Evening Must-Read: George Dvorsky: How Universal Basic Income Will Save Us From the Robot Uprising
…we may have little choice but to implement it. Given the ever-increasing concentration of wealth and the frightening prospect of technological unemployment, it will be required to prevent complete social and economic collapse…. The idea has also been supported by the esteemed economists Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, the latter of whom advocated for a minimum guaranteed income via a ‘negative income tax’…. Some thinkers contend that broader social restructuring will have to accompany the problems wrought by technological unemployment…. Gary Marchant, Yvonne Angelica, and James Hennessy present six possible policy options: Protecting Employment…. Sharing Work…. Making New Work…. Redistribution…. Education…. Fostering a New Social Contract…
Me? The fact that we experienced “peak horse”–that all of a sudden there was nothing the marginal horse could do that paid for its maintenance, and that as a result the horse population downsized massively–makes me very skeptical of claims that there will always be productive, profitable, and paid things for the marginal human to do. As I say over and over again, break it down: (1) backs, (2) fingers, (3) brains-as-cybernetic-control mechanisms (both white-collar and blue-collar), (4) smiles, (5) mouths-to-communicate, and (6) minds to think.
In past generations predictions of technological unemployment have been false because the decline in (1) and (2) has been offset by growing demand from a richer society for (4), complementarity between machines and (3), and the failure of communication to become one-to-many fast enough to reduce relative employment in (5). Of these, only (4) looks secure to me for the future. But will it be enough?