> Piketty, no conservative, has argued that UBI fails to address root structural problems: “unequal access to education and health, low-paying and low-productivity jobs, malfunctioning markets, corruption, and regressive tax systems.”

I don't think we should listen to Piketty for anything: it's a product from the state, by the state, to create state loving persons by hammering them with constant state-loving propaganda since they're a toddler till they're a grown up.

Speaking about "low-productivity job" I think every single job Piketty has been doing its whole life does qualify.

Corruption: yeah, the french state is very good at that. Public spending is, officially, 57% of the french GDP. But unofficially we all know it's above 2/3rd, with many of the "private" companies, like the utility ones, being actual state monopolies. France is nearly a full-on planned economy and crime is on the rise, quality of life in freefall, education level in freefall, the country is closing to defaulting on its public debt and we can all see how many tech companies France created: way to go. Hermes and Champagne are saving the country: go France! (typing this while sipping a "mojito royal" [mojito with champagne instead of sparkling water and wife's got many Hermes scarves: so I'm one of those bringing money to the french state btw... I wonder how finances are going to turn out once we stop buying the "french quality" bullshit).

Really: people should stop listening to that fraud as if what he wrote was the gospel. I could have shat is dumb mega-over-simplistic formula our of my arse too if I had been raised by the state to love state, teach for the state, to create state-loving persons.

And people have called the bogus numbers he used in his main "breakthrough" publication. The explanation have been wonderful too: "Yup my numbers are wrong, but my formula is still correct".

Just stop with Piketty.

P.S: that UBI is fucktarded: we all know. No need to reference a fraud to make that point.

So what happens when it is companies powered entirely by AI directly getting money from the federal reserve print, spending it on other AI companies with humans getting nothing? Game theory suggests they must exterminate us as we’d present a liability. If you give us universal income capitalism will create inflation and force us to ask for more and more from the machine state. And for what? So we don’t destroy the machine state but are sufficiently pacified. It amounts to an extortion in the eyes of the machine state. Eventually it will be cheaper to just cut us out and kill us all off.

Absolutely slamming that upvote arrow. Someone finally put into an in-depth, well-read essay what I've been trying to argue on my blog, in HN comments, in-person for several years now. What they call the "Dead Economy Theory" I've taken to calling the "Anti-Human Economy", but it's basically the same thing: half-assed, milquetoast automations displacing human labor such that capital can continue to accrue upwards and with no consideration for the actual impacts of these changes on humans, society, community, or civilization itself.

I'm far from the first to highlight it either. The Animatrix highlighted it beautifully what one can expect in a civilization where machines replace human labor in a general sense, and where systems haven't been built to preserve human interests prior to their rollout - tax schemes, job programs, collaboration rather than competition. Ghost in the Shell has had multiple story arcs about the consequences of displacing human labor without care for the consequences of said displacement, because the displacing party gets all the money and power while remaining unaccountable (or so they believe until the very end) for their actions. Cyberpunk dystopias have been intensely focused on it in video games for decades: System Shock, Deus Ex, Horizon, you name it. All of them take those next steps of "what happens when automation displaces a plurality of labor" and reached the same conclusions on strife, despair, poverty, and the general collapse of social order.

These effects have been known for centuries. They are not new concepts.

The folks trotting out "people say this about every technological revolution" are those willfully naive to the past historical harms and ignorant of the plight of others in the present. A flimsy excuse to avoid having to stare into the heart of the system and understand its machinations for yourself, to avoid having to accept that yes, you are a part of it too, and therefore bear some degree of blame for how things function. This isn't the loom, or the radio, or the computer coming onto the scene, but generalized intelligence partnered with generalized robotics to replace the entire sum of human labor. This is what the AI firms openly and repeatedly advertise. This is what CEBros continue to do layoffs for, never considering for a single moment what comes after. Excuses of "people need to find meaning outside of work" or "new jobs will be created anyway" are similarly ignorant in narrative, hollow excuses to avoid the most basic of rational thoughts about the system they're defending beyond whatever nugget of faux-intellectualism they can spout out to sound like they have a clue.

General intelligence, with general robotics, to replace general labor.

There is exactly one way that story ends, and it's not for the benefit of humanity, not under the current systems of governance and systemic incentives we've built for ourselves. It doesn't end with infinite leisure or transhumanism or grandiose visions of utopia, but with the wholesale destruction of human civilization in the name of personal power and wealth.

This all boils down to one thing IMO:

The “elites” have decided to depopulate the planet

No one will want to live in this world, unless they’re born into magnificent wealth created long before their birth.

On the other hand, this could also just be the death knell of Capitalism. Not sure how that plays out, but I would expect a great deal of blood get spilled.

[dead]

[dead]

[dead]

[flagged]

Or alternatively, you fire all your staff for agent subscriptions. Then Anslopic realises they have you by the balls. They ratchet up your contract cost every month until they’ve choked every single bit of shareholder value out of your companies lifeless corpse.

And you can’t get your employees back or go back to how you used to do it, because all of your institutional knowledge is gone.

The problem is worse than it seems when it's phrased like it's all about some evil far away up there billionaires.

It's a bit like discovering when a corrupt country is not purely corrupt due to its leadership but the whole thing is a fabric throughout society.

It all starts from individual decisions and it applies to small companies and consumers alike. If a small company needs translations, and AI is good enough to do it, they won't hire someone from the goodness of their hearts for human dignity reasons. If you're a regular person and want to do taxes or want fina cial advice or have some accounting tasks and it's way cheaper to do with AI than hiring someone, you won't hire accountants out os solidarity. Just like you don't buy artisanal shoes and handmade furniture.

We see this in many other things too, such as abundant entertainment and food delivery replacing social connections. People will take the path of least resistance.

Everyone wants to be needed and to have purpose, but also everyone in actual preferences do accept the machine version in the end if its more convenient and cheaper.

I don't see anything inevitable about "new jobs" or everyone discovering artistic passions to spend their time. That has not happened either when the Internet opened up all knowledge and you could suddenly talk to people anywhere on the planet. The optimists said that all this will lead to people learning and reading and everyone doing courses or talking to others and reconciling differences once they can directly interact, leading to more peace and understanding, that social media will give a voice to people and inevitably strengthen democracy etc.

It's very possible that all the Earth's population ends up like the Aboriginal Australians, addiction, lack of purpose, the ground pulled out under our feet. Essentially sedated with AI generated VR content to bear our existence and any small Epsilon change in the local neighborhood will have too much activation energy to happen. People all in their own generated worlds, polarized, angry at each other, seeing no value in each other, or perhaps even in their real selves, as opposed to their projection in the VR stories.

Some strange groups like the Amish will hang on, but even they are dependent on trade with broader society.

We will be told this is all for the greater good. Humanity was anyway not going to last forever, it was just one step on a cosmic drama, and the important thing is the future light cone and immense numbers of galaxies and whatnot.