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Imagine that within two or three decades we'll have morphed into the Robotic States of America. Most manual laborers will have been replaced by herculean bots. Truck drivers, cabbies, delivery workers and airline pilots will have been superseded by vehicles that do it all. Doctors, lawyers, and business executives will have seen their ranks thinned by charming, attractive, all-knowing algorithms. So how will humans earn a living after they've been made redundant?
Farhad Manjoo writes at The New York Times that one idea has gained widespread interest — including from some of the very technologists who are now building the bot-ruled future — is a plan known as "universal basic income," or U.B.I. - just give everyone a paycheck. "Imagine the government sending each adult about $1,000 a month, about enough to cover housing, food, health care and other basic needs for many Americans," writes Manjoo. "U.B.I. would be aimed at easing the dislocation caused by technological progress, but it would also be bigger than that." Supporters argue machine intelligence will produce so much economic surplus that we could collectively afford to liberate much of humanity from both labor and suffering in the sort of quasi-utopian future we've seen in science fiction universes like that of "Star Trek."
There is an urgency to the techies' interest in U.B.I. They argue that machine intelligence reached an inflection point in the last couple of years, and that technological progress now looks destined to change how most of the world works. Wage growth is sluggish, job security is nonexistent, inequality looks inexorable, and the ideas that once seemed like a sure path to a better future (like taking on debt for college) are in doubt. Even where technology has created more jobs, like the so-called gig economy work created by services like Uber, it has only added to our collective uncertainty about the future of work. "All of a sudden," says Roy Bahat, "people are looking at these trends and realizing these questions about the future of work are more real and immediate than they guessed."
Previously:
"Silicon Valley Startup Funder Eyes Universal Basic Income"
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Guppy on Monday March 07 2016, @12:21PM
Historically, the solution has been something that combined aspects of several of the above. This was to raise a big military and go to war against somebody.