what your describing basically sounds like "trickle down economics" for UBI. you really think if we dump public funds into the private sector, they'll just redistribute it to the public? look at the world we live in now, and it should be apparent how unlikely that is.

implementing any sort of UBI would require a shift away from an exclusively capitalist framework, so trying to frame it in terms of current globalized capitalism is just going to lead to a lot of dead ends. consider that if a future really becomes "post work" as some people theorize (i do not think this will happen tbqh, but i am open to it conceptually), that will come with massive social upheaval. revolutionary social periods tend to spring up when people have a lot of time on their hands in addition to knowledge and a cause to fight for. hopefully, over the next 60 years we will see a transition from exclusionist socio-economic structures to holistic models that incorporate facets of all existing theories with some new ones. this has notably been the trend of every academic, scientific, and artistic field as we have entered the transition to the age of aquarius over the past two decades, so it is not unlikely. if we live in a truly post work society, people will have enough time on their hands to force such new social structures, and UBI on a public level or other equivalents would likely be on that list (assuming a better alternative is not developed by then)

1. Become massive corporation with billions in capital.
2. Put hundreds of thousands on your payroll.
3. Don't have them work.
4. ??
5. Profit.

“We can all agree”

“Childish fear of state intervention”

What a load of crap

>I think by now we all agree that a highly automated society can become a post-labor society and therefore should resort to a wealth distribution instrument such as universal basic income.

Uh. Don't put me down for that. I don't have expert knowledge in macroeconomics, so I don't have a clue what an automated economy looks like. Not even a guess. North and South could become East and West for all I know.

Anyone here who purports greater certainty than that is lying to you or themselves.

What would be the motivation for them to pay anyone?

I think it’s much more likely that there is no such basic income at all, and that companies continue on as though nothing is different, happily replacing as many warm bodies as possible with more efficient silicon hands and minds. There will be far greater wealth concentration than at any time in all of human history, in the hands of a few thousand extraordinarily wealthy families. Most people will be relegated to absolute penury as wages stagnate and prices continue to relentlessly rise. People will naturally stop having children as it becomes prohibitively expensive to raise them, and populations will decline. Violence will become far more common, as people are displaced by climate change and attempt to squeeze into the remaining areas on Earth that are habitable. The rich will retreat into lives preserved for hundreds of years through genetic and cybernetic intervention, and will potentially live lives of absolute luxury in the few extremely fine habitats on Earth, or in orbiting space stations with an extravagantly high entry price that all but assure the wealthy will live completely separate lives from the masses of humanity slowly dying in piles of filth at their feet.

Sounds like a truly awful idea. Just look at how harmful private healthcare is. Private UBI (a massive contradiction in terms) would be just as bad or worse.

No corporation would ever do that. Their only mandate is to increase profits. Many cut necessary jobs from the payroll to cut corners and reduce spending as it is, why would they ever pay anyone other than a CEO to do nothing? It doesn't make the slightest bit of sense.

This isn't a solution, no part of it is remotely feasible or possible.

Why does everyone think that free shit is free and that AI is free? I dont get it you'd think these ideas are the ones you realize are retarded by the time you are 6.

I wouldn't write off socialist programs like UBI yet, once the boomers die the political landscape will be vastly different

Until all the world’s problems are solved, there’s no need for UBI, plenty of work to do.

Unless you’re physically unable to in which case there are already social safety nets for that.

Handing out money doesn’t magically create more doctors and food. Those are both still limited resources. Just like the Corona stimulus - when you flood the economy with money, you only get inflation. Nothing is free.

Until you run out of somebody else's money, and the more equal pigs start the same old mass murders. No thanks.

I like the concept of a UBI - a minimum standard of living for everyone - but from a pragmatic standpoint, I see problems.

There are many people who will piss away every penny that they get. With a UBI, those people will still end up broke and homeless. In those cases, we will need public assistance based on need to provide essential services to them (e.g., food, shelter, clothing, medicine).

Also, it seems like a waste of tax money to provide UBI checks to wealthy people who don't need them.

