Universal basic income.
If even Elon Musk says it’s the only option, it must great, right?
It sounds really like utopia came true: everybody is entitled to receive free money no questions
asked, no strings attached.
And we could all afford this because production would be so cheap thanks to automation, and
there would be no jobs left for humans thanks to automation.
We are being told the same story over and over – automation is coming and it will
make you useless.
You are not part of the automation, which is why you are not in charge of making decision
for yourself.
So listen to this bunch of successful people telling you how centralization is not just
the best way, it is the only way.
Yeah. I am good. Thanks.
Automation has a potential to destroy 45% of the jobs
of our jobs, says one report.
But others are contradictory.
It really depends on what kind of automation we are talking about.
Hypothetically, artificial intelligence does have a potential to replace humans in all
tasks at some point in the future.
But are we really going to get there?
That kind of a world doesn’t seem feasible.
Considering human self-centered and incentive motivated animal nature, we are probably not
going to create a world where we no longer find a use for ourselves.
For the past 10,000 years, human economic interaction depended on the ability to exchange
goods and services for other commodities and eventually money.
No matter how authoritarian the system, it always relied on trading the products on an
open market.
But that required other people’s ability to buy the product, which meant they had to
possess some sort of wealth or income.
In modern time, that ability is in majority facilitated by paying wages that are spent
on the goods and services.
The hypothetical automation that we hear so many scary stories about would turn this business
cycle upside down, as people would no longer be able to generate income, which would cripple
their expenditure, and gradually corporate profit.
However, only that which can be sold is produced.
It doesn’t matter how cheap the production is if there are no buyers.
Provided people are the only buyers, owners of automation are not going make such production
that would make it impossible to sell their products.
To imagine a system where automation would completely replace human labor, would require
immense concentration of political power tightly centralized around owners of automation.
But the buyer can also be the government, which explains unnecessary production of tanks
and $1.5 trillion fighter jets that nobody wants.
The real story is, of course, that the government exists and it often attempts to supplement
the expenditure on behalf of the free market.
The problem with that is similar to what Amazon did to the book publishing industry – it
destroyed the industry when it grew into a monopsony – the only buyer on the market.
Now Amazon can dictate prices and decide what it wants to sell or not.
If there comes a time when large portion of population is no longer economically productive,
implementing universal basic income would eliminate poverty, bud deepen income and wealth
inequality.
Universal basic income would permanently separate wealthiest technology owners from everyone
else who didn’t happen to create a multi-billion dollar technology start-up.
The ramification of this system are existential.
With everybody receiving equal amount of benefits without having the ability to earn for themselves,
the option to improve your standards would disappear.
It would eventually make everybody own equally basic wealth except for those who make the
decisions.
Essentially, everybody who doesn’t own artificial intelligence will fall into this category.
Replace own with being part of and artificial intelligence with a central party and you
get the idea of how totalitarian Eastern Bloc used to work before 1989.
Whenever some part of population is turned into passive receivers of income, their political
power goes down with it.
Their potential to influence the debate in favor of their interests gets to freezing
point.
That’s why you’ve never seen homeless people striking on the streets.
Because they don’t contribute economically, they can’t cause any damage if they choose
to take action.
Rioting is not an option either as advanced police and military would take care of that
quickly.
If you give unemployable people universal basic income, you sure improve their living
standards, but nothing is going to change on their ability to participate in the decision
making.
Their voice would be limited to casting a vote to whomever promises them the highest
benefits.
Not only is the universal basic income just one option out of many when dealing with poverty,
it’s the least desirable.
The fact that
the
Sillicon Valley so keen on introducing this idea so much ahead of its time is deeply troubling.
It would grant them ultimate monopoly powers on the market as they would be the first and
only owners of the automation.
Universal basic income would thus make barriers to entry the market with your own entrepreneurship,
because you wouldn’t be able to increase your income or make profits on your own.
Since most people are left dependent on the will of the Sillicon Valley to distribute
their wealth, it will be up to technology giants to decide what is universal and what
is basic.
The scariest part is that everybody seems to be on board with this.
Various testings and proposals are already experimented with in Finland, Canada, France,
United Kingdom, New Zealand, Netherlands, California or Kenya, with only Switzerland
rejecting this idea in a referendum.
What seems like a progressive idea even made it into Marco Rubio’s presidential plan.
The only positive scenario that could make universal basic income relevant would be if
the ownership of automation was given up to public ownership so that everybody could participate
in the decision making process equally.
I don’t have a problem with people getting free money.
The ideas of universal basic income as a response to automation are way further into the future
than it’s currently presented.
It opens up a Pandora door to a new kind of centralized system, possibly even globalized.
I am not convinced that this idea would include all of us equally, and that with universal
basic income, we would all be granted universal equal access to the distribution of wealth.
And because I think that the latter is impossible, and that permanent hierarchical system would
be inevitable with this proposal, I cannot support universal basic income in the current
state of affairs.
The real problem why automation deepens inequality is the existence of high barriers to entry
the market and diversify competition in automation driven industry.
Most of the artificial intelligence is through corporate protective regulations within the
hands of few multi-billion dollar transnational companies.
The rate of new entrepreneurs entering the market is declining fast.
To solve this problem would be to focus on easing up regulations and bureaucracy for
small-to-medium size enterprise so as to give the middle class direct access to ownership
of automation.
There is no reason to believe universal basic income would spur entrepreneurship.
It would increase the level of risk entrepreneurs take, which would make money-lenders raise
their rates or stop lending altogether.
Universal basic income would thus cut financial funding, which would reduce incentive to innovate
and enter the market.
What’s causing increasing deformation of economy is the shift towards generating revenue
from intrusive data collection and targeted marketing that violates privacy of individuals.
This business model has similar creative value as financial institutions trading bonds of
risky mortgages among one another to generate more profit out of nothing.
It eventually resulted in an economic collapse because the artificially generated revenue
did not reflect real-life expenditure and currency movement in the flow.
Technology start-ups are no longer focusing on creating new products, but rather spend
most of their resources on improving the data collecting AI to make it more and more invasive.
It creates a multi-billion dollar bubble that will burst once buyers no longer have enough
wealth to keep their spending.
Universal basic income sounds like the same solution as the financial bailout of the banks
that crashed the economy.
That is a no solution at all.