Nope. That's not at all what I'm saying. UBI isn't there so that nobody works. UBI is there so nobody HAS TO work. It would be set at roughly the poverty level. If you do nothing, you get just enough to be able to eat, have health care, and live in the most basic housing.
It won't be poverty level. It will be much better than that. There is no reason this has to be a race to the bottom. Remember, the machines will be more capable than todays workers. They will be smarter than todays workers. They will be more productive than todays workers.
The result won't be that they produce 100 million cars (approx the number of cars made in a year today) that are hoarded by a handful of people. The result will be that everyone can have a car without the toil of working.
And then, if you want more, you get a job, or you create one!
Doing what? Remember, the machines are smarter, faster and more capable the humans. Human labor has no value. So what would a human do for work in this scenario that would be worth being paid for?
I would expect it'd be about 50/50, workers vs. non-workers. However, I would expect that a significant portion of the workers will be less than full-time (by today's standards), or possibly do multiple part-time gigs. If I could create cool gadgets Monday and Tuesday, fly on Wednesday, volunteer on Thursday, and play music on Friday, that would be great! Or do something completely different. And I'd likely experiment some because I wouldn't have to worry about failure putting me on the street.
This is closer to the truth. Good friend of mine has never had to work. But he's had 3-4 jobs over the years because he want to deep dive into something and learn about it. Most notably becoming a somalier because he wanted to understand wines more.
But, again, make no mistake, these will be hobbies, not jobs.
Think of it like this. One of my hobbies is woodworking. I enjoy going out to my shop and making things. I'm decent at it, but no one is going to pay me because there are thousands of craftsmen out there that have more experience and do better work. So, I still do it, but it will always be a hobby.
Now, replace craftsmen with craftsrobots. The robots will be able to do anything a craftsman can do better, faster and cheaper. So, no need for craftsmen.
Now, replace woodworking with any job. The robots will be able to do accounting, programming, business development, factory working, drawing, designing, piloting and anything else that can be imagined better, faster and cheaper than humans.
Also not true. There are still corporations. There's still property and real estate. There's still investors and capital gains. There's still trade and tariffs. How do you think we got on before the 16th amendment was passed in 1913?
Yes, exactly.
Again, that's not how it works. You can still have all those people, they're just not slaves to a job. Automation will never replace 100% of humans.
I agree. But 95%, probably. And I have no idea what the 5% will be other than human oversight of the machines.
First of all, that's much higher than UBI would be. Like I said, poverty level. And you can absolutely have a job and work harder and be rewarded for it.
Doing what? Name one job that humans will be able to do better than machines to the point that a human could work harder and be rewarded when the machine is faster, smart and cheaper than the human.
There are OODLES of places I'd love to travel, and not just for a weekend/week vacation, but enough time to really experience them and get a feel for the place. I was lucky enough to live in the Netherlands for a year when I was growing up. I went to first grade there and learned how to read and speak Dutch with other kids my age and it was a wonderful experience. I have many fond memories of that year, and we went to lots of other places in Europe because of the luxury of proximity. I got to see the crown jewels, Big Ben, the Eiffel Tower, Anne Frank's hiding spot, windmills, castles, museums of many kinds, ride on a hovercraft and a hydrofoil that were both big enough to ferry cars (both across the English Channel, before the Chunnel), and experience other cultures.
If I had the time (and money...), I'd love to spend some time in Japan, South Korea and other "western" Asian countries, Australia and New Zealand, parts of South America (my family lived in Brazil for a few months before I was born and my BIL lived in Chile for a while), Puerto Rico and the rest of the Caribbean... I could easily take five years of my life just for travel and nothing else.
Exactly. I think some people, particularly americans due to the paucity of vacation time compared to the rest of the developed world, just can't wrap their minds around travel as anything but a week a year going to Paris or Disney or Tokyo.
We already have a small class of people that RV full time and spend months at a time at locations. Many of them make YT content to support their habit. The future of travel will likely look more like that than vacations. Just without the need to make YT content unless you want to do it as a hobby.
So far no one (except 172and you) has mentioned the one industry that just might get the biggest benefit from the no-work concept. Entertainment. Singing, dancing, acting, symphonies, and so on. But wait! There must be theaters, sound, light, props, etc to support all this. Which means factories to produce the infrastructure, people to design everything and how are people going to learn to design? Someone's got to teach them, ChatGPT isn't viable for everything.
Why on earth would people be needed to "design everything"? Creative work is rapidly being displaced by LLMs and we're only in the first hours of the revolution. This is only going to increase as the years tick by and automation improves both objectively and subjectively.
Objectively, I doubt anyone would get on a plane designed by todays AI. But that's not because AI isn't capable of it, it's because we're in the first hours so that particular flavor of AI doesn't exit yet. Airplane design is massively automated with CAD and physics sims that prevent companies from having to build prototypes until the final stages of design/verification. Indeed AI is already used in things like turbofan blade design. What hasn't happened yet is to create a system that brings those technologies together to create an entire engine. Or an entire plane. But it would be a mistake to think that it won't happen. It will.
What about that plumbing leak in the kitchen...what type of robot is going to fix it?
One that can fit into spaces too tight for a human without having to tear open walls. One that doesn't get grossed out or made sick by dealing with waste water. One that doesn't have to be dragged out of bed at 2am when a pipe bursts. One that isn't limited by its own personal experience and can instead draw upon all plumbing knowledge from lead to cast iron to copper to PEX to ABS to PVC rather than only being effective at a subset. One that is every bit as good as any other one, instead of having to get references to make sure you hire one that knows how to do the needed work properly. One that can be packed, along with a thousand of its clones, into the back of some jets and flown into a disaster area after an earthquake without having to leave family behind and demand both hardship pay and hazard pay. That type.