So, we end up back to needs-based public assistance of services, rather than cash. Maybe this is a good thing, since we already have some of those systems in place, so we can just expand and strengthen them.

the biggest issue is why would corporations willingly act as a working class life support and loose profits employing large amounts of people a specially in a country like the us where they have a very large amount influence and control over the government. Also purely government based ubi is actually a popular idea with some billionaires in the us like Elon Musk, Richard Branson,Mark Zuckerberg. So in a post laborer highly automated/ai dominated economy a more likely scenario is that the government recycles ubi through taxes in order to artificially create consumers and to stimulate the economy.

I stand for fully automated luxury space communism. Lets go comrades ✊

You're painting with a broad brush, which got sone others' backs up, but anyway it's an interesting conversation starter.

There are two things to bear in mind which will help form an opinion. First, it is in the interests of industry to have customers, from Henry Ford paying a minimum salary (thus diving up salaries to a level where he had more customers) to the modern versions Bezos and Musk who do the same source despite their rivalry. This seems at first like it should be a shared goal between unions fighting for higher salaries, and minimum wage proponents, but here is where we get into politics.

Since the turn of the century there have emerged two parties in most Western countries, one representing industry, and the other the labour unions (side note, this is in contrast to the preceding political landscape which was drawn more along the lines of city vs country, the British Tories and both US parties seemingly "inverted" at this time as the world changed around them). It is worth noting that these political parties are usually completely funded by their respective bases.

The industrialists support a minimum wage commensurate with their target customers, but want it to be enforced on their competitors even to the detriment of their competition. Imagine Ford trying to sell more Model Ts, your town of 1000 workers, which has nobody earning his $5 minimum to afford it (only the bosses) if he pushes for a minimum wage some businesses will fail under this burden, others will thrive, so he sells 500 cars to wealthy workers and creates 500 unemployed workers, great success, until they vote for unions.

The unions push for higher salaries also, but their goal is also maximum employment, they calculate the maximum each business can sustain and negotiate for this, maybe, in the example above, only 100 cars are sold, but employment is maintained.

In this 1912 example a UBI results in something in-between, taxing companies, however not pushing them out of business, and leaving wages low but supplemented, ideally results in the maximum number of cars sold, by limiting both wealth (with low wages) and poverty (with UBI).

If you add a load of technology redundancy to this situation the maths becomes even more extreme, requiring a UBI for the major companies (the ones with the technology) to survive.

How strange that modern industrialists would want something so socialist, but it must be Universal to work, they can only go so far on their own, for this they need a political party to do their work. For the industrialists this is most likely the GOP, so socialist! It's almost as if political parties have never "inverted" based on disruptive technology... Oh wait!

This is my hypothesis: Amazon, Tesla, Apple maybe even Ford (the company) need a UBI to survive the technological revolution we're in, the unions must resists this technology, and therefore resist the UBI. Ironic that the "socialist" parties of the left must resist literal socialism. The GOP will rebrand itself as a champion of the free market's success story, an "innovation dividend" or whatever they call it, paid for by those that pioneer technology, and punish those that don't (especially unionised businesses). Sold to the traditional voters as a way to have smaller government and empowering individuals to choose how they spend their own taxes. Looking at demographics and reading Strauss - Howe's Generational Model, the boomers and gen X are already mostly republican, so the battleground must be fought over the millennials, so I think they need a charismatic "leader" - a front-person to bring in the millennial vote by targeting them directly. To do this they will also need the press (Twitter, Washington post). The wheels are already in motion, maybe not this election cycle, but not much longer after that.

In answer to your question, from my perspective it is a private enterprise, they just need to go through some minor inconveniences like elections to make it happen.

People who understand math, economics, and human corruption don't like communism/socialism because it's proven not to work. There are many examples of this but idealists keep pushing these failed systems. While capitalism isn't perfect, no system has raised as many people out of poverty. The poorest in America are still wealthier than most of the world.

Automated ways of making money will probably become the new norm. If not, government issued salaries would probably only allow people to do more of what they love and, for me anyways, include learning ways to become more self-sustainable.

