To think the time is coming when a universal basic income is seen as a necessity?

[DoubtfulCat]

AI is replacing a lot of jobs which were previously highly specialised- like translation- as well as entry-level jobs into careers like law. Because the jobs which are hardest to automate seem to be those which are currently either very well paid (like senior managers, politicians, etc) or those at the lowest pay level (like care work, for example) it seems as if more and more people who would once have been gainfully employed will increasingly be competing for a shrinking pool of jobs with half-decent pay, and for those manual jobs. I see a rise in people with no job at all and a huge fall in people earning ‘professional’ salaries and following a reasonable career path. The knock-on would be falling private pension provision, falling savings, rising personal debt, and so on. Increasing hardship and wealth gap between those with and those without.

Do you think that a form of UBI would help to solve that problem?

• more people could work fewer hours each, so more people could have a job which often gives people a purpose in life
• hardship would be mitigated- no-one would be destitute or unable to feed themselves
• people might use their time on creative projects or things that are good for their health and well-being, if they have some breathing space around struggling to survive

Machines SHOULD free us from work. There is more to life than creating more and more stuff we don't need, jobs that are just created to make more jobs.

WHY can't we want for AI to alleviate the pressure and stress of slogging our guts out? We are the only animals who subscribe to this notion of working 8 hours a day, five days a week, to recover for two days and start all over.

There HAS to be a better way to spend our lives. I am ALL for people being productive, but on their terms, for their desires, for the good of society - create art, music, entertainment. We don't need 100 different types of lipstick and 3000 types of pen, or 869 different components for machinery that works perfectly well as it is. There has to come a time where we decide we would prefer to spend time in leisure pursuits, seeing friends, focussing on our family, getting fit, developing passions of creativity. Or rest.

Here's a list of great minds who are/were for UBI or a variation of it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_advocates_of_universal_basic_income

They have it. They earn millions in passive income just for having billions in wealth. People on here have no idea how rich the ultra-wealthy are (with is why you get high-earners on here being offended about the idea. We don’t mean you!)

People forget that with more technology, consumers expectations simply go up and the average workload stays the same.

A mere 10-15 years ago there were no apps to get food delivered to you instantly without having to speak to a human. Or next day delivery of literally anything I can think of, via amazon. My shower broke and needed a specific valve thingy replaced. Beep boop, it arrived the next day. To facilitate all that is an army of software developers, warehouse staff, delivery staff, the list goes on.

I can't forecast exactly how our expectations will change but they will.

If we all get self driving cars, we'll be expected to be checking our emails while driving. There is no gained time, as we teachers say in the summer term. There is never gained time

Your talking about the middle classes who have amassed a bit of money, I'm sure they will be delighted to cough up. The really rich will be long gone. And the 'workers' would give up in droves if they can get free money and the marginal rate they make over the non-workers isn't that much. People already complain that you can be better off on benefits.

When Google search was invented, directory enquiries died but search engine optimisation was born.

There'll always be jobs

Do you believe the people who have the most power in this world value human life intrinsically?

Or do you believe a worker surplus is part of capitalism?

Do you believe the people who have the most power in this world love and cherish workers as children?

Or do you believe they see us as products and servents?

We’ve got hundreds of billions in oil under the North sea. Our stupid goverments are in thrall to net zero so we are letting Norway take the oil and we will buy it from them at great expense. We still have vast reserves of coal but we are buying that from China and Australia. The steel and pottery industries have been decimated by inferior Chinese products.
But, hey, as long as we can all keep buying plastic crap from temu and shein, who cares, right?

Every citizen of Norway has a stake in their country, the Sovereign wealth fund far outweighs any debt owed. If we’d gone that way instead of our ‘elite’ selling off Britain, just think how much better off we’d be.

We should be protesting in the streets at the rank stupidity of it all.

Why will there 'always be jobs'?
You mentioned driving a combine harvester. Already we are moving into a world where nobody will be driving a combine harvester. Somebody will be operating 12 of them from a flat in Islington.

Maintenance? Already vastly reduced.

There won't always be jobs just because we want there to be.

The poster you quoted is incorrect if they genuinely think all the jobs lost were replaced with other things. Part of the problem today is that they weren't.

