[FRIAM] The case for universal basic income UBI

Tue May 4 16:35:36 EDT 2021

Pieter wrote:

My speculation is simply based on the premise that the technological progress that's been happening for a long time will not stop. Why will it stop?

Well, the first step would be to make a distinction between "progress" and "change", with the former being a subset of the latter.  Now, the task is to see if there is any way to define "progress" transculturally.  For me, culture bound as I am, hand and foot, the wordprocessor program was progress because it made it easier to do the things I love to do, and facebook was regress because it demanded I do things I did not want to do. 

Nick 

Nick Thompson

ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of u?l? ???
Sent: Tuesday, May 4, 2021 2:16 PM
To: friam at redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The case for universal basic income UBI

This bleeds back into my response to (c), which in essence was that we *need* diversity. One huge problem with technology is that tools bias the projects within which they're used. (To a hammer everything looks like a nail.) Hearkening to Ashby, if the diversity of the robots fails to match the diversity of the cultural and biological world, technological progress will be constrained by the culture set by the prior technology. And if that "funnel" from diverse to homogenous goes on too long, it'll crack, perhaps catastrophically, perhaps merely "disruptively". And if it's catastrophic, then we regress.

But with the transhumanist rhetoric (as opposed to the strong AI rhetoric), the diversity is more likely to maintain. Some of us rely on robots, others implant neural links, others edit our germlines, etc. The question is well put in the Ezra Klein podcast (I think Nick mentioned), where they ask whether we let the market decide who becomes transhuman and risk the same wealth asymmetry we see now or should we democratize it somehow? And if so, how?

On 5/4/21 12:07 PM, Pieter Steenekamp wrote:

> I speculate that there is hope for Glen's wish to have some revolutionary change to the current money-based system. With the technological progress that's happening right now all the products and services all of humanity will be provided in abundance by robots and AI without humans at such a low cost that even if we have money, the cost would be so low that it's not worthwhile to sell it, it'll be free.

> Of course there are no guarantees, we just don't know what's going to happen in the future. My speculation is simply based on the premise that the technological progress that's been happening for a long time will not stop. Why will it stop?

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