It is impossible to implement any significant long-term change without changing the distribution of opinions. You can't build something around a structure that actively resists the thing you are building.

>It's the result of decades of anti-socialist indoctrination driven by the largest propaganda machine history has seen.

Yes, it is. That's why a necessary step for any large-scale change must be to build our own propaganda machine.

The exact shape of it will be different - messages are medium-dependent, and that specific existing machine is optimized for particular conservative messages. Just building the exact same thing wouldn't work. But we do need active, intentional, well-funded, coordinated messaging.

I think UBI is where we’ll eventually end up, but I can’t see the transition being something smooth. I am anticipating some kind of economic collapse to rival the Great Depression, followed by a period of civil unrest, that (hopefully) turns into a near post-scarcity economy.

good point of view

but the problem is the same:

1. country creates UBI, does economic activity grow? does other metric of "happiness" grow which makes the workers healthier/work better? if not then it doesnt make economic sense and the country gets damaged and more since if other countries dont do it the impact is bigger cause capital would flee resulting in less economic activity, less jobs, more poverty, more death.
2. companies create UBI for workers, which is like a share for everyone that they cant sell and will give dividends for them. That sounds like extra pay with extra steps.
   The problem is the same, x company gives extra dividends "for free"=higher salary just because. Which is good cause it will atract better workers, current workers will perform better. But that only works up to a point=worker wont be happy/work better at the same ratio increase as the dividend. So real shareholders will sell the stock cause it doesnt make economic sense if the dividend is too high , resulting in the need to drop the value of the dividend cause now the company is worth less.

It makes way better sense cause companies are with a better standing vs most countries which are riddled with debt+countries getting weaker by bad economic decision is bad cause geopolitics. So companies doing it is more real.

Ubi should be tied to education, health and job, imo.

Education as we do it now is basically completely for profit. If we could change that system to entice people to continue into late adulthood, a much larger part of our population would be able to impact humanity in better ways.

Some jobs aren't going to be replaced anytime soon. Those people usually work hard as fuck.

People can not help they cards they were dealt and imo a huge portion of people with disabilities are forced to live a meh life. At the same time, sometimes people aren't afforded an education that would allow them to do more for themselves and or humanity. That balance can really lift a lot of folks up. Self-esteem and production wise.

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Ubi funded by taxes on corporations.

There will be civil war before UBI goes mainstream. The elites won’t let go of their wealth happily.

The best course of action is to develop the new system, which is likely heavily socialist in practice, and run it parallel with the old system.

As both run parallel with each other we ever so gently merge the old with the new.

People are addicted to this eay of life and only see the end of the world before the end of capitalism. Therefore we will have to slowly ween everyone off little by little to get everyone onboard with the new system. If we take away the drug now we're looking at a chaotic mess.

We will get government UBI once everyone realizes they only have to work if they want to. They’re already testing a robot McDonald’s in the US. All those “shitty jobs” and “workforce entry” jobs will disappear

If you took all the wealth in the world and distributed it equally, by the end of the week there be grossly wealthy and grossly poor people, as time went by it wold become worse.

In the words of Morty Smith, “That’s just slavery with extra steps.”

Hard disagree that UBI requires a divergence from capitalism. Capitalism might be the perfect economic structure for UBI.

People in a post scarcity world would still want to do things that create value for each other and they should be able to make money off of their efforts... Ie... Capitalism.

What doesn't need to happen is anyone worrying about having a safe place to sleep, and food to eat.

My dream is to have government owned commercial properties (but oriented as a town square and transportation hub) that charge 0 rent to owner operated businesses. So people could have their basic needs met by ubi, and if they want to do something they love for extra income, they can.

If I could feed and clothe my family without worry, I'd immediately go back into music production. But I can't, because I can't make enough money and I can't go backwards in my career. I'd like a world where you can pursue your passions, and maybe even make lots of money, without fear of starving if you fail.

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You are right about UBI being difficult in a capitalist society. The solution isn't to modify UBI for the private sector.