An ever decreasing number of people is needed to keep the world we live in operational. It might be taking longer, but it's naive to think it won't ever happen, especially when it already is happening.

I think many people think of UBI simply in terms of "my taxes paying others to do nothing". An economy is not just about production, it’s about circulation of money. If large numbers of people lose jobs to automation and have no income, demand for goods and services falls. When demand collapses: Companies make fewer sales.Businesses shrink or shut down.

Even people who now protest againt UBI because they have jobs can lose them because their employers no longer have enough customers. UBI isn’t just about “giving people money for nothing”, it’s about keeping the economic engine running in a world where traditional employment might not provide enough widespread income. In that sense, it can be seen less as charity and more as an economic stabilizer that benefits everyone, including businesses and taxpayers.

And how many of those live in the UK and would stay here? I don't think we'd get far with trying to tax Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk.

I’m not talking about the middle classes.

All true, but people want 300 different types of lipstick. They want the more expensive BMW. They want more stuff. They want to differentiate themselves and while that desire (which is instinctive to attracting a mate) continues, nothing will change.

It's almost as if the millionaires think they are at the top of the food chain. Unless you do something physical you are likely replaceable.

What I worry about most with this is AI is already storming ahead, yet we haven't put the reigns on re a form on income tax from the work it is doing to redistribute what is company is already saving. It's relatively early days and we've missed the boat on keeping tabs of where the £ is going already.

It's almost becoming cryptocurrency in that it becomes more elusive as it becomes normalised and therefore the companies forget they are in increasing profit from not having to pay employees. If we don't plug the holes these jobs will be forgotten and not added to the "total" amount these large companies pay, if we can ever find a way to make them.

I do worry also about education as a result; it will be interesting to see if more people choose to learn for pleasure or it becomes a thing of the past in many ways because the lack of choice of jobs makes it pointless unless you actually like learning. I do think community will be stronger, although it will likely have a feeling of covid lockdowns for a while. A lot of people will need to retrain into things like social care, mental health specialists, more trades, I suspect.

No. There really won't.

Where is it though? Tied up in huge multi national companies providing jobs mainly (the odd few million in life's luxuries but nearly all invested) and if you could force them to liquidise their assets all over the world and use it to pay everyone a wage for doing nothing how many years would that last? And where would the food come from if no one is working, just being creative and enjoying their labour free lives?

It's not naive at all to say that AI won't be leaving us all jobless.

This exact same panic has occurred every time, in history, that there's been a major technological evolution. Every time, people have worried/celebrated that we'd have no work left to do.

And every time, previously unthinkable jobs were born.

Before the computer was invented, "software developer" was not a job that existed. Now we have many thousands of them in the uk.

It's not naive, it's knowledge of history.

@MumoftwoNC do you think a person is sitting typing this in? It's computer automated. As with most things.

Its either UBI or violent revolution in the next 50 years.

YABU. No-one, I repeat, no-one will ever be prepared to pay for it. And nor should they.

The UK has 153 billionaires, or it did last time I checked. Their combined wealth wouldn't support UBI for more than a couple of years. Then what?

And those billionaires will leave as soon as they think their wealth is under threat, leading us rather nowhere.

I have always been a big fan of UBI. I wish it could be a reality. It would help people get into education who otherwise can't because of having to work to feed their family. People could take up hobbies and interests and have more free time which would help improve their mental health.

The job market has swung to being largely computer based, ergo most current jobs will not be needed.

The OLD jobs, looking after people, physical labour etc are still there and will be needed. It's the shift back to these we are really talking about - rather than being "online marketing manager" or "data analyst" for eg.

You've misunderstood my point. I don't know what new jobs will be created. It doesn't matter specifically what they'll be. There certainly will be some.

No one could have imagined a job called "software developer" would exist, in the 1950s. And now they're everywhere, my dh is one.

Similarly, 50-100y from now, many new job titles will exist that we have no clue about now.

And some other jobs will always exist. There will always, forever, be midwives (for example).

most current jobs will not be needed

I don't know about "most", but anyway, they'll be replaced with new ones.

If everyone was to get 10k. (Hardly enough for a life of luxury). This would cost 300 billion pounds a year.
Not a figure you are conjuring through tax loopholes and increasing tax on the 156 billionaires in the UK.