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

Exactly. It will make the world a better place. I am sure of it.

We need to re-train people to think of what they'll gain in freedom, creative and leisure time. Time to read, learn, get fit, hang out, take up new sports. These things can still be paid for.

We need to move away from materialism, and funding the likes of Bezos.

Why do they have to be new jobs? Why not one of the many jobs we have shortages for, midwives, builders, mental health specialists, for example?

COL would decrease. The system would be that all utilities are nationalised and therefore cheaper - no fat cats creaming off profits for themselves - it would get put back into the network and once the network was running as well as it can, fares reduced.
Supermarkets would run cheaper, food would be cheaper.
We wouldn't need so much stuff. We need to be conditioned to spend our money on experiences, not things.

It would be violent revolution with UBI, no food, no products in the shops, no shops come to that, no businesses, no healthcare, no public transport. After all why work you get money anyway and the important poorly paid workers will give up first. In the end people would start from basics again growing their own food keeping a few animals, subsistence farming.

You'll see. There always are. Every technological evolution has created a new industry of jobs.

A relative of mine does "search engine optimisation" - it is a bonkers job that only exists because search engines exist.

Similarly, AI becoming widespread will spawn a new generation of jobs to do with it. Manipulating it, or whatever, I can't predict exactly what. It doesn't matter what. Wherever you have people, they'll find a way to monetise their time and skills

Nationalised utilities worked so well in the past (they didn't), they cost far more to run. But whatever it still takes people to run everything, who would work in the supermarkets or even on the farms if they got a good wage for doing nothing? How would food be cheaper no one to grow it, no one to distribute it or import it. Food would be scarce and expensive.

All the jobs really were replaced. The UK has no more unemployed now, than we did then, despite having a much larger population.

Today we have software developers and engineers, internet moderators, web designers, content writers. the poor sods who have to watch computer generated child porn for the police. Digital fraud investigators, web analysts, mobile phone engineers, mobile phone repairers & designers. Software support staff, software sales, software licensing specialists, chip designers, version control analysts. Cabling engineers, networking specialists, wireless specialists, network designers.

I could go on. The list is endless. Whether those jobs provide similar incomes or security of tenure is a different question.

And incidentally, someone operating a combine from a room in Islington would be very bad at their job. Combine harvesting is a hugely skilled role that takes into account a plethora of different influences on the day, as well as second by second synchronicity with the rest of the crew.

I couldn’t agree more with this.

I also think that we’ve become far too individualist and lost the collectivism that would be needed in society for a policy like this to work.

I don't doubt there will be some, few, new jobs tending to AI factories - keeping them secure and cool for example. The issue is whether most of our current jobs will be needed, such as your friends' optimisation role. I can't imagine that being needed as AI must be all over that like a rash! Anything you sit at a desk on a computer for is not really going to be needed. Yes oversight will be needed but there will be many fewer jobs like this as the data will already be collated by the systems.

I do think it will be that more community based jobs are created and used. I can see it might be a better way of living as suggested, with less consumerism and more community based care and expression. I do think we need to keep checks and tabs on it to avoid it becoming like minority report or something easily taken over by dictators - whether we can trust AI not to take over us if we let them take the digital world over, we want to be the creatives and have art and music as fun past times for us, not rely on them copying Mozart and rejigging it for "new music" for example. There is an element of threat that counter balances the potential for good, purely because it is coded by man. Or, I should say, men.

Maybe but there needs to be suggestions on how to fund it.

It IS naive. It's naive to.look at that history and not see the slippery slope, or the losses that have already happened as a result.

There can't possibly always be jobs when every technological advancement removes a need for a member of the workforce.

At the time of the industrial revolution, what actually happened was that jobs which could only be done by a smaller amount of skilled individuals could be done by the unskilled masses. That is true.

But what happens when the machinery no longer needs the unskilled masses? We are back to the skilled few. It was actually, looking at that same history, an inevitable progression.

Because it's what those who own it all want. Labour is the biggest expense in any business. If you can do away with the labour, your profits escalate.

Readers may be interested in this BBC article on the UBI experiment in Canada about 50 years ago. Canada’s forgotten universal basic income experiment

Content writers are almost obsolete, along with a lot of journalism roles - AI is everywhere!
I don't think we'll be dropping farmers any time soon as I suspect the physical and face to face roles will become more important.

Mental health wise more people may need it but more will be retraining into it as a job that can't always be done by AI. Yes we have some basic online counselling but the main thing we haven't invested in for decades is mental health and social care, which I strongly suspect will see huge upticks when there's more people wanting to take the roles and more availability alongside less "keeping up with the Joneses"

If all the jobs are gone, who owns the A.I?

The answer, is a handful of tech firms who are now responsible for paying virtually all taxes. This is where your UBI will come from. How impartial do you think those companies will be when the Government depends on them?

If you live off UBI, you will be held to ransome by the government, who will want something in return. Forget privacy, autonomy or freedom. If they jump, you WILL say "how high master". Otherwise they will cut off your UBI. Look how they treat benefit claimants at the moment.

Anyone who thinks UBI is a good thing is delusional.

