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UBI probably is the positive outcome, though it may not seem like it to begin with. Initially it will likely be stigmatised and under-resourced, but as a larger proportion of people move out of work and onto UBI that stigma will drop and the resources should grow.

Eventually UBI will be the norm, and if the living standards of a person on UBI is as good as yours or mine today, that will be an enormous win for everyone. It’s like pensions, once these were only for the elderly poor, now they’re a right for everyone in most developed countries.

It’s also interesting that for most of human history leisure time was the point of life, and only in recent modernity has work come to be the meaning of someone’s existence.

UBI has to be commensurate with production being automated. That’s a big logistical problem, if you think building datacenters is a challenge try bringing about radical abundance, but even so it’s not insurmountable. It just needs to be taken on as project and not seen as an impossibility.

So much of this is not about what is possible so much as what people believe is possible. We can do anything if we try.

by bubblemoth1 hours ago|

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> Eventually UBI will be the norm

I see comments like this tossed around a lot, but what makes you say this? Don't you think its more likely that most people end up in poverty?

by Chance-Device1 hours ago|

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No, I think people will demand to not live in poverty. Capitalism allows people to escape poverty by personal effort. An AI future won’t allow it by any means other than collective effort, so that’s what we’ll do.

by mekael49 minutes ago|

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That will entail an immense amount of violence to be undertaken by the working class against those in power, unless you think they'll gladly give up all of their ill gotten gains out of the goodness of their black little hearts.

by orangecat41 minutes ago|

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In fact I don't think that rich people are cartoon villains who enjoy watching the poors starve. If AI leads to greatly increased productivity, then at existing tax rates there will be more than enough to provide good living conditions for people who can't find jobs.

by orangecat2 hours ago|

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do not seem to have found any possible positive outcome to present

See "Machines of Loving Grace" by Dario Amodei: https://darioamodei.com/essay/machines-of-loving-grace.

by HarHarVeryFunny2 hours ago|

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This seems more a fantasy than a considered likely outcome. He basically admits that humans will eventually mostly all be out of a job, replaced by AI, but then says (Gemini's summary) that there will be:

"Massive Economic Abundance: Because AI will exponentially grow the total economic pie, overall resource scarcity will diminish. The fundamental challenge shifts from producing wealth to distributing wealth."

So how do we go from everyone out of work, no income to spend on food, or the goods and services that the AI is producing, to "massive economic abundance"?!

It's like the meme:

Step 1: Create AI

Step 2: AI takes all the jobs

Step 3: ???

Step 4: Profit! (massive economic abundance)

What is step 3?

by Marha011 hours ago|

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> What is step 3?

"Massive Economic Abundance" implies massive increase in produced goods. This implies massive deflation, ceteris paribus. So step 3 could be simply printing money to pay for UBI. Deflation from AI productivity increase and inflation from UBI money printing will cancel out.

by HarHarVeryFunny50 minutes ago|

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This doesn't make any sense.

For money to work it has to represent some real value, something that has some scarcity to it such as potatoes or hours of human labor. Ultimately it is just a decoupler in a barter system, a universally recognized IOU.

Why would someone give me a car in exchange for UBI-scrip when that UBI-scrip has no inherent scarcity or value and can be produced in infinite supply by the government ?