Will Universal, High Income Work?

As long as time exists, this will not work I think.

Even if we get to a point where someone can achieve some great task in 30 seconds, that time will be monetized to absurd amounts.

Time will become a currency. And what about incentives for humans?

These realities people foresee rarely taken the human element into account.

I could be way off base, but I don’t think universal income will ever be as effective as people believe.

Companies will not survive unless people can afford to buy things. Universal income will have to come from companies that are taxed enough to pay for the AI they use instead of hiring people because the govt cannot pay out that without something like that existing. What then would the threshold be for enough money to be paid to each person to live and everything exist in the free market the way it does now? Seems impossible. Then what about healthcare and other facets of society like choice in treatments for illnesses vs. how insurance only covers certain things. Housing. Education. A lot of questions that don't seem possible with anything close to the current way we do things.

quote:

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If everyone has money, no one does.

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Right. You could essentially just say that if AI takes over the entire workforce, you can just do away with money all together.

Absolutely not. There is more wrong with that idea than I care to list out. Could you imagine the waste, laziness, and supply chain nightmares if everyone could afford whatever they wanted.

For all of human history, human labor has been one of, if not the biggest input to the production of goods and services.

If hypothetically we could still produce all the goods and services we have today with no human labor, then technically people wouldn't need "jobs" anymore. Jobs are a means to an end, not an end unto themselves.

However it's such a drastically radical change it completely upends the entire economic model and nobody knows how anything would work.

You still would to have SOME sort of allocation method. Even with AI we wouldn't produce infinity stuff so how is the stuff that is produced allocated?

I’m surprised Elon is so gung-ho on something that is so naive. Wonder if he actually believes it will work out this way or is just trying to quell the AI fear.

The latter for sure. AI is what will make him the first trillionaire...