The amount of common euphoria and uncritical reception of an idea so big as universal basic
income makes me question how many people realize nothing good exists without condition.
Somehow we are supposed to trust huge corporations whose sole intention has always been consolidation
of wealth and economic power to the point nothing and nobody can question their dominance.
Corporations that track our every movement, follow our credit cards and cellphone IDs
everywhere we go in order to have a perfect track record of our personality traits and thoughts.
Corporations that in order to bring greater profit for their shareholders, exploit child
labor in undemocratic countries or failed states, just so that they don’t have to
employ expensive labor in Western societies.
Corporations that aren’t shy for being in bed with ones of the worst authoritarian regimes
in order to expand their business.
Corporations that actively pursue monopolies so that they have the power to influence social
discourse and our behavior, by manipulating what we can see, censoring what we can say,
and filtering what we can know.
Corporations that lobby and bribe our politicians by dumping hundreds of millions of dollars
every year in order to rig our democratic process and maintain their unquestionable presence.
Somehow we are supposed to expect that these corporations who have never cared about the
values and needs of the society, who have securely corrupted our democracy, and know
more about us than we know about ourselves, will give us all free income without any conditions.
Politicians left and right, corporate leaders, and people from all backgrounds seem to unite
behind an idea that could’ve easily worked if we implemented it hundred years ago, when
free market actually worked.
I am not here to question whether universal basic income
would successfully elevate people out of poverty.
I am not here to question whether this form of guaranteed income
would make people more productive.
I agree that universal basic income could successfully achieve both of those things.
I am here to express my skepticism towards the new system and power relationships we
are going to build when we implement universal basic income
in combination with centralized automation.
I am not saying I am 100% right.
I am just pointing out that we should be careful about what kind of world we are building under
the premise of hopeful dreams and good intentions.
The debate about universal basic income is essentially a debate about whether this time
technological revolution is going to be any different than the previous ones.
And I am on the side that argues this time is going to be different.
Artificial intelligence is going to destroy the need for human labor.
But not for the reasons others argue.
Elon Musk best summarizes this line of thinking:
I think that’s right.
But it’s only a part of the whole truth.
Robots are going to be better than us in everything.
Including manipulation, censorship, and propaganda.
It’s not just that the robots are going to be better.
It’s about what social contract are we going to implement around a system where robots
can do everything better than humans.
There may be a hypothetical time when robots will be completely indistinguishable from humans.
But that time isn’t going to be in our century and thus shouldn’t be a core issue of our debate.
We might never even reach that point.
Artificial intelligence isn’t dangerous because of what it can do, but because of
how people who created it are going to use it.
Instead we should focus on how the development and deployment of automation currently takes place.
And this is where at least in my reasoning, the dream of universal basic income crumbles.
My argument is that universal basic income is not going to create a better world.
It might create a wathere is less poverty and starvation.
But because people will no longer be needed in production,
they will lose all of their power as workers to secure their rights and position
in the social contract with their economic and political elites.
Protesting and striking will lose all its value because corporations and politicians
won’t be reliant on human labor to prosper and grow their power.
And that is going to happen if we don’t change anything in the current trends of
centralization of power and consolidation of wealth.
So when Musk implies that because robots will be able to replace humans:
The emphasis should be on the word “choice”.
I think Elon didn’t pick this word by a stuttering accident.
It might actually be one of his premonitions.
Why exactly are we not going to have a choice?
Isn’t free market supposed to decide what people actually want in the so called ‘law
of demand and supply’?
No business would want to create products in a system where they can’t sell them because
their customers can’t generate income anymore.
So is Elon Musk hinting that decisions of a handful of corporations will override the
desires of the whole free market?
I think this is what makes all the difference between technological revolution of today
and those of the past.
And that is precisely because human societies have never faced entities consolidating so
much power as the biggest transnational corporations are doing today.
The argument isn’t that we shouldn’t implement any form of a guaranteed income.
But that we should do it on our own terms rather than having it shoved down our throats
by big corporations with pseudoliberal agendas and politicians who only care about reelection.
Otherwise universal basic income is going to constitute a new social contract which
we aren’t going to have any say in.
When we look at this issue from a historical perspective each technological revolution
completely changed the previous social order and created new forms of government.
The next technological revolution triggered by artificial intelligence
will also result most likely in a complete rearrangement of the social contract.
And as I will soon demonstrate, this process has already started.
Before the first industrial revolution in the 18th century, human relationships were
tightly locked to the land they were working on.
Ownership of more land meant higher position in the social hierarchy.
The highest rank belong to the king who owned most of the land in the kingdom.
The lowest rank in the hierarchy was held by the peasants, the majority of the population.
