have fewer people working. The question is how we're going to deal with that.

That article covers what happens before the apocalypse. What happens after it, i.e. after the point where AI and robots can not only do our current jobs better than we can, but also all of the ones we could possibly retrain to?

Unless AI and robots become effectively humans, they will not be able to do our jobs better than we can. And they do become effectively humans, we will have much bigger things to worry about than unemployment.

Elon realizes this, hence his warnings about AI - how we deal with it is build a better bot that counteracts EvilBot 1.0.

How do you know?

You might. I wouldn't. I'd be willing to wager that most people here wouldn't. They might take more vacations, but they'd probably also be starting more companies.

Hopefully you're a good person or the environment around you will help you grow in positive ways. Would you have a family? And why are you unhappy at your developer job? Is it more stress than you'd like? It seems like your dad had a strong influence on you.

>If we create a UBI then people will have the time to be better educated, to be healthier, to raise healthier, happier, and more productive families. We're almost there, automation will strongly facilitate this.

Compulsory redistribution programs like UBI pervert incentives, leading to less individual responsibility over time. They're clumsy cookie cutter solutions, which with a stroke a pen, impose the same formula to tens/hundreds of millions of people. On one end, the people lose out, and on the other, they win out in the short term. The only determinant of which side a person is on is the amount of currency that they report to the government that they received for that year.

This is an overly simplistic formula that not only adversely affects incentives, but also becomes increasingly better gamed over time, leading to competitive energies being diverted to economically wasteful activities like tax avoidance (which is an industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars per year now).

These kinds of programs do not take into account the unique circumstances found in the vast population they affect. In other words, they ignore the vast majority of the knowledge of society, which is in the form of localized knowledge diffused across millions of people. So in place of spontaneously formed economic relationships based on the rich localized knowledge of millions of individuals, they create simplistic economic relationships based on categories created by legislators.

They are pure economic destruction. And we have evidence of this from the last 40 years. UBI is just the doubling down of an economic model that has been failing for over 40 years.

Social welfare increased 4.8 percent per year on average, between 1972 and 2011 [1]. This represents a massive shift to the social democratic economic model.

And it's not just the US. Almost all advanced economies underwent this transition over the last 40 years, and it has been associated with stagnating wage growth and less economic dynamism.

The key to accelerating gains in quality of life is not more centralization and dependence on government. It is to remove all artificial barriers to access to capital. As it is, only large financial institutions can access global capital markets directly. Regulatory agencies have created very onerous compliance requirements that one has to meet to engage in a wide array of financial transactions. This in turn means that in practice, the majority of the population must pay economic rent to very rich and powerful groups to participate in all aspects of the economy.

Distributed blockchain technology promises to democratize access to global capital markets, so that small businesses and ordinary individuals can trade equity for capital directly with each other, with no 'tax' being paid to rent-seeking institutions and professionals, playing the role of middle-man thanks to special government-granted privileges.

To further elaborate:

I believe everyone should be part of the ownership class. The average person should own microshares in thousands of companies big and small, and be assessing enterprises everyday to determine which ones to purchase a tiny amount of shares in, with zero friction and next-to-zero fixed costs that would otherwise make small purchases uneconomical (if each trade has a $10 trading fee like it does now, you can't economically buy $1 worth of shares, so that's why trading fees have to approach zero to make this kind of dynamic economy possible). These shares in turn would earn people passive income, so that they don't have to work all the time.

If distributed blockchains and cryptocurrency become the main economic institutions in the world, I believe this vision will become possible, and we will experience a renaissance in economic and technological progress like never before seen.

[1] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-is-driving-growth-...

> Compulsory redistribution programs like UBI pervert incentives, leading to less individual responsibility over time.

OK yes, but you can't think about incentives like that.

It's not just a matter of GOOD INCENTIVE/BAD INCENTIVE, because the incentives all influence each other. You can't just make a giant list of GOOD INCENTIVEs and then do them all.

In fact, you really can't play very many incentives all at once together, because the more incentive schemes you have the more likely you are to create strange situations that exploit unanticipated interactions between what really are GOOD INCENTIVEs when considered independently.

So, your lionizing of THE SPECTRE OF UTTER POVERTY as an incentive for people taking responsibility for something in their life... I agree with you. That spectre does in fact incent quite a lot of people to take responsibility.

But the problem is, if you accept THE SPECTRE OF UTTER POVERTY into your incentive package, then you also incent INTERGENERATIONAL POVERTY, where children are born into homes of people who, despite all those helpful incentives, just sucked at not being poor.

And the problem is INTERGENERATIONAL POVERTY is actually a horrible, horrible incentive when it comes to taking responsibility. Because those kids have very little resources and crime, even though it really pays off like a piddly little amount of money compared to a good job, if kids have like no resources even crime starts to make financial sense.

So you created this world where you have this super strong YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE, THERE IS NO NANNY STATE culture, then what really makes sense for that kid to do is say you know what, I am going to take matters into my own hands. I am responsible for my destiny. I am going to drive these kids over to this house and get a lot of money.

And that's what you incented. You incented people taking responsibility for taking care of their own.

Personally, I'd rather incent that kid to sit in an apartment and play Xbox after school until he's 18. And incent his mom to hang out and smoke as much weed as she wants and use food stamps to buy Frosted Flakes and stay the fuck out of trouble until he does turn 18.

As far as I know that kid could be fucking Elon Musk. For what? 12k218 = $432,000 of tax revenue?

You're saying his moral compass will be so eroded by the presence of his free apartment and lack of consequences for his slacker-ass mom that he will be unable to take responsibility for himself? I doubt it. He'll have plenty of other role models in his life besides his mom. Like Elon Musk and Prince or whoever.

>But the problem is, if you accept THE SPECTRE OF UTTER POVERTY into your incentive package, then you also incent INTERGENERATIONAL POVERTY, where children are born into homes of people who, despite all those helpful incentives, just sucked at not being poor.

This idea that the free market doesn't address intergenerational poverty is unfounded in my opinion. Poverty declines precipitously anywhere in the world that adopts a market economy [1].

In the US, poverty was declining decade over decade, until the War on Poverty began, at which point it remained steady, despite spending on subsidies for the poor increasing decade after decade. While UBI doesn't have incentives that are as harmful as those of traditional welfare, it still reduces the need to be self-sufficient, and thus teaches the wrong behaviours.

>So you created this world where you have this super strong YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE, THERE IS NO NANNY STATE culture, then what really makes sense for that kid to do is say you know what, I am going to take matters into my own hands. I am responsible for my destiny. I am going to drive these kids over to this house and get a lot of money.

It's important to remember that the role of a financial market is to provide capital to individuals and enterprises that can make good use of it. If this kid is the next Elon Musk, as you suggest he could be, then it's in the interest of profit-motivated investors to identify him, and provide him with a substantial student loan, in exchange for the future interest payments he will easily be able to pay off once he's finished school and started his Tesla.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-pol...

> I believe everyone should be part of the ownership class.

No classes for me no thank you. But hey, maybe different personality types need to have different ways of life. Perhaps you would thrive in a class based society, where as others would thrive in something else.

Strongly disagree. This feels like the academic style analysis that assumes computing costs are free. $10 trading costs suck. But so does the time energy and effort spent on researching stocks. Owning tiny micro shares isn’t worth the research costs.

Individuals have private knowledge about their local environment that can inform purchases of these micro shares. Combined with automated analysis tools, it can allow quick effective decision-making on small purchases to build one's personal portfolio.