Contrary to a lot of what is said AI literally only knows what it is allowed to know and if you are in a specialist subject it seems to know very little at all. It knows what has been published on the internet (in areas of the internet it can get to) it judges things by how frequently things are said not by whether they are right or wrong, it has no idea what the correct answer is only what the most common answer is. It is a very crude imprecise tool for a lot of things.

What it is good at is repetitive tasks that it has been carefully taught and that no one really wants to do day in day out, like looking down a microscope at hundreds of blood samples all day to check for specific abnormalities.

If I ask it about my speciality it tells me things that are out of date, no longer used or are just wrong.

I don’t know how it would be funded, but if those saying that all sorts of jobs will be made redundant are correct, how will the people who used to work as graphic designers and accountants and law clerks and translators and surgeons earn a living? Will we all become baristas and care workers? (But then who would be able to afford the coffee?) In that scenario we couldn’t afford anything as a country anyway because of the hordes of unemployed people and the health implications that would have.

You could tax income including UBI and people could choose to work as well as whatever they got from UBI, most people like having something productive to do. Some would spend their time in unpaid activities, others would want to earn more. Those with additional needs would get top ups in the same way that they receive support now.

There are some interesting ideas on here but those saying ‘I don’t want to pay for people to do nothing’ are missing both the point I made, and the point of UBI. But what else would you do, if jobs are automated out and those left are largely low-paid?

As far as I can see the only difference between a universal basic income and what we have now is that we start paying means tested benefits to everyone, regardless of income. As we are currently have about £3 trillion national debt and we are borrowing £16 billion a month just to pay the interest on that debt, I suggest we can't afford to pay more people than we already do.

I know what combine harvesting needs. I 'm from a farming background. I am more than aware of the changes in the industry.

You don't need to physically be on the spot to know what weather and conditions are. There's electronic systems that can tell you all that. There are already harvesting machines in operation that do not require a driver. Modern farms already have far less boots on the ground. Costs a bloody bomb to install the systems, so it will be a while before the traditional model disappears, I grant you, but it will.

Maybe it's not someone in a flat in Islington, but I assure you it is already an increasing number of remotely operated machinery. With increased improvements in remote technology, the need to be physically present to harvest, sow, etc, is decreasing.

While I agree that currently a lot of AI isn't exactly convincing, I think we are missing how fast it is adapting. Many things are now AI and are barely noticeably so. Students papers at Uni's are getting more convincing. It adapts and it is doing so rapidly. I remember everyone being able to see photoshop a mile off (cut out lines not blurred, colours, reflections in the wrong places) . Now we look for specific markers (teeth, hands, eyes in photo's) , then those markers get better so we change what we look for but before long we don't know what is real and what is a fake. Leaders are worried about the leaps in deepfakes which have a very willing group of teenaged boys uploading friends faces onto to create porn as a testing ground. It evolves, and very quickly.

AI is suggesting antibiotics, a pretty specialised topic. It depends on the data inputted, but it is always being inputted. When it's properly sourced and channelled (which is where many of the the issues lie as most coding seems to be being based on men alone by mostly men) it can come on leaps and bounds. It is only as good as the data put in, but are we controlling what that is or is someone else?

I think it’s always easy to allocate money to people. The difficult task is getting the money together so it can be done.

We should think about taxes in an increased AI situation, who is paying them and how do we make sure profits are accessible here

I wouldn’t be delighted to cough up. I’m not that rich and yet I’d still be looking to leave.

And for the love of god can people io. This thread and similar ones stop saying ‘government funded’. It’s taxpayer funded. Important to use the latter or you start thinking there’s a magic pot of wealth we can just ‘have’.

I think a universal income will be necessary if AI remains relatively benign but all bets are off while the next few years of development play out.

Listening to Sam Altman and his peers I think few people (I was pretty oblivious until recently) realize what's actually happening in terms of the exponential nature of AI evolution. Even the big tech firms responsible don't seem to have a grasp on what the most likely outcomes will be - particularly whether artificial sentience is imminent. There's also very little global coordination on safeguards - it's reminiscent of the space race to some extent. The big powers (US and China this time) competing to get there first and not considering the consequences until it's too late.

With this and the threat from 'mirror life' I'm surprised any experts in the field can sleep at night - it's certainly unsettled me and I can only grasp the very basics.

Ds shared with me a space race type video with China v US. It was unsettling to say the least. Best case we lose loads of jobs, worst, well.. it’s bad.

I find this all really interesting.
If there was ubi how would you get people to do the jobs no-one really wants, such as care and refuse collecting. Would the rewards for those have to be greater to make them appealing?

Exactly. It's terrifying and awe-inspiring at the same time. A real fine line between changing the course of our future for better or decidedly worse.
People don't seem to realise how much information these companies have on all of us already, we sold out decades ago for the most part. They are predicting what we will want and suggesting needs to us already, one company even getting advertising into people's dreams using noises and jingles. It's happening and people haven't clocked that "oh that's funny, I was just thinking about XYZ and now I'm getting ads for it" is actually very creepily advanced AI working.

Taxing the companies profiting in order to get UBI has already failed from what I can see, so I do agree funding it will be an issue as we already can't tax the super rich. I do like the possibilities it has for re-adjusting our communities and sustainability though.