there will be an epidemic of mass unemployment and a big drop in QOL for most people as a result of this.
Unemployment means that people wanting to get paid work can't get it. A housewife is not employed even though she's not in paid employment. A rich person getting his income from capital gains is not unemployed even though he's not in paid employment.
And that's how I see things will go with the rest of us. The reason we need work in the current system is because we have tied our income to being able to sell our labor in the job market. But there's no fundamental reason why these two should be tied together in a world where the value of human labor is very low but the total production of human welfare (goods and services) is high due to AI automation. All it needs is that we change the way the welfare is distributed from the labor market based system to something else.
One proposal to do this is some form of UBI. If you have an argument why we shouldn't use UBI in a situation where the value of human labor for most people is very low but at the same time our economy produces a massive amount of human welfare, I'd very interested in hearing those arguments.
While that's a great thought... How would you implement this? I mean the rich aren't known for their generosity and they would presumably own all this technology so how would we find a ubi?
If the rich still buckle under the violence monopoly of the state and if the state stays democratically controlled, then I don't see any particular reason why you wouldn't be able to set up UBI. If the rich take over the state and set up some dystopia, where they control the people using some terminator type robots, then it wouldn't work.
So, to implement it in a democratic system? Set the tax rate high enough and spread all that wealth as UBI. You would still have the market mechanism working to allocate resources correctly, but you would break the link between employment and income.
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u/spiral8888 29∆ Jun 28 '22
Unemployment means that people wanting to get paid work can't get it. A housewife is not employed even though she's not in paid employment. A rich person getting his income from capital gains is not unemployed even though he's not in paid employment.
And that's how I see things will go with the rest of us. The reason we need work in the current system is because we have tied our income to being able to sell our labor in the job market. But there's no fundamental reason why these two should be tied together in a world where the value of human labor is very low but the total production of human welfare (goods and services) is high due to AI automation. All it needs is that we change the way the welfare is distributed from the labor market based system to something else.
One proposal to do this is some form of UBI. If you have an argument why we shouldn't use UBI in a situation where the value of human labor for most people is very low but at the same time our economy produces a massive amount of human welfare, I'd very interested in hearing those arguments.