It's to end capitalism.

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We don't have to wait on the government to implement basic UBI, cryptocurrency can make such a scheme turnkey. For example, you can make 1% of transaction fees get redistributed to users, you can make rules based on wealth of different users, etc. You can vote on-chain about changes to the rules. For example, 1% of fees can be redistributed to users, 10% of fees can go into a common healthcare insurance fund which anybody can request funds for and be reimbursed from, etc. 100% transparent, no middlemen, free to anybody who wants to join it, and completely uncensorable. There are cryptos already working on a model very similar to this. This is one of many reasons why I am very excited to see what DLT brings us in the next 10-20 years, it has the power to fundamentally change society if people can get past "I saw that crypto was a scam in an article title once".

Instead of all being stuck in whatever economy we are born in, we can choose to participate in an economy that reflects our values, whatever they may be, and we can be in multiple economies at once.

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Given that all the AI and ML things that are truly game changing require computing power that is out of reach of moderate and even large businesses - only global mega corps can afford it - we ought to simply make it a public utility.

You're generalising quite a bit when you say 'Western Society'. I don't think that France/Germany/Sweden/Canada - maybe not even Japan is going to have a significant problem with the idea of redistributing the gains from automation. And ultimately, the democratic pressures to do so can only be held back for so long - even the best right-wing propaganda is going to struggle to tell people that black is white.

My own opinion is that this process will start by 'dealing' with the problems we're seeing right now with funding for an ever increasingly elderly population. That will take a huge amount of resources just to get us back to the same position we were in in the early 1980s.

Once that has been 'paid down', I think that states will start providing more basic services for free, and reducing taxation, rather than giving money directly. So, there will still be incentives for people to earn, but the salaries that they are willing to accept will be less. If there's no income tax up to a certain level and your water/energy/public transport is provided for free then you can afford to accept a much lower wage, which companies will be still willing to pay whilst the move over the full automation is taking place. On top for that, companies will be able to afford to offer more hybrid work/training programmes at these lower wages, meaning that people can get developed in a skill that has value in the new economy whilst they are working.

For 2 I'm going to guess that you have never had to rely on the VA, been enlisted or incarcerated. That tends to give those who experience that a conditioned aversion to small brained power drunk government workers and the things they do.

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And as for 3 well ... IT tends to be the politicians that favor corporate bailouts.

This is a pretty decent description of what Big Tech already does.

Consider the cost of developing and maintaining software that companies like Google and Meta provide to people at no cost. Consider the cost of producing entertainment products like professional sports that are provided by networks at no cost because dollar value is found in advertising.

Economics and forward thinking companies have already learned that fundamental unit of value isn't promise of labor or goods, but choice. This was understood when advanced economies transitioned from producing goods to services. UBI is just another way of allowing low friction choice. UBI is not just entirely compatible with capitalism but is the end state of capitalism.

The barrier isn't propaganda or capitalism. The barrier is that people and by proxy, elected government, don't understand this.

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What incentive would the companies have to "hire" people?

>I think by now we all agree that... society ... should resort to a wealth distribution instrument such as universal basic income

No, while I support it, it's a fairly minority view. We already have pretty huge wealthy redistribution going on, but I would agree a little more may be needed. Many people don't, though.

>People prefer to pour millions into state resources for companies, banks, or financial institutions bailouts, rather than implementing any type of social assistance plan for the common people.

Western society runs quite the gamut of political and economic positions, but all are basically well-or-weakly regulated free market capitalist economies. They all have pretty significant social assistance plans for most people.

>That's why I envision a scenario where resources are poured into the private sector, and companies are the ones who have a large number of employees on their payroll. Paying them just for being on their payroll. A kind of private UBI.

I'd love a pill or two of whatever you've been taking.

Human beings respond to incentives - your system won't work because you have created a system with incentives counter to what you wish the outcome to be. You've suggested providing funds to the private sector, and having them distribute money to people for nothing in return You're incentivizing the private sector to NOT have many employees on their payroll (because if they have fewer employees, they make more profit), whereas what you desire is more people on their payroll.

