UBI before riots, possible or a worthless pursuit?

Submitted by nitebear t3_10g9irt in singularity

I've been reading comments and posts about how when agi or ai take over job sectors the loss in jobs will lead to riots. The main solution so far is to implement ubi so those without jobs have the income to live. This means that we're reliant on the government to correct the issues that ai may bring.

That leaves this weird transitional period where job sectors will begin to be destroyed and the government has to be quick to react, but will such a transitional period be dangerous? I find it difficult to imagine a world where politicians will not be helped by ai. Personally, I think politicians with ai to inform them will be much more successful than those left on their own. Which leads me to believe that ai will take over the government by proxy and therefore such a transitional period will likely be successful.

My main point of this post is to start a discussion of whether you think ai will integrate with the government faster than a job sector dying or perhaps you think the government would move too slow for ai to be integrated in time.

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Fuzzers t1_j51ly94 wrote

My personal opinion: There will be blood.

As AI begins to replace jobs, unemployment will begin to rise assuming new jobs aren't created when old jobs are replaced. This will take many years to manifest, beginning with basic jobs like long haul transport and admin services, and compounding over years towards more complicated jobs like the trades.

Now the question becomes, where is the turning point where unemployment is so high that the government has to step in to prevent a societal collapse? 10%? 20%? 50%? Who knows, but violence always comes before government intervention.

There will be riots long before the conversation even begins about UBI, the government in general is never proactive, they are always reactive. This means they will wait till the country is on the verge of collapse before even beginning to consider talking to the corporations about UBI payments, and even then the process could take years to complete.

This argument all hinges on the idea that more jobs will be lost then created due to AI labor displacement, which to be completely honest is very difficult to forecast. If 3.2 million trucks lose their jobs in the states, where do they go? Is there a new industry or roles created due to the AI trucker displacement? Who knows.

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phriot t1_j52bwuy wrote

>As AI begins to replace jobs, unemployment will begin to rise assuming new jobs aren't created when old jobs are replaced.

In the past, mechanization and automation was pretty much contained to one role at a time, not even necessarily one job at a time. So, if you mechanized sewing, you could sell more clothes at a cheaper price point, driving demand for sales clerks, designers, managers, construction workers to build new stores, and so on.

The thing is that this wave of automation is coming for arbitrary jobs. There's nothing that eventually won't be able to be done better, or at least more cheaply, by some software, maybe with a robot attached. Soon (now?), if you can make a better shirt for a cheaper price, you can sell it on a website, have an AI write the copy, have a robot build your warehouse, have a self-driving truck bring the shirts to a shipping service, a smaller self-driving truck go to a neighborhood, and a drone drop the shirt off at the customer's doorstep. Where's the new job for humans? Influencer? How many of those can an economy support?

You also now lost the jobs for the truck stop workers, and maybe some additional gas station and fast food workers. The self-driving trucks and drones will need maintenance, but likely less than older ICE vehicles. Planning on having robot maintainers replace the lost jobs will only work until the robots can repair themselves. (More likely an automated repair depot caring for modular robots).

As you note, it will probably take some time to get to that future. But it will be decades, and not centuries. How many of us can become plumbers and electricians before those manual, non-routine jobs are lost, too?

>This will take many years to manifest, beginning with basic jobs like long haul transport and admin services, and compounding over years towards more complicated jobs like the trades.

Don't forget that a lot of "difficult" knowledge jobs will be automated, too, and probably well before the trades. It won't just be fast food workers, truck drivers, and personal assistants.

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PoliteThaiBeep t1_j52kvtx wrote

I think public opinion sort of bounces back and forth around issues trying to find "balance".

In the 70s there was a public push to reduce taxes, which overtime resulted in a massive reduction of effective taxes for the rich and since then inequality has been exploding.

A bit of breathing room happened in 90s which calmed the public I think. A lot of good things happened.

At some point hopefully not too late it'll again reach to the point where the public push towards higher taxes for the rich will make sense to part of republican constituents.

I actually think we're very close, we already had basically UBI payments across the whole country during pandemic and nobody bat an eye even though just a few years ago it seemed impossible.

There just needs to be some kind of public catalyst to implement effective taxes level of near 1970s levels and also start UBI at the same time. It doesn't even needs to be large or to be called "ubi". It could be a bunch of different things that would together act as a UBI, but we won't call it that.

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stievstigma t1_j5c4bvf wrote

You mean like a “Freedom Dividend”?

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PoliteThaiBeep t1_j5c8jqm wrote

I think Andrew Yang called it that right?

But his solution was to introduce VAT taxes and use that to finance UBI to avoid "redistribution" stigma.

I think politically it probably makes sense, but personally I think taxing rich passive income is more beneficial for the economy if implemented.

Right now poor people's major income source is work, investment income is a tiny portion for them. As you go up the bracket investment income tends to be more and more important and for billionaires I think it's over 70% income is in investment. I don't remember exact numbers but I remember the trend.

