The taxes will be most burdensome for the wealthiest and most productive of institutions, which is generally why these arrangements collapse economies and nations. UBI is hard to implement because it incentivizes non-productive behavior and disincentivizes productive activity. This creates economic crisis, taxes are basically a smaller scale version of this, UBI is like a more comprehensive wealth redistribution scheme. The creation of a syndicate (in this case, the state) to steal from the productive to give to the non-productive is a return to how humanity functioned before the creation of state-like structures when marauders and bandits used violence to steal from those who created anything. Eventually, the state arose to create arrangements and contracts to prevent theft, but later become the thief itself, leading to economic collapse and the cyclical revolutionary cycle.

So, AI may certainly bring about UBI, but the corporations that are being milked by the state to provide wealth to the non-productive will begin to foment revolution along with those who find this arrangement unfair, and the productive activity of those especially productive individuals will be directed toward revolution instead of economic productivity. Companies have made nations many times before, and I'm sure it'll happen again.

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grues-dinner 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

The problem is the "productive activity" is rather hard to define if there's so much "AI" (be it classical ML, LLM, ANI, AGI, ASI, whatever) around that nearly everything can be produced by nearly no one.

The destruction of the labour theory of value has been a goal of "tech" for a while, but if they achieve it, what's the plan then?

Assuming humans stay in control of the AIs because otherwise all bets are off, in a case where a few fabulously wealthy (or at least "onwing/controlling", since the idea of wealth starts to become fuzzy) industrialists control the productive capacity for everything from farming to rocketry and there's no space for normal people to participate in production any more, how do you even denominate the value being "produced"? Who is it even for? What do they need to give in return? What can they give in return?

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lotsoweiners 4 days ago | parent [-]

> Assuming humans stay in control of the AIs because otherwise all bets are off, in a case where a few fabulously wealthy (or at least "onwing/controlling", since the idea of wealth starts to become fuzzy) industrialists control the productive capacity for everything from farming to rocketry and there's no space for normal people to participate in production any more

Why do the rest of humanity even have to participate in this? Just continue on the way things were before without any super AI. Start new businesses that don’t use AI and hire humans to work there.

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grues-dinner 4 days ago | parent [-]

Because with presumably tiny marginal costs of production, the AI owners can flood and/or buy out your human-powered economy.

You'd need a very united front and powerful incentives to prevent, say, anyone buying AI-farmed wheat when it's half the cost of human-farmed (say). If you don't prevent that, Team AI can trade wheat (and everything else) for human economy money and then dominate there.

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throwaway0123_5 3 days ago | parent [-]

But if AI can do anything that human labor can do, what would even be the incentive for AI owners to farm wheat and sell it to people? They can just have their AIs directly produce the things they want.

It seems like the only things they would need are energy and access to materials for luxury goods. Presumably they could mostly lock the "human economy" out of access to these things through control over AI weapons, but there would likely be a lot of arable land that isn't valuable to them.

Outside of malice, there doesn't seem to be much reason to block the non-technological humans from using the land they don't need. Maybe some ecological argument, the few AI-enabled elites don't want billions of humans that they no longer need polluting "their" Earth?

	▲	grues-dinner 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		When was the last the techno-industrialist elite class said "what we have is enough"? In this scenario, the marginal cost of taking everything else over is almost zero. Just tell the AI you want it taken over and it handles it. You'd take it over just for risk mitigation, even if you don't "need" it. Better to control it since it's free to do so. Allowing a competing human economy is resources left on the table. And control of resources is the only lever of power left when labour is basically free. > Maybe some ecological argument There's a political angle too. 7 (or however many it will be) billion humans free to do their own thing is a risky free variable.

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essnine 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

The assumption here that UBI "incentivizes non-productive behavior and disincentivizes productive activity" is the part that doesn't make sense. What do you think universal means? How does it disincentivize productive activity if it is provided to everyone regardless of their income/productivity/employment/whatever?

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juniperus 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Evolutionarily, people engage in productive activity in order to secure resources to ensure their survival and reproduction. When these necessary resources are gifted to a person, there is a lower chance that they will decide to take part in economically productive behavior.

You can say that because it is universal, it should level the playing field just at a different starting point, but you are still creating a situation where even incredibly intelligent people will choose to pursue leisure over labor, in fact, the most intelligent people may be the ones to be more aware of the pointlessness of working if they can survive on UBI. Similarly, the most intelligent people will consider the arrangement unfair and unsustainable and instead of devoting their intelligence toward economically productive ventures, they will devote their abilities toward dismantling the system. This is the groundwork of a revolution. The most intelligent will prefer a system where their superior intelligence provides them with sufficient resources to choose a high-quality mate. If they see an arrangement where high-quality mates are being obtained by individuals who they deem to be receiving benefits that they cannot defend/protect adequately, such an arrangement will be dismantled. This evolutionary drive is hundreds of millions of years old. Primitive animals will take resources from others that they observe to be unable to defend their status.

