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I don' think automation will have a net-destructive effect on jobs--that is, new jobs will replace old ones. But to go along with the hypothetical, probably a continuation of what we have now: more welfare spending, but also occasional on-time universal remittances like in 2020-2021, but it will not be a UBI.
Likely not because in a consumerist capitalist society elites derive their wealth from the lower classes. Who is clicking those Facebook, Google, or Instagram ads? There will be more business to business activity, bypassing the consumer altogether, such as Facebook selling ad space to NGOs and multinationals, Amazon selling cloud storage to big companies, Microsoft servers, etc.
There will always be some scarcity, such as social status or between the merely rich and ultra-wealthy.
The critical point is when the expected economic value of a typical human goes negative. That's when things start to go screwy, and I worry we're crossing that line soon.
Presently deriving wealth from large numbers of the lower classes is the most common route, but what if you could derive your wealth from large numbers of robots instead? Unless the aggregate poor can sell something to the aggregate not-poor, cash will flow away from the system until the population dies out.
This obviously concludes with Mongolian supremacy, since they have land to build with and fewer mouths to feed. Steppe Nomads at it again
Well, in democracies, all people do have some value: their vote counts the same no matter what they are, so they're worth something as tokens of legitimacy in power-games, if nothing else.
But aside from that, I consider that, to some amoral self-interested agent, people's worth can be summed up in their capacity to create and to destroy. Rather like honeybees: you don't want to bully a honeybee because it'll sting you, but you also don't want to get rid of all the honeybees because then you'd have no source of honey. Similarly, if you try to oppress your people they may rise against you, and you'd have no nice things without them, so peace with them is best.
When people lose those capacities, bad things tend to ensue. People who are destructive but not creative are like wasps, with all downside and no upside. A disarmed but productive people is vulnerable to the more powerful in a way that (I don't have a bug simile for!) People who are both disarmed and, say, have been automated out of all capacity to contribute are just flies, neither dangerous nor worth keeping around.
But then there's their worth as game-pieces for the competitions within the elite; I think this genuinely will buy the people some time, though I do not look forward to what happens when those in power realize that votes from people who can't hurt you if you hurt them or help you if you please them have no practical value. (If I let my imagination run wild, I can imagine a gentle transition away from people's votes having value. Perhaps it could start with referring to the projections of a predictive model proven to know what the people will want better and sooner than they know themselves. Soon you can "unpeg the vote from the human standard" entirely and just look at the output of the number-generator to tell you who should be in charge, before you realize that's dumb and antiquated, too.)
Similarly, I don't expect morality to be much help for a class of people who have "outlived their usefulness" for long enough. Counting on norms to protect the status quo in the face of changing incentives has a very poor track record. Perhaps "all people have innate value that makes them worth caring for" in the face of mass economic obsolescence would fare almost as well as traditional sexual morality did in the face of the pill; I can easily imagine a new generation of the great-and-good caretakers of the world convincing themselves of more-evolved moral theories about how it's in the people's own best interests to be euthanized en masse. (As an offhand example it seems negative utilitarianism/suffering minimization would be really handy for that.)
I have similar fears regarding UBI in general. Suppose the entity paying my bills decides to cut me off; what disincentive do they have against doing something like that? If I have a job in good standing, the theory goes that they value the work I do for them more than they value keeping the money, so if they cut me off and I stop working, they've lost rather than gained by their own lights. But if I do not and cannot give anything (practical) back to them, and if I am not being supported by a large group of others who do give back but want cases like mine to be well-taken-care-of should they ever end up in my position - if I have nothing but another's sentiment to support me - then I am swiftly doomed.
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