Despite this investment income taxes are capped at 20%. (For a stock owned for over a year) This creates a natural runaway wealth scenario where more money just makes money with limited incentives to actually create stuff.

I'd say UBI should be financed from the top 1% investment income taxes, make them higher like 30-50% for people with over 10 mil in investment, don't touch regular income taxes, don't introduce VAT.

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stievstigma t1_j5f2yt5 wrote

Yeah, it was Yang. I agree with most of what you said but I was under the impression that the VAT tax he was proposing was to be leveraged against big tech, as in, Amazon would be taxed on every transaction, Google would be taxed on every search, etc. Of course, it’s easy to see how those costs could trickle down though so yeah, taxing passive income makes more sense.

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PoliteThaiBeep t1_j52n424 wrote

Also I think the most important part of taxing rich is progressive taxing passive income from the stock market. Maybe we don't even need to increase income taxes. Maybe we just need to modify passive income taxes.

It does two things really well:

  1. Incentives rich to create things instead of just sitting on the money
  2. Very predictable flow of money to UBI
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Rakshear t1_j52u2xb wrote

Actually i suspect in terms of ai driven cars laws will be enacted requiring humans to always be present incase of emergencies or outages. This includes big rigs of course, which will mean people still need to be employed, though the pay probably won’t be as good, it will be much easier.

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TheSecretAgenda t1_j535qd2 wrote

Trucks will monitored remotely from a central location. A human driver will drive the truck by satellite like a remote-control race car.

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InvisibleWrestler t1_j52zfv2 wrote

Companies that have already invested in big machines or equipment that need humans to operate will move to full automation very slowly. If a company just bought many human driven trucks it'll take them long time to switch to fully automated trucks or to upgrade already purchased ones. If a manufacturing plant has been designed with human workers in mind it'll take time and more investment to get full automation. And we're still long way from affordable humanoid robots.

On the other hand if some simple AI cloud subscription could automate the work of an office worker, call center worker, accountant or programmer, that would happen a lot faster.

IMHO office jobs will start getting automated on a large scale in a few years. And a lot earlier than truck or bus drivers.

Aspirational jobs that require a degree and student debt are more at a risk than manual labour.

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Bierculles t1_j552nwl wrote

you face another problem with job displacement, even if you move all the people into new jobs, by the time you have reeducated them, AI probably can do that job too.

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TryHardHamm t1_j51pcv6 wrote

I live in South Africa, we are way ahead of you all on the unemployment thing

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RavenWolf1 t1_j52wdic wrote

Yes, that is true. In American people always forgot to look rest of the world where there are huge unemployment and not much ICT industry jobs. I think that job loss is actually happening currently very rapidly but it happens in poorer countries. All these modern jobs are concerted to modern countries.

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InvisibleWrestler t1_j52yfhq wrote

This is very true. Even in developed countries, there's large difference between locations.

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RavenWolf1 t1_j52vj3s wrote

I think AI will eventually be integrated to government and in the end humans are pushed out of decision making altogether. Humans are not fit to rule and humans do not make fair decisions. Whole system is corrupted down to smallest parts. The thing is humans who are in power doesn't want to let go of their power. You can look today's politics and notice that mainly all policies witch are made are always benefiting rich and powerful mainly. All changes which are needed to be made will take time which we don't have. Tearing down old system is it not easy task thus we will have riots and revolutions forcefully tearing old system down to implement new.

Whole thing is like Kodak which was unable to reform. Only major catastrophe will force change the system. For example before COVID-19 we didn't have much remote work but COVID-19 made it common. That is why we will have riots. We are unable to change in peaceful manner.

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ElvinRath t1_j52bg3j wrote

Well, there are riots from time to time already.

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Anyway, we are not yet there. Not even close.

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And governments move always too slow, that's not even a question... But most people who what UBI are highly unrealistic about it.

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I totally see a UBI in the future, but unemployment has to go up A LOT before that.

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retawx t1_j520xt1 wrote

Are people already forgetting what happened during the pandemic? A divided US government at the drop of a hat juiced unemployment by $600/week (later reduced to $300/week) on top of existing unemployment benefits. Not to mention the $3600 in personal stimulus checks. UBI is a forgone conclusion.

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langolier27 t1_j51et05 wrote

The real question is will we be willing to go in a general strike before AI is fully integrated, if not then we’re not getting anything other than the most paltry UBI imaginable

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Surur t1_j521zf2 wrote

You make a compelling point.

The main motivation of politicians have always been to stay in power, and what better way to stay in power than to be ahead of such an issue?

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BassoeG t1_j52f1v7 wrote

The problem is, once robotics technology gets good enough to replace all jobs, police and military are included in that. And from what we’ve seen of the rich over the past few decades, does literally anyone think they wouldn’t prefer to simply massacre everyone with killbots over paying us?

