zzrider12

Problem: Mass AI unemployment Solution: UBI No brainer, right? Anti-UBI arguments I've encountered: 1) Look at history, there's always new jobs - Imagine if a more superior intelligent alien species that can make infinite copies of themselves arrived in 1850 to compete against you in the labor market. They work for energy undercutting wages. how would that have played out? 2) AI sucks now so it'll never happen - Current capabilities are not future capabilities. 3) AI will never exceed human capabilities, so no mass unemployment - Current models already exceed humans at many tasks. The human brain proves that human-level general intelligence runs on 20 watts. We're not waiting for a physics breakthrough, we're engineering toward a known target. Extrapolate the trajectory. 4) There will always be human jobs, bc AI doesn't have agency - You don't need agency to do tasks. 5) Cost of compute give 20watt brain a competitive advantage - For a while. 6) Why not expand existing welfare or do a new narrow welfare to address it rather than UBI? - Unemployment never recovers and only expands. It's just easier to hand everyone the same amount from the get go. 7) We can retrain people to do new jobs! - If AI can replace almost all human jobs, it can do almost any new jobs that are created. 8) UBI kills motivation. People need meaning in life. - Retirees and kids seem alright. There's more to life than trading labor for resources to survive. 9) The government will just let us starve. - People will revolt. 10) The powerful will kill all the useless people - ...like why? There's enough for everyone. 11) But what if mass AI unemployment never materialize? - No UBI then. 12) But how do you pay for it? - Printer go brrr. Print money, don't worry about the debt. If the AI is smart enough to replace human workers, money will essentially become worthless soon, because the AI will be capable of making ever better AIs. So you just need UBI to get over the transitionary period until everything is essentially free. 13) But this is communism! - Not really, but i do see the similarities. It's just a new paradigm. Communism fails because people are imperfect. AI will essentially be as perfect as any intelligence can ever get. 14) But inflation will be insane! - Automation will be deflationary. You need something to off-set it, so printing money and distributing via UBI is a balancing act. 15) But there will always be jobs. It just won't be necessary jobs like maintaining infrastructure or producing energy. - Sure. People can do whatever they want unshackled from the labor extracting economic incentives. >But what if bad people control AI and do bad things to us? - How does a lesser intelligence control a vastly more superior intelligence?