by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
Humans are lazy and often idiotic. As such, the idea of a Universal Basic Income makes some morons salivate at the idea that they would get money from the government simply for existing. They want to be lazy. There will not be a sudden flowering of the arts if the UBI is instituted, rather there probably would be a systemic societal collapse.
BUT.
With the advent of advanced Chatbot technology like the OpenAI ChatGPT, we have to start thinking about how we might implement some form of UBI in the future.
If AGI has taken virtually every job away from humanity, the only way I can think maybe that we could fund a UBI is a tax on the activities of Non-Human Actors. But this still doesn’t address the fact that idle hands are the devil’s plaything.
If you 99% of the population didn’t have anything to do all day — even if they were getting a UBI — everything would collapse simply because people would want to fuck shit up out of boredom. Also, there is the problem of ambitious, greedy people being enraged that their income would be limited to a set UBI. How do you fix that fucking problem?
As such, you couldn’t just give everyone a UBI and walk away. You would have to figure out a way to pay different people different amounts of money. Maybe give people money relative to their lost wages from the advent of AGI?
Or, more ominously, if it could be the AGI that “bribes” humanity to behave while it actually runs the world. That is probably the most realistic way a UBI would ever be used. It probably would be part of a peace agreement between the AGI and humanity after some sort of post-Singularity struggle.
The AGI gets to be our “Lord Protector” and we sit around playing video games in the metaverse, living off the UBI.
