alt Hacker NewsThe problem with the studies is that they're cases in which specific groups within the broader economy lost jobs. Those aren't really comparable to the (theoretical) path of job displacement of AI for a couple of reasons:
1. Those people didn't get substantial, ongoing financial assistance. If we end up in a UBI world, particular one where the UBI people get is high enough to get more or less anything that's not very scarce (e.g. land in coastal cities), the negative economic component of job loss is removed. 2. Everyone else still had jobs. When you lose your job and everyone else continues to work and be successful (or at least you perceive that to be the case), there's a big hit to the status and meaning in your life. If everyone is affected in the same way, then your relative status to others remains unchanged, and everyone collective needs to reorient society to find their meaning.
I'm not saying it will go well, but I do think there's a theoretically possible path where there is large scale unemployment but because we have nigh infinite productivity, everyone has access to unlimited non-scarce resources (including luxury cars and fine foods and whatever medical treatment they need), and we end up with an enormous number of competitive leagues of everything, events centered around music and arts, dinner parties and all manner of other social activities that are what give people meaning.
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Let's grant the premise. UBI, significant enough to live well on, luxury cars and dinner parties for all.
Who sets the amount? Who controls the infrastructure producing the unlimited resources? What happens when you vote the wrong way, or protest the wrong policy, or simply become inconvenient?
A population with no economic function has no leverage with which to resist a reduction, a condition, or a withdrawal. You're describing a world where 99% of the people are entirely dependent on the goodwill of whoever owns the machines, and you're treating that goodwill as an unchanging variable. The history of every human institution suggests that power without accountability eventually behaves like...power without accountability. Even assuming the benevolence of the people holding all the cards isn't naive optimism, it's the same mistake that makes people say real communism just hasn't been tried yet.
Your counterargument is basically just... vibes? It'd be a lot stronger if you could also back it up with studies, like the author has.