Given that (allegedly) "your salary" won't be the answer for a significant chunk of the population soon, and all that money will instead (allegedly) go to the bosses doing the firings, and the AI companies they employ instead.
The entire Earth's population dead, with evil corporate board members holding votes underground as to who gets to be the CEO of the company.
Also, a UBI is likely to cause inflation.
"cause increased prices for consumer/essential goods" is what you meant (since buying power is moved to people who are reliant on buying them), but this is a one-time transition to a new equilibrium (so is mitigable by increasing the UBI to account for it), not a constant ever-looming devaluator.
We're talking about an increased federal budget in the hundreds of billions/trillions to support such a UBI. That will cause a massive increase in taxation on the people who can still find jobs.
To make matters worst, the government in 10-15 years will likely be spending ~25% of it's budget on interest payments alone. Hiking the federal budget up even more sounds like a hard sell.
Look at Rome and what it had to do when the system shock of so many slaves disrupted labor. Wild that Roman patricians understood you have to...like...feed society, but modern right wing Americans don't.
As a welfare replacement, it is much more efficient, since there is no effort spent determining who qualifies. People can spent their money however they want, rather than the patchwork of separate programs we have now.
It doesn't need to bring anyone down. It's just a different way of distributing what we already receive. For you ordinary workers, they will receive $X in a monthly check, and their salary can be reduced by $X (since the minimum wage can also be abolished).
That does mean that the desirability of some jobs will shift. Good. We have a bunch of very dirty jobs being done for minimum wage, even though demand is extremely high. I'd love to see the garbage men and chicken processors get more money for their dangerous work.
And if I get less for my cushy desk job, oh well. Especially since we seem to be putting all of the effort into replacing me, and none into the jobs that come with hazards to life and limb.
That is double current federal and state welfare spending.
I'm dead tired right now so I'm sure I'm missing something, but considering that is far below the poverty threshold in any big city, I dont think we'll be solving anything by eliminating welfare in favor of UBI.
UBI is basically of no benefit to the upper middle class or wealthy, and it won't be enough for the poor who cannot work enough. It really only benefits the upper lower class and lower middle class the most.
It doesn't benefit the wealthy at all. They come off worse for it. (There are revenue-neutral versions but I don't think they suffice.) But I believe that they can afford it, and will find the result a healthier America that they won't want to abandon.
"Everyone gets a livable minimum wage! Oh by the way if you had a cushy desk job, that's gone because Claude can do it, or you get paid peanuts to manage Claude instances if you're lucky. Don't worry though, you can still make big bucks by working as a garbage man or at a chicken processing plant"
and the alternative is
"Burn the data centers down"
then the 2nd option may have a bit more appeal?
If AIs simply replace people, the same total work gets done. It's just a matter of who gets the profits from it.
It won't be that simple, to be sure. Nonetheless we already produce far more than subsistence, and there's no reason why a UBI would change that. If it increases the price of some commodities because now everyone can buy them, I'm ok with that. It already horrifies me that some go hungry in the fattest nation in history.
Even if it were true, you still have distribution. You can’t get goods across a nation, let alone the globe, without significant inputs.
Are you checking the local grocery store and extrapolating globally?
Billionaires simply _should not exist_. The fact that the power to shape societies is concentrated in so few can account for many of the existential threats we face today. AI is not "the problem", it's merely the latest symptom of our broken system and the prioritization of the wrong goals and outcomes.
EDIT: grammar
If American billionaires couldn't exist then America would be even poorer and underdeveloped than Europe, the entire tech industry wouldn't exist, and it'd be entirely at the mercy of China. Because nobody's going to start a business in a country that violently confiscates their wealth just for being successful. The envy of people like yourself is a deep moral illness that destroys civilizations if left unchecked.
Sounds like a self-defeating argument to me.
Billionaires who inherit their wealth shouldn’t exist. But I have no problem with people like Bezos owning a sizable percentage share of valuable companies they created. When I was a kid, getting something ordered by mail took a week or two, even if you called in the order. UPS and FedEx existed, warehouses and storage trucks existed, but Bezos reduced that to a matter of hours. And now the sheeple can get their daily Amazon deliveries while complaining that Bezos is making a nickel on each one.
In a purely analytical calculation—without emotional nonsense—one Jeff Bezos obviously is vastly more beneficial to society than thousands of ordinary people. If we just had school teachers, or whoever else you idealize, we’d all be living in mud huts. The average person would be living like an animal without the technology created by exceptional people like Bezos. Why shouldn’t society reward them lavishly?