Most people that couldn’t afford any land were working on fields for landlords.
But even if those that could afford to own a land usually didn’t have enough means
to protect themselves from raids.
Just getting a sword not to mention a horse was usually extremely expensive.
Which is why these people usually formed pacts with nobility and knights to protect them
in exchange for tax from yields.
When industrial revolution kicked off, it completely dismantled the previous feudal system.
Mere possession of land was no longer a requirement for sustainable life.
Only those who owned bigger and better machines and
worked harder and smarter could accumulate more income.
Workers previously tied to their landlords could now go freely into the cities and offer
their labor at a plethora of working opportunities.
As the industrial revolution went on four things started to happen that are beginning
to fade out from reality today.
First: human labor entered free market and workers could choose from myriads of different jobs.
Second: Competition of business owners was very high and it was extremely easy for workers
to switch jobs.
Third: Climbing social ladder was for the first time based on merit and hard work and
not on just an inherited social status.
Fourth: the technological progress vastly improved living conditions and allowed for
equal opportunities even for the bottom class.
Presence of these four elements at the time of the industrial revolution brought about
immense social changes.
And likewise, their absence in our time is a symptom of an upcoming social restructuring.
In the 19th century, these four new elements empowered middle class and balanced the relationships
between workers and business owners, even the most wealthy ones.
It became easy for the middle class and workers to organize in unions.
Economically, all workers are replaceable as individuals.
But as an aggregate, they can unite to protest and strike to cause sudden systematic disruption.
Through unions workers and broad middle class were able to convert their economic power
to political power.
This is how working rights and universal suffrage were granted to people.
Not out of the benevolence of the political and economic elite, but because of the conversion
of economic power to political influence industrial middle class could pull of to win their cause.
The disturbance caused by workers not showing up at work but striking on the streets, was
too effective at damaging profits.
Unions and workers strikes are still present today, but they bear much less political power
than they used to.
Why so?
Because today workers even as an economic aggregate are replaceable, either by outsourcing
the production to countries with poorer working conditions, or by centralized automation.
Effects of the decreasing need for human labor is also multiplied by the new economy standard
where companies no longer make most of their profits from sales, but when people use their products
But that still doesn’t explain how we got
to this state of extreme imbalance between current middle class and the wealthiest billionaires.
Why is it that almost everybody benefited from the inventions of industrial revolution,
but only biggest corporations benefit from centralized automation?
And that’s precisely because something used to be happening in the 19th century that is
no longer the case today.
And it’s this: To balance the power of organized unions at
the turn of the 19th century, businesses with significant market power
also organized themselves in groups.
By abusing the system of trusts, businesses started buying stocks from one another, forming
trade associations, or constituting conglomerates.
This is how few big business owners managed to accumulate more percentage points of a
certain market share when they couldn’t do it purely by outperforming their competition
with a better product.
But unlike today, 19th century monopoly seeking attempts turned out to be largely unsuccessful
because the public outrage of empowered middle class forced the government to take action.
There are three most resonating historical cases.
John Rockefeller's Standard Oil, J.B.
Duke’s American Tobacco, and James Hill’s Northern Securities.
All of these companies used various methods to take advantage of their market positions
to form artificial monopolies.
All three of these companies sought to become monopolies in their industries following similar
formula: buying stocks of businesses that relied on them; merging and acquiring other
companies to gain bigger market share; and cut out other resisting competition by artificially
underpricing your products to the point others are put out of business.
Eventually the US government sued all three of these companies under anti-trust clause
from the Sherman Act.
The Courts later ordered to dissolve all of them as unlawful and artificial monopolies.
And while some big businesses continue to engage in anti-competitive practices today
the government and the public no longer take any sufficient counter-measures.
Since American Tobacco and Standard Oil were broken up in 1911 the only anti-trust case
that resulted in dissolution was the AT&T breakup in 1982.
Predatory business owners managed to win the fight for the balance of power against the
middle class.
When in 2005 the Southwestern Bell Corporation recreated AT&T by purchasing its parent company
together with a dozen of other children of the breakup from the ‘80s, the US government
did nothing.
When Verizon did the same with the rest of the baby Bells in the same year, the US government
did nothing.
And that’s how the two largest telecommunications corporations were born that today enjoy either
a monopoly or a duopoly everywhere they operate.
Forming business trusts became the instruction manual for big businesses in every industry
to create monopolies.
Big banks caught up on the trend too.
Vast deregulation of the ‘80s and ‘90s allowed for the mergers of commercial and
investment banks, which was strictly forbidden under the Glass-Steagall Act (repealed by
Clinton in 1999).