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TheSecretAgenda t1_j5386jo wrote

The oligarchs are in a bit of a bind. They depend on the masses for labor. However, they also depend on the masses to consume what they make. So, impoverish the masses = no more profits for their companies.

Even companies that don't sell directly to the general public are still feeding their products to manufacturers and service provider that do.

I imagine that they will be short sighted and automate assuming the business down the street will provide the jobs, while the business down the street is believing the same thing about them. Circular firing squad.

Consumption by ordinary people is 70% of American GDP. Other that UBI or some new job category that I can't imagine what it would be capitalism will be in real trouble.

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p0rty-Boi t1_j55oice wrote

Oligarchs become regional despots controlling resources and enforcing their will through kill bots?

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Bruh_Moment10 t1_j5pcotj wrote

What if transportation and other such jobs are automated before military tech gets good. Where unemployment is massive but militaries aren’t automated yet.

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unirorm t1_j52fvyw wrote

The current socioeconomic standards are not compatible with AI growth. AI in conjuction with hardcore capitalism is a recipe for mayhem.

Why? Because we will have all the means and tools, to make the world a better more viable place for everyone and we will use it for profit, again.

I presume this will result in first global awakening with massive riots all over the world. That will be the end of the capitalism as we all know it and the beginning of something more viable for everyone.

At this point AI will have the basic role of consulting politicians. An immediate democratic system, since we will all be connected online 24/7, will be more appropriate.

We will see a lot regulations and a code of conduct for using AI on business after the first "Beta catastrophic unregulated period" simply because it's impossible for the (1/3 or more) of working force to go unemployed . Work is a human right.

Of course.. it will be a matter of time before humanity relapse and go back to what it does best. I hope we would learn and become better on this after many years.

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TheSecretAgenda t1_j538mmc wrote

I don't know that I want mob rule. As Trump has demonstrated a large portion of the mob is incredibly stupid.

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CriticalPolitical t1_j545b5u wrote

I think Andrew Yang would be elected president if nobody else would budge on UBI and there would be Yang approved members of Congress that would make up a large quantity of Congress probably as well.

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jalle007 t1_j52ien5 wrote

Prison chains before freedom

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crua9 t1_j52s5qu wrote

IMO the problem with UBI will always be how is it paid for. I think when this gets a solid answer it will be near impossible to stop it.

But what I assume will happen in places like in the USA is something like stim checks will come back, and it will be a regular thing. Then it will be an expected thing in the law.

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Like I think when AI hardcore starts taking over jobs. We will see regulation against AI, but that is likely to go no where but maybe hold things back for a short bit. But then some type of stim checks for the massive unemployment or under paid people

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RavenWolf1 t1_j52x5cf wrote

Whole question about how we pay UBI is really funny if you think about it. How do we feed our people currently? All that wealth is somewhere already because we are not dead and starving. When robots come and take our jobs how does it change the fact that we can now feed people? It doesn't actually, we have even more capabilities to feed people. Only thing which is problem here is our broken economic system. Nothing more.

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crua9 t1_j53cl5f wrote

>How do we feed our people currently?

Currently? Farmer farms for money, it does the thing where it goes to the store where money exchanges hands a dozen times, and then people buy the food.

>When robots come and take our jobs how does it change the fact that we can now feed people?

You're forgetting a transition between then and now specifically between now and when the unemployment so bad that it has to be recognized and the current numbers are not used with the unemployment benefit system.

It's extremely easy to hear and see stories of homeless and others going through trashcan to find food to stay alive. For homeless to die for being sick and having no money to get treatment. And so on.

Like you can pretend that things are Utopia right now and everybody is going to bed with a full belly. But in reality many aren't. To the point that some people are eating crackers just to have enough money to feed their kids something proper. And this is the USA.

So the between your Utopia where money is not really a thing and now. How do people survive and how does ubi get paid for? Robots taking over will not happen overnight. There is likely going to be many problems on the way. It could be so bad that it takes several generations before what you're talking about is realistic.

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Lawjarp2 t1_j54pi1w wrote

There could be riots because the jobs that will get replaced first are not basic needs. If we can drive food production, mineral extraction costs to zero through automation first we can have some semblance of good life for all. You can't automate jobs at the top and then expect more for all. If you want more produce more.

(1) Nationalise and/or fully automate agriculture and mining.

(2) Automate transport fully. You don't need fsd perfection if all vehicles are automated and can sense each other.

(3) Automate construction of homes and cities.

(4) Drive down cost of energy via fusion or slowly increase capacity through robot labour.

Provide the basics for free for everyone. Food, water, shelter, internet and some extra UBI. The odds of riots decrease greatly.

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Bierculles t1_j552w4t wrote

Sadly it's most likely going to be a shitshow, most of our politicans still think the internet is a new fad that will go away soon and that fax machines are the height of technology. Governments also tend to be purely reactionary and slow while AI will come comparatively fast. I'm certain we will see mass riots long before most governments will do a single thing.

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