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Well, this is the rub. The UBI skeptic's worldview is a fundamentally aristocratic one which does not share your faith in the average individual. The UBI skeptic generally agrees that there is an intelligent, open-minded, agentic elite of individuals who can flourish when left to their own devices - he simply believes that lower-IQ or otherwise mentally disadvantaged people cannot say the same, and the happiness of a fraction of clever dilettantes is not worth leaving the Average Joe to rot his brain with 24/7 video games while shoveling nachos into his mouth.
I don't, myself, find this picture convincing, though it is a failure mode which it is worth bearing in mind. It seems to me that to the extent the horror stories about self-wireheaded proles living off the dole have some basis in fact, the individuals at issue don't actually have much in the way of the option of traveling the world instead, so they don't prove much. Moreover I think this kind of willpower-sapped listlessness should be understood as a form of clinical depression, and could likely be addressed with antidepressants if all else fails.
Still, you said you "didn't understand" the doomer viewpoint on UBI - well, here goes.
Yeah, I find that opinion gross and evil and degrading to the average person to the extent that I don't understand where it comes from. The people they're imagining will do poorly without a job are frankly mostly already living without a job, and have done badly in school, which was difficult for them to begin with. Anyone who is doing fine with a job already will do fine without a job too.
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As a UBI skeptic, that's not my view. I agree that there is "an intelligent, open-minded, agentic elite of individuals who can flourish when left to their own devices". And a much larger group of people who will fit the stereotype "rot his brain with 24/7 video games while shoveling nachos into his mouth." But if UBI let everyone do what they wanted, that would be fine. I'm a skeptic because I don't believe in the implied abundance; someones going to have to produce all those nachos for the average Joe, and the videogames, and the electricity. And that's either going to be that first group, or some other group outside those mentioned -- no magic robot is going to do it for them. So you've got a group doing all the work, and a group reaping the benefits for nothing; that's not utopia, that's slavery. Talk to me about UBI when you've created the magic robots, and not before.
This is a perfectly reasonable take, but a completely different thing than what I meant (and took @aiislove to mean) by "UBI skeptic", ie someone who believes that even if it could be implemented as advertised, a UBI would not be good for a majority of humanity. I think, insofar as it is ever worth discussing ideals rather than short-term ends, this is an interesting conversation in its own right, separate from the object-level AGI-by-2027-vs.-moribund-AI-bubble debate which determines how soon if ever we might get the magic robots.
Define "good for". If you waste your life playing video games, but you would otherwise have starved to death, is that good for you? I would say that it is, ignoring semantic questions about whether "better" counts as "good".
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I too am a sceptic because of this. If we replace all the labour (or as much as we can squeeze out) with the magic robots, we are not likely to see "and MacroFruitCountenaceBigBigBank happily handed over 80% of their yuuuuuge profits to pay UBI for the 90% of displaced labour force".
Jeff Bezos was able to afford to rent out Venice for his second wedding. That money did not go into UBI. Same with the future: governments will tax what they can, corporations will avail of what loopholes they can, them that has, gits.
And governments may not even tax what they can, see the comedic saga of the government in my country being forced to accept €13 billion in back taxes from Apple, while it did its very best to refuse it (due to fears of "if the EU makes the American multinationals which prop up our economy pay up, they are likely to leave Ireland and then we're effed"). Same with UBI taxes: if it is too onerous a burden, the corporations will move overseas and good luck prying a cent out of the robotic hands.
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It seems pretty likely to me that the "magic robots" are coming. Why can't computers run an electricity generation facility? It's because they lack something which humans have. You can call that "know-how," "intelligence," "dexterity" or something else, but whatever it is, computers are getting better all the time at duplicating human skills. So it's reasonable to hypothesize that magic robots will be here sooner or later. And probably sooner rather than later.
That being said, it's been observed that science fiction writing is not about predicting the automobile but rather about predicting the traffic jam. My concern with UBI is that it will lead to unintended and negative consequences. So that instead of a utopia, we'll get something much less pleasant. What will happen to some beautiful beach on a tropical island paradise if suddenly billions of people have the time and resources to visit it? What will happen to marriage and family formation if your typical woman no longer needs help or financial support from any man? What sort of laws will the citizenry ask for if they have all the bread and circus they can handle but still aren't receiving the social status they think they deserve (because it's mathematically impossible for magic robots to create an abundance of social status)?
On a tangent, and relevant (I hope) to the vexed TFR question which gets debated on here: I don't know how many on here are married/partnered with children, but let me pose a question to the guys.
If you came home from work this evening and your wife/girlfriend says "Honey, great news, I'm expecting a baby!" what would be your reaction:
(1) Wonderful, now we can start having the big family I always wanted! This is the best surprise I ever got!
(2) Wait, you're what? We didn't plan for this. Isn't it too soon? There's so much we haven't done yet, are we even ready to start having kids?
Given that my wife is 45, was subfertile, and is now properly infertile after a botched IVF cycle when we tried for a third child that way, there would be loud rejoicing, expressing thanks for a miracle.
I do not think I am particularly unusual in thinking this way among older parents.
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For the sake of this question, shall I assume that I am recently married; that my wife is in her fertile years; and that we do not already have children together?
You can. Just that it's a surprise that you weren't expecting. Or maybe you already have one kid. Needn't even be your wife, as I said.
