I strongly doubt it will even provide us with a roof over our heads. In an unconstrained market, the pressure to extract as much as possible from the UBI will be enormous. The amount of UBI will probably always lag years behind the actual amount required to create a liveable situation, and increasing its amount will be a constant political struggle.

UBI in an unconstrained market is nothing else than enslavement.

Fair and progressive taxation and proper social systems are far more efficient. UBI is just an excuse to get rid of social systems and leave everyone individually stranded with problems no one can solve alone.

Yeah there has been a weird belief here for a long time that if something bad happens to us then extremely generous welfare benefits will materialize.

Ask the people who used to work in the auto plants if that's how it goes.

No one will get a dime unless they organize and fight for it. Otherwise things are more likely to go in the other direction, what safety net exists now gets reduced.

I don't understand UBI.

Let's say a burger costs $10. Then UBI is implemented. But not just like $1K/month UBI... $1M/year UBI... for everyone! There's no way that the burger is still $10 now. Right?

Won't the economy just soak up all the extra UBI money? So a burger will cost $1000 in world where everyone gets $1M/year? And like $20 when everyone gets $1K/month? Isn't it all just a wash?

A true UBI might be hard to fund today, but it's not inherently hard to fund in principle.

Mathematically speaking, any UBI amount (or other expansionary monetary policy) could be offset by an equal and opposite increase in aggregate supply, resulting in more money with net zero inflation. If we had 100x higher annual growth in supply of housing/food/energy/transportation/healthcare/electronics/etc., creating 100x more annual growth in money supply would counter the positive supply shock to keep the purchasing power of a dollar stable; the fact that more dollars would exist would simply reflect the reality of having more stuff to go around.

Whether and how it may be possible to achieve such supply growth, however, is another matter entirely. While I'm personally optimistic about the technological trajectories of AI, solar/fusion, and humanoid robotics, optimizing/liberalizing Western economies and adjusting to a post-labor-scarcity world will both be at best politically turbulent.

The incentive for the wealthy to go along with such policies is that it would be a practical necessity in order to continue selling their stuff. If 90% of the population lacked a survivable income, that wouldn't be a functioning economy, it would be a precursor to civil war. Even so, private corporations won't want to voluntarily employ people they don't need, because that's just a textbook prisoner's dilemma. On the other hand, publicly funding such capital distribution puts the corporations on a level playing field relative to one another while enabling business to continue as usual.

If they've eliminated all the jobs then presumably the economy has the idle productive capacity required to either produce the goods demanded by ubi recipients or produce the (real) capital required

Agreed. 90% of UBI would go to rent and 10% to food. That isn't some kind of artificial demand; people have always needed food and shelter.

As for higher taxes, they're trying to get ahead of the pitchforks.

At _current_ prices. The idea is that labor and energy prices would be close to zero before this would happen. So it wouldn't be that "expensive" to provide basic food, clothes, etc. A lot of goods and services would be automated.

It could perhaps work economically if AI automation also reduces the price of goods. What about automation-backed universal basic necessities? Mass-produced tract housing in the Midwest? Sounds awful but better than spending 90% of income on rent. Bread and circuses; subsidized mobile homes and Netflix.

But it won't work if necessities are captured by special interests, e.g. doctors ban AIs giving any medical info, even if it is technically capable of replacing them, so they can keep their own jobs.

This is also what I was thinking... how did this article get so many upvotes when it has some glaringly weak points?

Forget about UBI, most of us (the current earners) may not see social security, which we've paid into. Social security is a ponzi[1]. If jobs collapse, the inflow into the Ponzi stops, which also stops the outflows.

https://www.hoover.org/research/biggest-ponzi-scheme-earth

If we actually had UBI most people would supplement their income with stuff they enjoy doing. There’s going to be a lot of art, music, literature. Human made creative content is always going to cost a premium and people will keep paying for it.

> It's a roof over your head and enough to afford groceries.

And plenty of free time to figure out how to eat the rich.

Made harder by the fact that we make it illegal and hostile to build housing

> It's a roof over your head and enough to afford groceries.

That sounds very nice. I would finally be able to work full time.

oh for fucks sake are you making an excuse for them now so you’re not disappointed when you’re starving?

The UBI comes from taxes and moderate money printing to balance things. Yes I expect the rich to get taxed more because otherwise things should get violent, in the extreme hypothetical of this discussion.

Going green is much cheaper now than it was. That may invert at some point but it's hard to predict when that might be.

The entire tech industry has morphed into ponzinomics, and it’s been like that for at least my entire career.

It seems like none of these SV companies make money, or even have a realistic plan to ever make money. Instead the strategy appears to either a) hope that the investors have infinite funds and keep pretending to grow, b) get bought out by a larger, also unprofitable company, or c) go public and make it so that all of our retirement funds depend on it.