Taking advantage of other regulatory loopholes opened up by Reagan and Bush, banks began
to engage in risky investments with people’s money.
Investment banks could make outrageous bets with high likelihood of failure, because the
money they used from the commercial banks were federally insured and backed by government
bailouts in case of a downfall.
Nothing changed on this despite 2008 financial meltdown.
Banks took this old industry standard to a whole new level: if you seek to become a monopoly
today you don’t get punished but rewarded.
But it wasn’t the banks that started the new
technological revolution.
It was the Internet-enabled tech industry.
Previous industrial revolution had a strong affect on morality – feudalism was no longer
ok, slavery was no longer ok, and soon even child labor was banned.
So did the new tech start-ups brought any moral innovation?
They built-up on the old practices of predatory
banks and telecoms.
Google started off with the “don’t be evil” but even they quickly realized that
being predatory at all costs is the way to go.
Merit of the product is no longer what brings the winning.
If you want to win you have to consolidate faster than everyone else.
Google took this to their heart so much they acquire or merge with a new business every month.
And on top of the questionable acquisitions, Google abuses its dominant search engine position
to censor out any competing business that offers similar services to the ones of Google.
Google is no longer just a search engine, but hundreds of other things, including an
email provider, biggest video hosting site, developer of artificial intelligence… but
most notably, Google is an advertiser, which means they are a data broker.
The same goes for Facebook, which also is a data broker and an advertising network more
than it is a social media platform.
Apple too acquired 30 companies just in 2014.
And companies that Apple couldn’t acquire found themselves fighting in aggressive patent
wars that Apple loves to wage in order to price out their competitors by excruciating
legal costs.
And remain certain that incumbent telecom operators like Comcast or Verizon do exactly
the same, which is why you haven’t probably seen so many successful municipal broadband
projects or other competitive Internet Service Providers.
And just to be clear none of these are legitimate monopolies – that is when a company outperforms
competition purely based on the merit of their product.
All of them are artificial monopolies, which means they have actively conspired against
competition through various legal gymnastics to artificially elevate their market positions.
Now all of this begs the most important question: why is it that in the 1900s the government
banned artificial monopolies while today it is perfectly OK with them and even rewards
them by bailouts from the tax payers money?
The answer is this: Corporations today learned from the mistakes
of the 19th century monopolies and began converting their economic power into political influence,
exactly what the middle class used to do at that time.
And they did this by inventing the ‘revolving door’ and dumping millions into lobbying.
This is how it looks today: AT&T spent $16 million in lobbying just in
that single year
93 out of 120 AT&T lobbyists between 2015 – 2016 previously held government jobs.
Google spent $15 million in lobbying in 2016 and had 78 out 92 lobbyists from government
positions.
Verizon spent $10 million in 2016 84 out of 106 lobbyists from government revolving door.
Facebook spent $9 million with 31 out 33 lobbyists from the government.
Apple $4 million on lobbying, 38 previous government employees now working as lobbyists.
Twitter dumped $700,000, and 16 out of 17 lobbyists came from previous government employment.
Microsoft: $ 9 million on lobbying, 100 lobbyists out 118 with previous government employment.
Amazon $11 million 56 out of 69 lobbyists with previous government jobs
Walmart $7 million 79 out of 91 lobbyists from the government
Comcast $ 14 million 126 lobbyists out of 147 with previous government jobs
Walt Disney $4 million on lobbying, 19 lobbyists out of 22 that held previous government jobs
General Motors $9 million on lobbying, 40 lobbyists out of 53 with previous government
jobs ExxonMobil $12 million on lobbying, 27 out
of 37 lobbyists with previous government jobs McKesson Corporation $1.3 million on lobbying
17 out of 23 lobbyists with previous government jobs
21st Century Fox $5.5 million on lobbying, 34 out of 40 lobbyists with previous government
jobs Berkshire Hathaway $6.3 million on lobbying,
62 lobbyists out of 75 with previous government jobs.
JPMorgan Chase $3 million on lobbying, 39 lobbyists out of 45 with previous government
jobs Goldman Sachs $3.2 million on lobbying, 45
out of 49 lobbyists with previous government jobs
Coca-Cola $8 million on lobbying, 35 out of 50 lobbyists with previous government jobs.
This is the conversion of economic power into political influence in the eyes of the big
corporations.
And what is the middle class doing to counter this?
Nothing.
Nothing at all.
We are now incredibly divided because of the identity politics and we are flooded by issues
like massive cultural immigration and terrorism that weren’t present in the daily lives
of the 19th century middle class.
When an important issue comes that we should unite behind it never happens today because
we completely rely on media intermediaries to deliver us information.