I'm very curious about the reactions when it comes to "oh, you expect me to put my money where my mouth is when it comes to having kids to save our crumbling TFR rate?" There's a heck of a lot of guys posting on here about "the solution is to force women to have babies", with one person exampling Afghanistan under the Taliban as the "you may not like it, but this is how you do it" as to getting women pregnant whether they agree or not.
I want to see if they're as eager about having three/four/six kids if the chickens come home to roost in their coop.
Then I would be perfectly fine with it.
One of the biggest regrets of my life is that I have only 2 children.
And by the way, if there were some magic genie who offered me a deal where (1) society would be changed such that smart women would be encouraged to marry and reproduce rather than pursuing advanced education or high powered careers; (2) I myself would marry and have a large number of children; and (3) instead of being a successful professional I would be pushing a mop in a sewage treatment plant, I would probably take the deal. (The main reason I wouldn't is if I believed that advances in AI are going to cause so much upheaval that it would be a moot point.)
What I mean is, I am potentially willing to give up the pursuit of money and social status for the sake of fertility so that I am not asking women to do something I wouldn't be willing to do myself.
Okay, you want to be a husband and father and are honest about it. That's good. There's still a lot of men who are pushing the angle that it's all the fault of women for [spin the wheel and pick your reason] no babies but who would run off to Antarctica the minute they got "Honey, I'm expecting!" message.
I'm not sure which specific comments you are referring to, but I think what's common is that (1) someone (usually a man) will say that public policy needs to limit women's choices in order to improve fertility rates; and (2) someone (usually a woman) will interpret this as an attack on women; an attempt to assign "fault" for societal fertility problems.
In my opinion, addressing the fertility crisis would require policies and norms which will a lot of women will perceive as being coercive and unfair. For example, discouraging women (but not men) from pursuing advanced education and careers such as attorney, business executive, etc. Is advocating for such policies "pushing the angle that it's all the fault of women"?
Based on my experience, that seems pretty unusual. All of the conservative pro-fertility men I have encountered were reconciled with the idea of traditional marriage.
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What reaction are you expecting? At least a third of our posters already have kids and regularly comment on how fulfilling they find it, and another third (myself included) are very vocally unhappy that they haven't been able to start a family. We have a few out-and-proud horndogs around but definitely below a third.
At the risk of being provocative, you seem to be very invested in this idea that 'boys only want one thing'. What would it take in terms of evidence to genuinely change your mind?
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Jerry Pournelle wrote about a solution. Not a pleasant, utopian solution, but I don't think the citizen islands from the codominium are that implausible.
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Depends how lifelike the robots are. You could imagine a world where people live surrounded by a Dunbar's-number's worth of robots (or VR simulations) that they can feel superior to, and scratch the itch that way. Or indeed, where we all become the omnipotent gods of our own little subjectively-infinite pocket universes. Not to say this is necessarily the outcome I root for or anything, but, could happen, conditional on sufficiently magic magic robots.
Yeah, I've wondered about that possibility myself. Fundamentally, the question is whether people would choose Nozik's Experience Machine over reality. Most people claim that they wouldn't (and personally I believe the reason is that they perceive that choice to be low-status) but what if it were marketed properly?
Hell, there's a !!fun!! question if it isn't an Experience Machine. What happens when everything but the 'people' are real? If you had immortality, I can think of worse ways to spend thirty years than a Primitive Technology meets Minecolonies run to really build an monument in the same sense that Sagan joked about making an apple pie from scratch.
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I will observe that the tension between "libertarian" (people flourish best left to their own devices) and, for lack of a better word "progressive" (we can steer people to be better souls) long predates AI. I don't think either side has clearly won there: drug addicts living on the streets of San Francisco are, IMO, pretty clearly neither living their best lives nor making the world a better place for the rest of us. I'll leave aside religious discussion of the innate value of human souls here.
The failures of the opposite extreme, trying to "immanetize the eschaton", as it were, are also pretty well documented in these parts. But this also isn't new with AI: it's the same argument as for alcohol prohibition a century ago. Ditto for similar vices throughout history. While I can accept universal Maslow-style enlightenment as an ideal post-scarcity society, I'm not convinced that it's possible to push people into that. That said, I think part of the role of a successful society is to achieve that self-actualization more broadly, although the methods for doing so are left as an exercise for the reader.
Yep. If you just look at the court cases in your local news, you will see how many people decide to spend their free time: drink, drugs, and criminality.
To be fair, for some of them that's not their free time, it's their career.
Not many career violent and property criminals nowadays - in a world where TVs are cheap, stolen phones get bricked remotely, and people don't carry large amounts of cash it isn't lucrative enough, particularly compared to drug dealing or online scams and fraud. In addition, sentences for repeat offenders are still harsher than they were in the Hippie Era such that you can't just write an occasional week in jail off as a cost of doing business.
There are specific niches where you see career property criminals, like shoplifting in San Francisco and fencing it on Facebook Marketplace, or pickpocketing tourists almost everywhere, but nothing like the situation in the 1990's where you could make a career as a burglar or mugger. Ask a beat cop or a local politician in a high-crime area and they will say that most property crime nowadays is committed by junkies who need cash fast for their next fix.
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And UBI just permits them to devote full-time attention to said career.
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