But it’s fine, as long as you brand it as “tech” and give some vague promises of it being “the future”.

The things some people on HN believe leaves me baffled.

I feel there are like 50 load bearing assumptions in this piece of fiction that are dubious at best, definitely speculation. When you put all of them together and chain them in a product of probabilities it becomes tech bro wish fulfilling fantasy. But as usual this is expressed with total confidence and inevitability. This is a perfect encapsulation of all that is wrong with rationalists, TPOT, etc. IMHO.

I'll just suggest that you track your predictions and "update your priors" once they start domino falling.

maybe lay off the kool-aid for a while, my friend

Thanks for this post. I am always amazed on how people only ever look at nominal wages (which might collapse for the "obsolete" class) but ignore the wealth being generated in the process.

What do I care if I don't earn money if the robot builds my house and customized medicine better than what we have today is available in abundance? I will be much poorer than the elites, but perhaps still much better off than today.

A very idealized scenario for sure, though. Personally I am still on the "AI as a normal technology" track with the various bottlenecks. Productivity will be a bit higher and that's it, no mass unemployment.

> reskill find new work

except that no one has been able to articulate what "new work" might emerge

and while yes, this happened before, it happened over decades, and more importantly, the new jobs were created as the old ones were being destroyed

neither of these conditions are happening this time around

so we have not "been there before"

> participate in traditional economics

Nor in recent patterns of "democracy".

If we are outdone in intelligence, diligence, and creativity, humanity will have to fall back on its weakest talents - integrity, fairness, and compassion. What a nightmare.

New technology doesn't eradicate what came before. It only replaces what's profitable. There are still some people in the world subsistence farming. A tech worker is many orders of magnitude more productive in monetary terms, but hasn't replaced them. In the worst case, automation (including physical) may drive the cost of labor far down, but it cannot drive it to zero, and as it does so commodity goods will become cheaper as well. (Housing, education, and healthcare prices are inflated for policy reasons. Expect to see increase in unregulated alternatives for housing and especially healthcare.)

Net effect: huge inequality, many people buying very cheap goods for tiny wages. Middle class destroyed. Lots of struggle. But not as bad as some folks are saying. History zombies on.

History provides the same answer every time this question arises

You will starve to death while Musk gets a luxury space yacht.

There's a darkly simple answer - they won't be provided for, they'll be culled.

> how am I to make heavy use of frontier AI models if I can't easily buy a machine worth using it on?

You are not supposed to run them locally but to pay for them running somewhere else.

Why do you think that physical labor will become incredibly expensive if nobody has jobs? Do you think tools are that hard to get? Chinese tools are cheaper than ever.

In your example, why didn't a 6000% ROI not attract enough investors and introduce competitions, eventually lower the ROI?

it's stunning to me that in most verticals the middlemen seem to be eating the whole pie.

Things aren't as hopeless as you assume.

I read this essay a few months ago which calmed those doomsday theories for me somewhat: https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...

Sample size of one, so take this for what it is, but I was initially kind of depressed when I started using Codex and Claude Code, because it did kind of feel like I was being automated away.

However, more recently I have been having fun by having three concurrent projects going at once. Instead of having less work to do, I just broadened the scope of what I was going to do.

Suddenly, it became so much more interesting. I have started multiple porting-to-WASM projects, a Jellyfin clone that I am already running on my home server written in Erlang, new themes for my blog, and many other things.

I realized that over the years there has been dozens (hundreds?) of projects that I have wanted to do, but I never really got around to doing them because it was just too much effort and I couldn’t justify the time sink. By having multiple agents working at once, I can work on multiple projects concurrently, and I can focus on the harder (and more fun) parts of programming.

Seriously. The AI psychosis that has people actually believing this stuff is far scarier to me than what might maybe possibly could happen if AI somehow actually performs to the level that the people selling it say it will.

I don't think anyone seriously believes 'labor' in the abstract is going away (well...I'm sure some people do, but not the people at the core of "use our AI product it'll be awesome trust us..."). The issue (IMHO) is that it will be "the labor opportunities left to you will suck way, way more than the ones that have been obsoleted/eliminated".

The cynical conclusion of AGI is that most humans will be enslaved or disposed of. We won't be forced to continue working for pay despite being slower, less intelligent, and more expensive than machines.

This time isn't different.

History has repeatedly shown us isolated examples of completely replacing the need for human labour.

The industrial revolution did destroy jobs, but back then labour was incomprehensibly unproductive. So much so that around 200 years ago 50% of the entire workforce worked in agriculture.

This meant that although a large percentage of the total workforce was affected by the industrial revolution the total percentage of jobs that machines could do was absolutely tiny. Even where machines could typically only automate some percentage of the total work. For example, in agriculture although machines could do a lot of the work, there was still a need for humans to operate the machines.