So, overall, UBI will probably be implemented, and it will probably end in economic crisis, revolution, and the resumption of this cycle that has been playing out over and over for centuries.

	▲	throwaway0123_5 3 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> You can say that because it is universal, it should level the playing field just at a different starting point, but you are still creating a situation where even incredibly intelligent people will choose to pursue leisure over labor, in fact, the most intelligent people may be the ones to be more aware of the pointlessness of working if they can survive on UBI. This doesn't seem believable to me, or at least it isn't the whole story. Pre-20th century it seems like most scientific and mathematical discoveries came from people who were born into wealthy families and were able to pursue whatever interested them without concern for whether or not it would make them money. Presumably there were/are many people who could've contributed greatly if they didn't have to worry about putting food on the table. > The most intelligent will prefer a system where their superior intelligence provides them with sufficient resources to choose a high-quality mate. In a scenario where UBI is necessary because AI has supplanted human intelligence, it seems like the only way they could return to such a system is by removing both UBI and AI. Remove just UBI and they're still non-competitive economically against the AIs.
	▲	LouisSayers 4 days ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		> When these necessary resources are gifted to a person, there is a lower chance that they will decide to take part in economically productive behavior. Source? Even if that's true though, who cares if AI and robots are doing the work? What's so bad about allowing people leisure, time to do whatever they want? What are you afraid of?
	▲	essnine 4 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		There are two things bothering me here. The first bit where you're talking about motivations and income driving it seems either very reductive or implying of something that ought to be profoundly upsetting: - that intelligent people will see that the work they do is pointless if they're paid enough to survive and care for themselves, and not see work as another source of income for better financial security - that most intelligent people will see it as exploitation and then choose to focus on dismantling the system that levels the playing field Which sort of doesn't add up. So there are intelligent people who are working right now because they need money and don't have it, while the other intelligent people who are working and employing other people are only doing it to make money and will rebel if they lose some of the money they make. But then, why doesn't the latter group of intelligent people just stop working if they have enough money? Are they less/more/differently intelligent than the former group? Are we thinking about other, more narrow forms of intelligence when describing either? Also > The most intelligent will prefer a system where their superior intelligence provides them with sufficient resources to choose a high-quality mate. If they see an arrangement where high-quality mates are being obtained by individuals who they deem to be receiving benefits that they cannot defend/protect adequately, such an arrangement will be dismantled. This evolutionary drive is hundreds of millions of years old. I don't want to come off as mocking here - it's hard to take these points seriously. The whole point of civilization is to rise above these behaviours and establish a strong foundation for humanity as a whole. The end goal of social progress and the image of how society should be structured cannot be modeled on systems that existed in the past solely because those failure modes are familiar and we're fine with losing people as long as we know how our systems fail them. That evolutionary drive may be millions of years old, but industrial society has been around for a few centuries, and look at what it's done to the rest of the world. > Primitive animals will take resources from others that they observe to be unable to defend their status. Yeah, I don't know what you're getting at with this metaphor. If you're talking predatory behaviour, we have plenty of that going around as things are right now. You don't think something like UBI will help more people "defend their status"? > it will probably end in economic crisis, revolution, and the resumption of this cycle that has been playing out over and over for centuries I don't think human civilization has ever been close to this massive or complex or dysfunctional in the past, so this sentence seems meaningless, but I'm no historian.

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CER10TY 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I guess the thinking goes like this: Why start a business, get a higher paying job etc if you're getting ~2k€/mo in UBI and can live off of that? Since more people will decide against starting a business or increasing their income, productive activity decreases.

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essnine 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

I see more people starting businesses because they now have less risk, more people not changing jobs just to get a pay hike. The sort of financial aid UBI would bring might even make people more productive on the whole, since people who are earning have spare income for quality of life, and people with financial risk are able to work without being worried half the day about paying rent and bills.

It's a bit of a dunk on people who see their position as employer/supervisor as a source of power because they can impose financial risk as punishment on people, which happens more often than any of us care to think, but isn't that a win? Or are we conceding that modern society is driven more by stick than carrot and we want it that way?

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lotsoweiners 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

If everyone has 2k/mo then nobody has 2k/mo.

	▲	LouisSayers 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		That's like saying "money doesn't exist". In a sense everybody does have "2k" a month, because we all have the same amount of time to do productive things and exchange with others.