The private sector already works like this. I work with a guy we call "bad decisions". He's paying child support to four different baby mommas. Of course they all got their side hustles, but that child support check is what pays for the basic necessities.

Do you like shopping, renting, eating, sleeping, almost every tangible aspect of your life to be from the "company store"? This is a good way to get to that and give up on regulatory capture and stopping total corporatocracy.

by far the largest federal budget outlay is for entitlement programs: medicare, medicaid, etc. your premise is kinda faulty.

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fat chance. might as well hope money falls from the sky.

Seriously stop rationalizing ubi with something that could happen. People have been predicting automation eliminating jobs for literally ever and it hasn't happened yet. Sure it could happen this could be different, but maybe let's wait until unemployment is above the record lows we're at now to think about implementing it?

It's also worth noting that the Venn diagram of people convinced ai will take over and there will be massive unemployment therefore ubi is required and the people who wanted ubi and mass redistribution before ai was even a thing is basically a circle.

If you give the money to companies first, they'll want their cut.
Then they'll nickel and dime you to oblivion for the rest.

It's a bad idea. Every middleman wants their share.

UBI works best when the money goes DIRECTLY to those who need it.

This is exactly what key people from the company i work for are trying to do. They are switching from a seniority based pay model to a relationship based one.

As someone who has been working full time for 30 years and never got anywhere in life, the idea of me and my wife just being able to stay home and enjoy our time together and still receive enough money to live off of sounds amazing.

But imagine your government starts doing something you don’t agree with and you join protests against it. Then they use facial recognition to see who the dissidents are and shut off their income. What’s worse, they deny access to the money you already have. We’ve already seen this even now.

UBI and digital currency would give governments more control over populations. Nothing like financially choking someone to get them to comply.

You seem to have the purpose of UBI confused with some sort of actual goal.

UBI is the final, desperate grasp for supply side and end user based economies to continue after workers getting replaced by machines becomes too efficient to disincentivize with grants.

The fact is that a post-scarcity world where desperate powers didn't end the whole thing (unlikely) may not need a universal income at all as needs will simply be met with luxuries either public or earned through whatever system survived.

How you managed to start off with 3 falsehoods in a row is really impressive...

I disagree with your initial assumptions. Why and/or how does a highly automated society have to become post-labor?

What do you think happens when congress passes a spending bill? We use taxes to hire people in the private sector to do the work contained in the bill.

Based on your personal opinion, you just sound like a communist.

Most people don’t want to do squat but still have wants. Almost everyone wants more than their neighbors. A large portion of the population will do the very least they can get by with. people will trade whatever you give them for what they want even if you make it illegal. Move a stack of boards from one side of the construction site and then move them back just to make it look like they are doing something. “Capitalism “ as the Socialist/Communists call it (free market economy) is not perfect but definitely rewards the motivated and penalizes the lazy. The people calling for “fairness” don’t really want fairness. It is fair to get rewarded for the amount you contribute and to be penalized for inactivity. Every system that has tried it collapsed after the workers figured out they will get the same amount for less and less effort and then come the death squads.

UBI is about making access to basic money like access to public water. Just a constant. Not need-based, just there. Like the air. Because we can, and because we will eventually have to.

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UBI already exist. But, for now, just for friendly "investors" and landlords

It would be awesome if someone like Elon Musk would start a private company called UBI. The purpose of this company would be to function as a hedgefund for the people. The way you would do it is first determine how much you want someone to survive off of from birth to death. Then you invest enough in an interest bearing account to generate that much.

So if you want to make 100k per year you might have to invest 10million.

So that "employee" will generate 100k to live off per year wbile your initial investment stays with the company.

Once that persons 100 year trust fund is up the original prinicple returns to the company and is reissued to a new "employee" .

It wouldnt work for everyone in the short term but might be a way to wean ourselves off the capitalist machine that is destined to destroy us.

“US” is not western society. You’re talking about some form of communism that controls itself through some advanced AI. Sounds ass