However, there were some exceptions. Texture weavers were completely replaced by machines – it didn't make them more efficient it made them unemployed. More recently human calculators have been completely replaced. And more recently still checkout staff at supermarkets are being replaced by self-service systems. Again, a self-checkout machine doesn't make a job more productive, it entirely replaces the need for a human to do it.

Even today there's still relatively very few jobs which can be entirely done by machines, but for the first time ever, we're starting to see how this could change.

Then the question then is what new jobs might be created if you no longer need graphic designers or VFX artists or lawyers? If humans aren't good for physical labour or mental labour then what are they good for?

The assumption that humans will remain employable assumes that humans will still be able to provide some economic value which machines cannot. That humans unlike horses won't be sent to the glue factory because there will still be some economic use for us so that we can still be net providers and not a net-burden.

Even if we assume there will be a small percentage of jobs which machines won't be able to do, if you have the entire workforce competing for those jobs then you'll probably be paid so poorly you might as well not have a job.

Would be interested what you disagree with. Is it that you don't believe that AI will be able to replace humans entirely? If so what jobs do you think are safe? Or is it that you believe new jobs will be created? If so can you describe what these jobs might involve that machines cannot do?

Horse labor went away is a objectively decent argument

You sound blissfully ignorant. I'd honestly advise staying that way. The alternative is depressing af.

You assume that the people who are at the top of the organizations generating said wealth will have any incentive to do that. Look around the world at the petro states for examples of a highly capital intensive industry generating money that subsidizes the rest of the economy.

The same crowd who always vote against their own interests. To paraphrase, "give them somebody to look down on, and they'll empty their pockets for you."

That's already happening to some extent. Consumption in the US is very top heavy right now, and the top 40% of households by income already account for over 60% of all domestic consumption.

Those with >~$350k spend drastically less on consumption, funneling most into wealth generating assets

Those <350k->~$100k spend almost 86% of their income on consumption

Everyone else doesn't have enough purchasing power to matter to the market, spend greater than what they earn and have a dependency on debt.

The economy now is already at the point where it doesn't need the bottom 50% to even participate to continue current growth, outside of providing the labor necessary to fuel the consumption of the middle bracket.

The problem is AI/LLM automation is threatening the exact middle bracket that is sustaining the current consumption based economy. If we automated all the jobs of the bottom half of the economic underclass, the ~$100k+ group could run in a closed loop. Instead, we're trying to automate the labor of the very group thats sustaining the system.

The loss of white collar work is going to cause a huge cascading failure that we aren't ready for.

The saying is "workers spend what they earn and capitalists earn what they spend".

Capitalists don't need worker demand to support their own consumption; spending out of profits directly supports profits overall.

It would be something of a consumption race to the bottom, however. They wouldn't be any better off vs if we supported adequate demand for everyone, but they might control a bigger slice of the (much) smaller pie.

Not before violence takes the place. People are semi-developed selfish tribal monkeys and it sadly looks like that.

Maybe not at first. Regardless of when they get replaced by tech, you’ll see those jobs get saturated and wages go down. Which sucks because they are already low

10 years ago we said "Technology cannot replace programmers, accountants, lawyers, doctors, etc" and here we are, potentially on a cusp of replacing all of those in a decade.

We can keep moving the goal posts all we want, but eventually things will get automated.

Why can't we have automated farm land, automatic harvesting, automatic sorting, delivered automatically via robotic trucks to your door? It's not that far fetched.

It does sound like the end of the middle class though.

Employed doing what? At some point, we'll have autonomous tractors, autonomous techs to fix those tractors, autonomous cars and delivery vehicles, robot plumbers, AI doing information work.

Employed doing...what?

Where did Anthropic get money to buy (rent, actually) capacity from SpaceX?

So bitcoin, but without calling it that because of the political implications.

The “wealth” will mostly be numbers in a database without an economy. Sure, they could have an island or disaster shelter, huge, elaborate, and well stocked, and own lots of land, but even the land ownership is a paper filed in an office without a functioning government, which needs a functioning economy, to actually enforce keeping people off of the land. They can pay private security, but I feel like that has limits

Essentially, I’m arguing they have more money than actual wealth, and they’re immeasurably poorer without a functioning society and economy

We already have abundance in some areas and very little of it results in a higher standard of living.

We could make enough insulin to give it away to people for free. Instead people ration with negative consequences. We grow more than enough food but we throw a huge amount of it away. We have everything we need to house people, clothe them, feed them, and provide the basics of medical care. But we wont because theres too much money to be made otherwise.

All you have to do is look at the state of the world today to see this is the endgame. Huge swaths of humanity live on basically subsistence level agriculture, and it's not like we're all sending UBI to them. The top .001% can see the rest of us fall a lot further before they have to worry about who will buy their products.

