alt Hacker News>> So then there's no need for AI workers.
> You got this backwards - there won’t be need for humans outside of the elite class. 0.1% or 0.01% of mankind will control all the resources.
Let me rephrase that from 'So then there's no need for AI workers.' to 'So then there's no money to pay for AI workers.'
The UBI approach creates a closed economic loop: Company A pays taxes → Government gives UBI to consumers → Consumers buy from Company A → Company A pays taxes... This is functionally identical to Company A directly paying people to buy Company A's products, which makes no economic sense.
It's like Ford paying his workers $50/day, but the only customers buying Ford cars are Ford workers spending their $50/day wages. Ford would go bankrupt - there's no external value creation, just money circulating in circles.
Where does the actual wealth come from in this system? Who are the net buyers that make the businesses profitable enough to sustain the UBI taxes?
UBI in an AI-dominated economy can't create a functioning economy - it's just an imaginary self-licking ice cream cone.
Replies
The Ford model shown has been oversimplified to the point of absurdity by using only one industry. The real economy is about flows between multiple sectors. Who's buying bread? Do they have enough disposable income to buy packaged bread or just flour to bake at home? If there's a packaged bread industry, does it become robust enough to justify buying delivery trucks from Ford?
On the other hand, on a much broader scale, the planet itself is a closed economic loop. There's a finite amount of resources and we're all just cycling most of them around back and forth.
Arguably, a significant amount of "growth" has come from taking resources that formerly were not "on the books" and putting them on. The silver in the New World wasn't in (Western) ledgers until the 1500s, the oil under the Middle East was just goo until the late 1800s. The uranium ore in your backyard suddenly got a lot more interesting after 1940.
New value can come from inventing new and useful applications for existing resources or by finding new external inputs (maybe capturing some of that radiation the giant fusion sphere overhead is blasting in our direction).
All economic systems are self-licking ice cream cones, they sustain themselves through coercion and belief.
There will still be a functioning economy - serving the elite class. There will be a million people total who control all the resources. These people will form a new society, will have their own government, their own laws, their own values, products, services, etc. Everybody else will be out of luck: at first they will be given "UBI", then they will be cordoned into special zones, basically concentration camps, and eventually exterminated, because the elite has no need for them. Why waste resources on billions of useless humans, widely seen by elites as inferior species? They will probably make a virus to wipe us out and see that as a reboot of human race.
Or the technological singularity happens before that, and either AI will kill us all, or humans will merge with AI.