Lucas Pollet 🌏

Energy plus high technology will enable full recycling and turn the Earth’s landfills into mineable ore. This is the way.

Yeah that’s why we create them. 1. Terraform Mars. 2. Terraform Venus. 3. You can even terraform the Moon. 4. Eliminate the EPA and agencies like it and green the deserts of the American West, Australia, and the Middle East.

I would like to live in a high-trust society. The decline of trust is something worth caring about, and reversing it is something worth doing. We should not have to live constantly wondering if we're being lied to or scammed. Trust should be possible again.

There will be no difference between communism and capitalism once AI and robots take over all work. Communism is government ownership of the means of production. The main economic problems with communism were the lack of incentives to be productive and the lack of freedom to produce what people wanted. In a fully automated economy, the government could own all the means of production while allowing the system to be completely responsive to consumer demand. Essentially, everyone could get anything they want, even a product made especially for them. It would be designed and produced quickly, at low cost, by AI and robots. There would be no need to incentivize work, since there would be no human workers to incentivize. There would be no need for profit to incentivize production, since anything people wanted could be made by fully automated industry. Alternatively, it would be possible for all businesses to be privately owned. However, from an economic perspective, and from the consumer’s perspective, there would essentially be no difference. Either way, a tax would be added to all sales so that UEI payments could be paid out to consumers. It may be the case that the economy will become so productive that demand will saturate. This means that people would not spend all the UEI they are given. If that turns out to be the case universally (no one wants more than the UEI pays out), then we could switch to a system where anyone can order whatever they want without paying. Under such conditions, private companies could also order equipment and supplies without paying, and then give away production for free. They would not be able to earn any profit. However, as I explained in a previous post, private companies would not be profitable anyway due to perfect competition and perfectly efficient markets. I know this all sounds strange, but this is likely to be the actual outcome when AI and robots take over all production, and once we reach the optimal limit to technology. This is not something I am proposing. It is not even really a prediction. It is simply an analysis of how the economy is likely to function under the conditions we are likely to see in the near future.

The more jobs lost to AI and automation the better. Every job that disappears is a person released from work that did not need a human to do it, and every hour of human attention freed from that work is an hour that becomes available for something only a person can actually do. The labor panic treats existing jobs as sacred because it cannot imagine what the freed labor will build, which is the same failure of imagination that worried about agricultural workers when the tractor arrived and telephone operators when the switchboard went digital. The jobs we cannot currently name are the ones that matter. They will be invented by people standing on top of the productivity surplus that automation creates, doing work that requires the freed attention, the cheap compute, the collapsed barriers to starting things. Labor is not a fixed quantity to be rationed. It is a discovery process. Each displacement surfaces capital and human capacity that the market then redirects into uses nobody could have predicted in advance, which is precisely why central planners and the anti-ai crowd keep failing to anticipate the next economy and keep demanding we freeze the current one in place to protect them from their own inability to see forward. The correct response to automation is to accelerate it, let the displacement run, and trust that the generation standing in the wreckage will build something the current generation cannot picture, because that is what every previous generation did with the ruins of the one before it.

Universal HIGH INCOME via checks issued by the Federal government is the best way to deal with unemployment caused by AI. AI/robotics will produce goods & services far in excess of the increase in the money supply, so there will not be inflation.

We’ve had UBI for unmotivated people for decades. Motivated people will still compete for positions of leadership, fame, women, etc.

This won’t be necessary. For every job lost to AI, 5 new jobs will be created—many of them will be jobs we’ve never even heard of that could’ve never existed without AI.

Being against UBI is totally fine. But so many of the arguments people make against it insult my intelligence. For example, the idea that if people aren't forced to work, they will lose all meaning. Many people dislike their jobs so much that they would trade working just to survive for the possibilities downtime opens up. Since when do we find meaning in doing something we despise? Has work for survival become our new idol? What about spiritual work, reading and studying, teaching, family time, growing food, working out, enjoying hobbies, and so forth? I'd flip this whole conversation—the fact that so many people think work is the primary source of meaning is a bigger problem than people having the option not to work. And UBI wouldn’t make working impossible; it just means people could be much more selective about what kind of work they do. That’s freedom and agency at its best.

1971 Nixon abolished the Gold Standard. 2024 we reintroduce it?