What is AI, page 10.
Added 2024-09-29 00:56:23 +0000 UTCWhy do they need to know what toxic waste tastes like?
If I had UBI, I would still "work". I love to sit around, illustrating ripping yarns!
Comments
Altruism.
Skunkupine
2024-10-01 13:17:40 +0000 UTCContinuing the previous thoughts: Often, the idea behind this sort of thing is that the wealth created by the robots will be put into a big pile, and used to pay the UBI. The problem I see with that idea is what I call "The Big Pile O' Money Theorem" - anytime you have a big pile of money, certain types of people will have the belief that said pile would look much better in their back pocket vs. where-ever it was supposed to go, and will look for a way to redirect said pile in said direction. So very quickly the money will be redirected from UBI to a few very rich people. Then there is the fact that AI without physical effectors is NOT going to create a great deal of real wealth. You need robot factories to turn raw materials into resources, and whoever builds those factories will assert they are the rightful recipients of the wealth (see previous point....) Lastly, having lots of robot factories might indeed churn out wealth at a prodigious rate, but that simply means the raw materials are exhausted at a prodigious rate, and eventually the planet won't be able to sustain that. "Oh, but our robots are super-dooper efficient, and waste nothing." Sorry, let me read to you from the Holy Book of Thermodynamics: Thou shalt not decrease the disorder of a system without increasing the disorder of some other system. These magical robots will need energy, and will produce waste, because That's Just The Way The Universe Works. Where is all that energy coming from? Do NOT say "fusion". For fusion to work, we have to do what the sun does, but we have to do it not one order of magnitude better, not two orders of magnitude better, not THREE orders of magnitude better, but over FOUR orders of magnitude better - my metabolic processes yield more power per kilogram than the fusion reactions of the core of the sun. In order to make an effective power plant you would have to have a fusion plasma putting out THOUSANDS of times the power of the sun, and not just for the few nanoseconds of ITER, but for years between service checks.
Skunkupine
2024-09-29 19:01:59 +0000 UTCThere's also the simple fact that "if everyone stops working, then where is everything we seek to spend money on going to come from?" Who is going to plant, grow, harvest, store, process, and ship crops? Who is going to mine, gather, etc vital minerals, ore, and materials? Who is going to turn them into products? Who is going to ship and sell them? Who is going to "man" the places we seek to spend money? Who is going to provide services needed to function? The ultimate problem with just giving people money that don't earn it, which we happened to be dealing with right now thanks to all that "you know what" crap over the past 4 years. And then the pan-ultimate social split . . . those that still work aren't going to be too pleased with their hard earned money and taxes going to pay for a bunch of worthless lazy pieces of trash to just stay home and sit on their butts. And when disaster hits and the crap hits the fans . . . what then? A.I. and robots running everything paints a pleasant picture, but once the power gets tanked, those with the skills and drive to work survive while all the lazy Lou's suffer and get left to reap the cesspool of their stupidity. You want U.B.I. or whatever they call it . . . you better be ready to cull the total population down to a level that can make it manageable . . . otherwise, get on your feet and get back to pitching in. And anyone who says they'll pay you to stay at home for any reason . . . you take the money, kick them out of your way, and keep working. The more that work, the more gets done, the more there is to go around . . . that has been a basic principal sense humanity first developed society . . . and when it is forgotten . . . you better be ready to choke down the aftermath when life starts dealing like a card shark. such as unleashing storms that lay waste to several states.
Sonicrailin
2024-09-29 15:59:44 +0000 UTCI think there are several issues with UBI that have not been explored in the trials. Hang on, this could be a long post. The trials were never "at scale" - they were a subset of the population, for a limited time. I think there will be several issues that will appear if this is applied at scale. 1) Cost of living in different areas. It takes much more to meet the basic needs in Washington, DC than it takes in Liberal, KS. Do we pay the person in DC more than the person in Liberal? If not, then either the person in Liberal has an excess over basic needs, or the person in DC doesn't have enough. 2) When companies know that people have money, they increase prices. In the US during the NTSC to ATSC conversion to digital TV, everybody had vouchers for US$20 per TV owned to buy converter boxes. The bill of materials for a converter box was pretty small; it should not have been a problem to make a $20 converter. But guess what?! No converter was less than $40, because the manufacturers knew people had at least $20 to buy a converter. 3) People are currently habituated to working and to "getting ahead of the Jones's". That leads to people working when they strictly don't need to. But after a time, I suspect many people would get used to the idea that they don't have to work to survive, and would fall out of the habit. I don't think any of the trials went on long enough to allow this de-habituation to occur. 4) I've saved the biggest for last. Where is all this money coming from? Roughly, basic living expenses are about US$50k/year if you are covering housing. Assume half the US population is a dependent of somebody else, so we fund only 150M people. That's 7.5 trillion dollars a year. That is more than the total spend right now.
Skunkupine
2024-09-29 12:24:05 +0000 UTCThis notion has come up on Stack Exchange and Wikipedia. Why do people help build and make things when they don’t have to? I suspect there’s a name for this but I don’t know what it is.
VGR
2024-09-29 03:07:23 +0000 UTCIf I had UBI I would probably do freelance work, or find something that would attract patreons, and I _definitely_ would have quit that high-stress job before it burned me out.
Paul Lenoue
2024-09-29 01:41:20 +0000 UTC