> wealthy class will launch UBI so that they will still have customers. What will happen is they will leave us to die.

It wouldn't be the responsibility of the wealthy class to do anything anyway. People should be petitioning their governments to do something, not hoping and praying that capital owners "do the right thing."

It's up to government to regulate, tax, and take care of its citizens. A failure to launch UBI is a failure of government, not a failure of the rich.

(I'd also argue having ultra super wealthy people in the first place is also a failure of government)

> Altman theorized a system where society has "an ownership share in whatever AI creates." In this "universal basic wealth system," people can barter their share of the world's AI capacity. [1]

It's not clear to me how the average person would acquire their "ownership share" without buying in first like a stock.

Is it from the company where you work now when they lay you off? When does it start? According to the CEOs, aren't we already laying off people due to AI?

> Everyone will need "to figure out how to operate in a post-AGI age," Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said. [1]

I have a bad feeling "figure it out" will be only meaningful support offered.

[1]: https://www.aol.com/articles/future-without-elon-musk-bill-0...

At some point a AI that maximises paperclips and one that consumes resources to achieve a few people self interested desires starts to look the same.

Yeah, reading this, my first thought was: "that's the neat part - nobody!"

The point is capital accumulation either for accumulation's sake, or to ensure survival of the few at the expense of the many. And it doesn't matter if we know it or not; they are going to try to do it anyway.

When clankers become the new consumer, we won't even be needed :)

I'd like to think that, if it comes to this scenario, the wealthy will have many things to worry about. Everyone will know, at that point, that *they" are the one who destroyed the global economy for short term wealth. I'm not sure they've actually thought any of this through because they will be in a prison of their own making at that point.

No, the incentives are aligned. Bread and circus reduces the number of data centers getting bombed and the number of heads rolling. The good AI and the evil AI both point to UBI.

There's no point being the whale in a P2W mobile game if there are no free to play players to stomp over. I think this translates at least somewhat to the real world.

So, back to the author's title - if they leave everyone to die/with no money, who buys their services and enables them to turn a profit?

Mamdani was elected in New York despite (or perhaps because of) explicitly running against the interests of rich people. Let the frontier AI labs and their investors burn billions in the R&D phase, then vote for governments to use the Magic Everything Machines for the interests of ordinary people. If today's LLMs don't actually evolve into Magic Everything Machines then UBI probably isn't the right solution anyhow; some jobs will be lost but many others will stick around. In that case just vote for Scandinavian style social safety nets.

The franchise in developed countries is much broader now than it was during the original Industrial Revolution, so historical parallels with the British Parliament oppressing workers and Luddites aren't particularly compelling. That was back when only about 3-4% of the British population could vote.

No, they’ll jail those unable to pay into prisons where workers are required to labor without a reasonable wage, and only let the rebellious workers die. The end goal is generally to replace the lost unpaid labor of now-illegal slavery with the more indirect enslavements of debtors prison labor and corp-indentured servitude. They don’t want to reduce the size of the worker pool, they want to reduce the demands of it — otherwise they end up vulnerable to organized labor by the few workers left.

And, as we know, hungry desperate people just lie down and die. Maybe nibble at a piece of cake if they have some.

> What will happen is they will leave us to die.

Lots of people want to rule a nation, but no one wants to rule a nation of bones.

French Revolution says the people win in that case but who knows.

This is clearly the goal.

Many billionaires have expressed the desire to eliminate the lower classes. Just take a look at the World Economic Forum and their goals.

They will pay us to colonise Mars! One way trip.

FDR created the US welfare system which destroyed socialism in the US. I'm not predicting the future but it has basically happened before.

If that's what happens, and "leaving us to die" results in very many people actually dying, then we'll start killing rich people until they realize that this isn't the world that they want to live in either.

When people are left to die, some of them get violent. They don't have to all do so. There are enough people who will, who have guns, who know how to use them.

Rome had "bread and circuses". But if you leave out the bread...

The goal of automation is to end humanity

This is why the Epstein Class is planning a mass culling (world war).

If nothing will change and overhelming majority of wealth in time become owned by the marginal piece of society I wouldn't ruled out that in some future there will be another revolution against the so called ruling class by basically same reasons it was before.

That or some neofascist/neofeudal regime takes place.

> The author is so naive to think that after eliminating the dependency on labor that the wealthy class will launch UBI so that they will still have customers.

Exactly. There is no UBI. It is has always been a unsustainable utopian failure once tried at a large scale.

> What will happen is they will leave us to die.

That is the hard truth.

Unfortunately, 2030 will make this so obvious that we have to prepare for when a crash that will wipe out many to the point where the divide will be widened.

What does history teach us in this context and how is the current situation comparable to the collapse of the Soviet Union?

Not sure if I get your point