> We have to think now about how to reduce job losses so that everyone can share in the prosperity that AI creates.

And I thought he is a smart man. This is so last century thinking. We need to prepare that there will definitely be no jobs for everyone and that will be falling all the time, it’s not a one-time event you should “prepare for”. There’s nothing to prepare, we already have funds and productivity to feed and shelter everyone. UBI is not a privilege, previous generations were slaving 9 to 5 all their lives so we can have it. This is it, arrived, and now, enter a few decades of historical period when all of us waiting for government bureaucrats to realise that UBI is a right.

> all of us waiting for government bureaucrats to realise that UBI is a right

You'll be waiting forever, then. This isn't something that you can wait to be given to you, it must be taken.

Or, put much more eloquently by one of the greatest Americans:

"This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress"

- Frederick Douglass

Somehow, I don't think the people with all the money, gunmen and (soon) robots will be OK with the world you envision.

UBI as a concept does not add up. It assumes an even production of all goods that people might need, but there isn't, you are giving everyone fiat currency that is not inherently tied to any physical good. Very fast you will descend into either plan economy where you get food stamps, or an economy where people are trading goods that are actually tied to value.

For example, you go to the store to get eggs, since everyone has UBI, they decide to also get eggs, the eggs either run out, or the store raises the price, at which either you will get food queues like in the USSR, or everyone will need more UBI to afford eggs. The solution to this is to increase egg production, but this is not instant, and not necessarily a priority, while money transfers are instant.

I don't understand why people always spring for UBI. I don't want free money; I want to earn my living. I want to work.

Why do we not push for labor reform, as we did a century ago? Depending on the actual productivity gains from AI broadly, set a new standard of 4-hour workdays. Or 3-day work weeks.

It really takes a lot of magical thinking to believe we can just implement UBI without any costs.

Notice that when you open your mouth, there is no roast chicken that flies in.

The funny thing is that the wealthy and powerful don't realise that a collapse of that scale means that every switches to professional guillotine builder over night.

There is no preparing for that.

I doubt we get there to be honest, they all have wealth and power because there are consumers with money. No more consumers, no more wealth and power.

I really don't think UBI can ever happen in the US. There is a moral imperative of "industriousness". Keynes' prediction (or maybe desire) ~100 years ago of the 15 hour workweek never panned out.

He is a smart man -- with an enormous $100B vested interest in the capital side of this equation. It is (meager) progress to hear any acknowledgement from capital at all that we might conceivably need to do something other than pump aggregate labor supply and dump aggregate demand.

This is a baby step, but it's a baby step in the right direction.

My interpretation of his point was that people get a ton of meaning out of their work in our current capitalist system, and regardless of whether or not we change our system in the long term, if we don't do something about jobs in the short term, there will be a civil crisis:

> In a capitalist society, employment is the way most people get the money they need to pay for the basics of life as well as being a key source of dignity and social connection.

> When a community has high unemployment, the ripple effects can be pervasive. Research suggests that in some parts of the United States, factory closures contribute to a rise in deaths from opioid overdoses. Now imagine similar pressures on both white-collar and blue-collar workers nationwide.

> Waiting until people are already displaced or underemployed will be too late. AI is a structural challenge to the way our economy is organized, and it requires thinking and action now.

----

I agree he should've addressed UBI directly. When he was asked about it in an AMA a decade ago he basically said he's optimistic it can happen eventually but not yet [1]. And in that same AMA he said he wished to see "computers that can read and understand information like humans do" within his lifetime [2]. Now that the latter has happened I wish we could see how his thoughts have changed on the former.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/5whpqs/comment/dea7v1...

[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/5whpqs/comment/dea5fl...

I support UBI and wealth taxes, but I also think generally that will be a difficult transition in terms of social upheaval. There are so many people I know who are financially well-off but completely fall apart when there is no visible professional hierarchy to give them meaning.

One would hope that this would still go down better than destituting large percentages of the world population, but I wonder.

> we already have funds and productivity to feed and shelter everyone

For how long?

He’s saying the same thing as you. I don’t think UBI will magically appear. If people lose their jobs, what guarantee do you give that they can survive? Thats his point - prepare for this event so that the guarantee can be made sooner.

> we already have funds and productivity to feed and shelter everyone.

Where ? who ?

How are you going to get UBI?

Are you going to strike? Are we going to take on the government by force?

People need to understand there is no democracy in a post-AGI world.

The power of human collectives comes from a combination of our collective economic power and our physical power. Without either leaders would be smart to just do what the companies paying all the bills ask if they don't want their families to starve too.

Yeah it's total horseshit, to be frank.

Worker protections have almost never been granted by the profiteers... not child labor laws, not weekends, not overtime, not safety regulations, not minimum wage, not workers comp... the working class is not what it is today because of "sharing prosperity" and there's been a lot of prosperity — it's all a series of fights.