Geohot is a smart dude. But here I think he misses the forest for the trees.

He has a point, certainly. But while he is harping about the U part of ubi, he's completely ignoring the B part. UBI is meant to provide some basic income so people don't starve. It's just an optimization of welfare programs where you have a ton of bureaucracy and make people jump through endless hoops and cause them endless amounts of stress (which is known to make people work less, not more). And replace it by just giving all citizens the same amount.

Yes, that's a bit stupid for the people first paying taxes and then getting them right back again minus overhead costs, but if you think about it: that's what happens now too, only less efficient (in the netherlands, that is) so you pay even more overhead.

On top of that comes the other realization: If the current trend of automating everything continues,we'll ultimately end up with (hyperbole) 1 person owning all the machines doing all the work. That 1 person earning all the money, and (in an ideal case) paying his taxes to give everybody else welfare. Which just is the same as UBI.

In a certain way this already happens now. Most not-too-smart people that used to be gainfully employed as laborer somewhere are now on welfare, and the threshold for not-too-smart could go up rather steeply with the current AI trends.

Also: https://geohot.github.io//blog/jekyll/update/2025/02/19/nobo...

Apparently if we, the poorer ones, win the war of attrition, the problematic ones that own everything will resign to golf. Or something. Getting financial planning from a lottery winner.

I think it’s a bad idea for about the same reasons, but that’s assuming we’re implementing it right now in the current economy. If automation means that in the future there’s not much for all these people to do that creates value then it makes sense.

Which of course ignores the obvious point that UBI is all about taking existing resource redistribution and making it less costly and more efficient. Practically all Western countries redistribute income on a massive scale (compared to the default outcomes of a completely free market capitalism) in order to ensure everyone can provide for their basic needs, and that could all be gradually replaced by UBI.

This is broadly in line with OP's suggested ethic "create value for others, don't play zero sum games" since capitalism is based on rewarding those who create the most value, whereas zero-sum games are largely political in nature.

Ah, well... TIL to not take anything geohot writes seriously in the future.

He's a privileged startup founder who has 301k followers on X. Who cares what he thinks about UBI, of all things? Also he looks like an ass.

Population growth or size has nothing to do.

No matter how much resources a society has, natural selection pushes everyone to keep trying hard to get more, as those that don't end up without resources.

In a society, the fastest way to get resources is to provide something in exchange to other members of the society. The most common thing we have to exchange for resources is work.

From those two things we can see that no matter what society you have or how wealthy it is, people will work as much as they can, or else they get behind in the rat race.

Hey, don't dismiss your intelligence like that!

> wouldn't UBI, even if coupled to actually producing _something_ will lead to a lot of useless stuff being made?

The general premise of a UBI is that it's unconditional.

If you tried to say someone is required to produce something without specifying what it is, they'll produce whatever is the easiest thing to produce, which will naturally be useless if they otherwise wouldn't have produced anything because the only reason they're doing it is to satisfy the demand of someone not imposing any specific requirements on the output.

But if it's actually unconditional then the things produced would only be the things someone wants to produce, i.e. the things worth their time to produce when they're not actually required to spend their time producing it. Those things would tend to be useful because at least the author found them to be and there's a decent chance they're not unique in the world. If you e.g. make an app just because you want to use it yourself, maybe someone else wants to use it too.

Would be great if true, but that doesn't really correspond in reality truly, especially in intellectual products. Compare even Linus Torvalds fortune with e.g. snapchat founder. Not even talking about thousands of 0 profit open source projects with millions of installations versus some saas hustler - usually the former provide much more value to society than some guy who is just good at selling stuff.

UBI might fuel some useless work, but it also might provide a way to people to be more into creative side of things rather than selling and marketing rat race.

Also in less developed countries money even less corresponds to value. It almost always has some kind of mafia and corruption that extracts huge portions of value from the economy and basically net negative, though profitable.

I'd like to live in the world where money are always allocated fairly, but we see that in IT, for example, predating, stealing data, spying on people bring more money than the honest work due to misaligned incentives, when bad actors pay more money than actual consumer.

Money is a function of demand, availability and leverage. Value is only an indirect part of it: a factor that drives demand.

It is easy to find examples of money not being a judgement of value in practice: think about thief or extortion for example, or pushing drugs.

We as a society would profit from not categorizing everything in terms of its usefulness. Things can and should be allowed to just be. That being said, UBI would probably result in more useful things not less. There are so many cases of jobs and things that seem to just be busywork or outright scams. There are also a lot of things that only appear useful if you never take the time to think about them. A plastic straw that will pollute the environment for thousands of years just so i can have a drink for two minutes? That is useless. Every street in every city being lined by cars that don't move for 95% of the time? That is useless and insane. Imagine what marvelous machines we could have built instead.

Also, I find the online discussion around UBI to be quite weird. I don't think anyone serious is advocating for it to be particularly high. In my opinion, UBI should cover your necessities plus some so you can participate in society. This gives everyone the opportunity to take it slow or focus on personal projects without fear. Everything luxurious can not, and should not, be affordable with UBI. This will leave ample opportunity for people to still care about and want to work.

Humans will always do. It is in our nature. But not letting people get homeless or starve to death might enable those of us that don't want to do what our overlords deem useful to do the things our society so desperately needs. I don't need some poor fool to cook my burger for me. I'd rather take turns with my friends that now have free time.

What useless things?

Wouldn't convincing the criminal part of the population to just stay home be a net win? Policing and prisons are both notably more expensive then welfare.