Re:Y Combinator Learns Basic Income Is Not So Basic After All
by DoreenMichele on Monday August 27, 2018 @03:50PM
(#17853913)
Basic income shouldn't be targeted to ensuring that people can afford to bum around on no income in a high-cost of living area. If you want to live in a high-cost location, you should secure the income to live there.
Sam Altman and other tech giants are proposing basic income as a means to provide for people incapable of getting jobs due to automation permanently eliminating jobs for large numbers of people. They predict permanent unemployment of up to 80 percent of the population.
The jobs being eliminated currently pay between $20k and $50k. Once they eliminate those jobs, they are talking about giving you about $10k and no hope of ever having a full time job again.
Please go talk to the people who are proposing UBI as a solution to this scenario, not me. I am not actually pro UBI. I am for seeing this as another industrial revolution and further improving worker's rights. Among other things, the first industrial revolution gave birth to the expectation of a 40 hour work week in order to spread earned income around.
I am all for people working for a better life. But people like Sam Altman would like to design a world in which that is simply not possible for most Americans and would like to then throw a few crumbs to the masses for whom a job is simply not a possibility in the world they foresee and would like to optimize for.
(Though I think if your goal is to eliminate jobs -- rather than find ways to redistribute work -- then UBI needs to be designed as a middle class income, not a poverty level income. Otherwise, you are an asshole in my book if this is the world you want to design for people who aren't already millionaires.)
Sam Altman and other tech giants are proposing basic income as a means to provide for people incapable of getting jobs due to automation permanently eliminating jobs for large numbers of people. They predict permanent unemployment of up to 80 percent of the population.
The jobs being eliminated currently pay between $20k and $50k. Once they eliminate those jobs, they are talking about giving you about $10k and no hope of ever having a full time job again.
Please go talk to the people who are proposing UBI as a solution to this scenario, not me. I am not actually pro UBI. I am for seeing this as another industrial revolution and further improving worker's rights. Among other things, the first industrial revolution gave birth to the expectation of a 40 hour work week in order to spread earned income around.
I am all for people working for a better life. But people like Sam Altman would like to design a world in which that is simply not possible for most Americans and would like to then throw a few crumbs to the masses for whom a job is simply not a possibility in the world they foresee and would like to optimize for.
(Though I think if your goal is to eliminate jobs -- rather than find ways to redistribute work -- then UBI needs to be designed as a middle class income, not a poverty level income. Otherwise, you are an asshole in my book if this is the world you want to design for people who aren't already millionaires.)