sohois
4d ago
I notice I am confused by your premise.
First of all I think it's a simplification.
there's a lot of people who are savagely agitating for a UBI on one side, saying we'll be post work. The other side of course says no that's not how it works
Are these the two sides? I wouldn't agree. I think you're bunching together a lot of disparate groups. I think the main group you are trying to describe are those who believe a high level of structural, technologically driven unemployment is coming and propose UBI as a way to prevent huge numbers from falling into poverty or rioting.
But when you see arguments in favour of UBI, plenty are more prosaic, liking it from a Friedmanite perspective as the most effective method of welfare.
Between the technological UBI and libertarian UBI enthusiasts lies the most populous group: the midwits. The standard reddit proponent, they are aware of some of the technological arguments, and some of the efficiency arguments, and are smart enough to know that communism is a dead end. Thus they attach to UBI as a way to sound smart while still pushing the type of left wing welfare they favour.
When you talk about left vs right, I think you are mostly seeing arguments from the latter group, and are ending up with a bunch of weakmen. Hence why you are arguing against "affordability", because you're seeing people whose proposals begin and end at confiscating all the money from billionaires worldwide. The reality is that there are costed UBI proposals, both for current welfare or post-AGI welfare.
but let's ignore all that. My second point of confusion is how you imagine this post-AGI economy at all. I'm assuming that we're putting ASI to the side, whether through slow-takeoff or because you believe it impossible, so AI that hits human level but no higher. Is this AI purely limited to the realms of current LLMs? Are you assuming no equivalent leaps in robotic technology? How long do you expect this period to last? What's the actual level of unemployment you are expecting?
I'm trying to imagine something like self-driving cars, level 5 with no requirement for human supervision. So you reduce the work week to a 30/20/10 hour max or whatever. Does it matter if no one ever needs a human driver again?
Is the assumption that AGI largely acts a super performance enhancer but generically, so that every current job can still be done by humans?
I'm not saying that this is an impossible scenario or we couldn't at least theorycraft some way that it works, but it seems like it needs a very specific set of future developments to make sense.
And this for me is the biggest reason why few people talk about work weeks and instead focus on UBI: it's simple.
Whether you have AGI LLMs, or robotics, or ASI; whether you have 25% unemployment, or 50%, or 100%, or even if it's all a big luddite fallacy and there are loads more jobs created, UBI still works as a method of welfare. You don't have to know the future path of the economy or technology to put forward a solution.
Why don't you switch to snowboarding?
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