When Amazon rolls out its Alexa devices into people’s homes the first thing that should
be trending on Youtube is how it shamelessly spies on all household conversations and hands
over all that private information to everyone willing to pay a nickel.
Instead, Steven Crowder is only outraged that it’s probably a social justice warrior.
As if none of that collected information could be maliciously used at any point in the near
future with conservatives becoming the first targets.
But I don’t solely blame people for this.
Corporations know they can do a lot with the potential of their algorithms.
Tech monopolies realized that we trust them too much so they started to abuse our trust
and became extremely efficient at it.
And don’t just take my word for it.
Listen to Bret Weinstein for Christ’s sake:
Facebook frequently conducts experiments on people who use it by manipulating their social
feeds.
In 2012 Facebook successfully manipulated people’s emotion as a part of a social experiment
to measure how affected people are by the contents of their news feeds.
Later the New York Times reported on instances where Facebook actively manipulated trends
on a societal scale in third world countries that triggered massive social responses.
The scale of one such response managed to overthrow the government of Indonesia.
And in other 6 countries Facebook decided to turn off visibility of news coverage to
measure the impacts on the democratic development.
Twitter most likely does the same by tweaking trending hashtags and blatantly censoring
opinions that don’t align with their agenda.
Google has such a search engine monopoly that if they decide to put your name out of their
rankings, you don’t exist.
They can easily rewrite the history or reality simply by tweaking its algorithms.
Google is also extremely polite to the political elites, when it doesn’t even suggest anything
controversial about their personalities.
And everybody knows about Youtube’s algorithms screwing up.
In my case, Youtube allowed only two of my 30 videos to get through the algorithm.
The rest of my videos are just sitting here despite the fact that I do everything I can
with search engine optimization for all of my videos.
Amazon also enjoys immense power as a retail monopoly.
If Amazon decides to not list your product, you are never going to make sustainable sales.
This is how they completely transformed the book publishing industry because if Amazon
doesn’t like some book, they’ll take it off the shelves and publishers aren’t going
to support it.
Big Internet service providers, now vastly deregulated, can straight out filter all internet
content.
Not only to just prioritize their services, but to also benefit certain agendas over the others.
TV and radio are beyond repair, we all know that.
But we at least expected the Internet to be the medium of free flow of information.
Not anymore.
It is a very common practice for billionaires to buy news outlets and media companies.
You could basically track ownership of 90% of US media to just a handful of the biggest
corporations.
Telecommunications providers step way outside of their original fields to also capture media
dissemination and advertising industry.
Which I would say is massive conflict of interests.
One could almost think that CEOs of all these companies could just sit behind one coffee
table and decide what you are going to read about tomorrow.
Every major social media tracks you across all of your online activities.
They don’t just use your likes, comments and private chats to profile you for advertising.
You can’t even get a device without an advertising ID attached to it.
The moment you sign up for any service you are logged for life.
These are the conditions under which universal basic income is going to be negotiated.
How this is not inclining anybody to believe it will result in some form of a dismantlement
of democracy and free market is beyond me.
So once again: you are very welcome to advocate for something so fundamentally impactful as
universal basic income.
But before you do you should make sure you are sitting behind the negotiating table alongside
those who are actually going to make that decision.
Because right now you are not even invited.
The line between the jurisdiction of the government and influence of corporations blurs.
Our only chance to get a seat behind that table is to balance the distribution of AI power.
And the only way we can do this is to develop decentralized and completely free and open
source artificial intelligence.
Not free as in “free beer” but free as in freedom.
That is an AI that everybody who uses it has full ownership of it and is granted full control
over that ownership.
As opposed to a closed source product, where your ownership rights are dictated by the
developer of that product.
This means you can transform, tweak, or build up on the open source AI to improve it.
By developing artificial intelligence under this open license, everybody can be granted
equal access to the AI power.
There is an open source alternative to Amazon Echo and Google Home called Mycroft, which
explains the best how it works:
This is the only viable opposition to the proprietary AI developed secretively by big corporations.
So what you can do right now is to start looking for
open source alternatives and support their developers.
This is why folks like Elon Musk are right about AI while disconnected people like Mark
Zuckerberg are completely wrong.
The politics behind developing our open artificial intelligence is to make sure no actor can
overpower everyone else by developing an exponentially more powerful AI.
And this is what it’s going to look like:
We can’t rely on the promise of the world where we’ll no longer have to work and corporations
and governments will give us everything to make us happy.
We should also own the AI and then with its power decide what kind of a world we shall
build on top of it.
We can’t have a discussion about universal basic income without making sure the AI serves
all of us and not just the lucky few biggest owners of automation.
Not the government regulations, but open source developers
are going to become our martyrs for freedom.
Thanks for watching.