Universal Basic Income

[Yami]

UBI will, eventually, be a necessity. It might be in 10, 20, 30, 40, or 50 years, but eventually the vast majority of labour will be performed by machines, and employment could sit as high as 90%. At that point, we should be so productive that it would be economically insignificant to supply the entire country with the bare essentials (food, water, utilities), with any extras coming from personally-generated income.

But that time is not now. Personally, I am in favour of initiating some sort of UBI immediately, but start very small (say, $5 a week) and ramp it up slowly over a long period of time or as particular events mandate it (for example, a factory of 60,000 people suddenly being completely automated). It should replace the vast majority of forms of welfare, which exceptions for those requiring disability etc. as their costs will generally be higher.

Keep in mind that even cheap Chinese labour is getting to the point that it cannot compete with automated systems; lots of companies are now looking to Africa for cheaper human labour, and in 10 years when they cannot compete with automated systems there isn't really any cheaper human labour.

There is such a wide array of industries that currently employ huge numbers of people that can look forward to being heavily automated over the next 5-20 years, with transportation and manufacturing being the major standouts. Sure, for every set of humans replaced by robots, you have maintainers, engineers, designers, marketers, managers, etc. responsible for getting the robots there and keeping them running, but you're still always losing more jobs than you are creating (otherwise it wouldn't be financially feasible).

 

[S0ULphIRE]

Dragging this thread back from the dead:
Thousands to receive basic income in Finland: a trial that could lead to the greatest societal transformation of our time | Demos Helsinki

 

[kmanmx]

Dragging this thread back from the dead:
Thousands to receive basic income in Finland: a trial that could lead to the greatest societal transformation of our time | Demos Helsinki

I think it's a pretty good move. I saw the reddit post and talk about post-scarcity economies. Wasn't familiar with the theory, but after reading up, it sounds pretty great. If people only had to work 5 to 10 hours a week just doing core duties, and everyone had a minimum standard of living which was fairly good.. that would be huge progress, and the kind of world I want to live in.

 

[S0ULphIRE]

I think it's funny that people who moan and groan over having to perform some ****ty job with ****ty hours, are the same people who red-facedly shout that you NEED to work to deserve to live. And in a way it's tragic, because they'll be the first victims of the changing times if the current system stays in place.
With the rise of machine learning, things are gonna get very different very fast. Heck, there was already that chinese factory that laid off 60,000 people and replaced them with machines. The low-skilled jobs are all low-hanging fruit as far as machine learning goes, just need to build up the data set to train on

 

[kmanmx]

I think it's funny that people who moan and groan over having to perform some ****ty job with ****ty hours, are the same people who red-facedly shout that you NEED to work to deserve to live. And in a way it's tragic, because they'll be the first victims of the changing times if the current system stays in place.
With the rise of machine learning, things are gonna get very different very fast. Heck, there was already that chinese factory that laid off 60,000 people and replaced them with machines. The low-skilled jobs are all low-hanging fruit as far as machine learning goes, just need to build up the data set to train on

Machine learning is going to totally change the world. It's already having a big impact and that's just going to grow over time. People have no idea. In 5 years we went from AI being pretty bad at image recognition, to now being at a level where it can correctly describe the contents of an image more often than an average human.

Look how for Siri, Google Now etc have came in just a few years. Again, that is down to machine learning. Everytime Nvidia release a new GPU, machine learning gets very significantly faster, too. I saw a video where AI can now look at art and draw it's own. The results were good, as good as the real art. How long until it can look at films and dialogue, and create it's own ? What if in 20 years Googles TensorFlow bot can create an equivalent to a Scorsese classic in just a few minutes ?

A truely smart and organic like AI powered through machine learning is closer than people average people realize, and they are literally clueless as to how it's going to change their life. I think if you look back over the past few hundred years, there are a lot of reasons to argue that the next 20 years or so will see the most rapid and significant change of them all. We're going to have huge advancements like self driving cars, machine learning / AI, gene therapy, lab grown food, and people walking around with super technologically impressive AR/MR tech that'll guide them through life all day everyday powered by said AI. efficiency, productivity, socializing, entertainment will all get so much better.

 

[S0ULphIRE]

I dunno if we're that close to stuff like creating films or writing books; those things have underlying ideas/themes that have no "pattern" for a ML algorithm to grok so to speak. Stuff like art is way easier, because each artist *does* have a pattern or style to copy and really it's just color combinations.

But the rest of it, damn right. I guess the question is with all that in place, why do we need the rat race? I honestly can't think of a single good reason. I guess there's an argument to be made on exactly *how* or *what* the best way to implement these sweeping changes will be, but definitely not whether or not it needs to happen IMO.

 

[kmanmx]

I dunno if we're that close to stuff like creating films or writing books; those things have underlying ideas/themes that have no "pattern" for a ML algorithm to grok so to speak. Stuff like art is way easier, because each artist *does* have a pattern or style to copy and really it's just color combinations.

But the rest of it, damn right. I guess the question is with all that in place, why do we need the rat race? I honestly can't think of a single good reason. I guess there's an argument to be made on exactly *how* or *what* the best way to implement these sweeping changes will be, but definitely not whether or not it needs to happen IMO.

I dunno, I mean, my AI made movie theory is just my own, not based on anything i've read. I say 20 years away, perhaps it'll be 30 or 40, or even never. It's just when I look at the rate of computing power increases, the incredibly rapid rate at which machine learning is developing, it doesn't seem that far fetched to imagine. The difference between an image and film is pretty large, but it's not that bad.. i'd say there were themes and commonalities between films in the same genre. Action scenes are often filled with guns, similar kinds of music, similar kinds of camera shots. They have similar stories like good guy + bad guy = good guy wins. It's possible in decades to come highly advanced machine learning could recognize those kinds of things, who knows.

Break it down into it's components; a movie is just a composite of 24 individual images every second. We've already proved that machine learning can create art, and recognise objects in images. I don't think it's a stretch to say in 20+ years machinelearning could analyse individual frames within films and learn and create similar scenes from those films. Then it analyses the speech and script and creates it's own (even if it crudely means pulling entire lines of dialogue from a film). Though i'd say this is by far the hardest part, as it would require some kind of actual understanding of word meaning, sentence construct, emotion etc. Predicting a date is hard but if I don't atleast see a silent film in my life time created by AI, i'd be disappointed

edit:

The best improvement will be a live 3D animated guide projected into your vision through AR glasses showing you how to construct your new Ikea bed.

 

[S0ULphIRE]

It's happening in me own country now!* Wheeeeee
Driverless bus trial in South Perth an Australian first - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

*top speed 45km/hr, or as my driving instructor would say "barreling down the road!"