This is the bit I can't understand about the nay sayers. AI promises a world of everything you could want. The problem is the current way of assigning goods (money for labour) is obsolete. The really funny thing (to me) is the people who'd benefit most by this are the ones wailing the most.
It's the disconnects that confuse me the most. "What about houses, how can we afford a house without a job?" is a complaint I hear. Like for some reason AI won't reduce construction costs to near 0.
The hard part imho is the transition where some jobs are obsoleted, but some aren't and some things still cost lots because they haven't been automated yet. This is where we are now I think.
> Like for some reason AI won't reduce construction costs to near 0.
Ok and how will you pay the guy who owns the lumber if you have nothing he wants? And the guy who owns the construction bots? And the owner of the land?
Yes, thats what I'm wondering - when you have a fully automated supply chain that builds houses with 0 labour (probably never be 0, but near enough for the sake of argument). Lets say we have a world that everything is automated to produce all the stuff we need.
Then how do you pay for that stuff because no one will be working. Also what will prompt people to make new machines to build new stuff?
In the end, it's all in the hands of our friend Sol. If only we could reduce every problem down to a problem of harvesting enough photons from the sun, we'd be set for life (and many more). In a way, DNA is the strongest-possible argument for truly universal UBI...