Let's just look at countries which have high income and very low income unequality, like Finland.
Turns out they don't live in mud huts, and most aspects of society work far better than in the USA.
But even if Bezos actually creates billions of value on his own, it doesn't mean that he should get those billions. The reward for such high value work should be high enough that Bezos chooses to do it instead of something else, but it doesn't need to be higher than that. In a world where the highest paid position would reward a few million instead of a few billion, I'm sure Bezos and people like him would still gravitate towards that work since it'd still be work with the best rewards.
People who have some revolutionary ideas wouldn't abandon them if the potential highest reward was millions instead of billions. Or do you believe that there are people with good ideas right now that abandon them because they can't earn trillions with the idea? What people expect as a reward for their work is what decides whether they do it or not. If we can lower the expectation, we can get the high value work without creating dangerous levels of power concentration.
I have no issue with incentivising and rewarding individuals who contribute great works. Any rewards, monetary or otherwise, would be fine if our institutions could continue to serve all and not just the few "rewarded" individuals.
Unfortunately, time has proven that money and power are intrinsically linked and those same few will continue to shape how and what paths humanity takes at large. I'm simply stating we should tread more carefully and not place all trust in a few cult of personalities as many seem to, and your response implies. Perhaps the stories of the self-made individual and the chances of becoming one of those few (however vanishing small the chance) is too ingrained in our collective psyche that we blind ourselves to what parts we actually play in this game.
The trade offs here aren't as simple as getting packages sooner rather than later. The tradeoffs are accepting a brutal, fuedalistic society where the negative outcomes for the many are disregarded for the positive outcomes of the few.
Perhaps the negative outcomes are too "invisible" in our daily lives because we, in tech, are isolated enough by nature of being fairly well compensated for the work we do. This in all likelihood will change if history is our guide. I personally know many individuals that work 2 or 3 jobs to be able to afford a roof over their heads because of wage suppression by corporations like the one you mention. Teachers, healthcare workers and the like. You may not see them as important but you may want to reflect on why. Meanwhile, the commons are actively being destroyed: hard won clean air and water protections are being rolled back. My father is dying of cancer because of exposure to chemicals that corporations actively lobbied to hide from the public at all costs, even though they were well aware of the dangers. These are the real results of direct corporate lobbying efforts made by the rewarded few. I don't see this as an "emotional" argument to make, but rather an inherently humanist one.
My children are growing up in a world with dimmer prospects than I or my parents had. If this is simply the cost of faster packages, than I want none of it.
Avicebron brought up inequality as the root cause.
DavidPiper indicated only the few thousand richest as the root cause.
Rayiner questioned if those few thousand richest have the means or capacity to reduce inequality.
estimator7292 responded that everyone has to help reduce inequality.
To which I wanted to point out exactly what would need to be sacrificed, because it would involve sacrifices among the top 10% to 20% of the world (constituting many on this forum) which those 10% to 20% would not even consider a "luxury". It is easy to claim a billionaire's private jet is an expendable luxury exacerbating inequality, but the reality is the bar is far lower than that (see statistics on energy used per capita, which can serve as a good proxy for which side of the inequality the lifestyle you might expect is).
That is why we are all mostly talk and no walk, because push comes to shove, we can't even get a sufficient fossil fuel tax passed to slow climate change for our own descendants, much less voluntarily decrease our standard of living solely for the benefit of others in the world.
Comparing middle income 1st world citizens to dragons on their mountains of gold is disingenuous at best.
Those two groups are on the greater side of the inequality, and the third group is on the lesser side of the inequality. All the dragons on their mountains of gold can stop existing, and the inequality barely changes.
Except for commercial flights (which I would easily give up for a hopeful society), I do not find anything on your list remotely relevant to my happiness or well-being.
Imported cheap goods are obviously something all of us consume a lot, but we only need them to feel good in comparison to our neighbours.
As long as we keep them for hospitals and medicine, the rest going away would be just fine. Children would play with whatever they can find instead of cheap plastic toys, we would have to learn to multi-purpose our tools instead of having a specific object for every minor purpose.
Money is just a way of keeping track to how high of a fraction of the future output of the civilization any one person or entity is entitled to. This is by consent.
With AI all is subject to change.
Nope. AI is an accelerant that makes the divide between rich and poor grow even faster.
Were you talking about specifically how do you restrain the power of massive corporations to harm people? AI is coming but a lot of the other things that are happening are preventable - like the rise of no-benefit gig work.
The richest nation in world history and we can’t spend any of it for the betterment of our citizens. It’s disgraceful.