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It keeps popping up in forums, Facebook, and live conversations: Some computer nerd (I use the term with affection, for I am one) brings up the concept of “Universal Basic Income” and declares that we had better start advocating for it, because we’re inventing amazing new technologies that will totally destroy so many people’s jobs that people will simply starve unless we hand them free money.
I don’t see it that way, because I don’t buy into the assumption that lurks beneath it: That some huge proportion of the human race is only qualified for one job, and would be instantly and permanently useless if that job went away.
As a counterexample I don’t have to look any farther than the mirror. Computer programmers completely reinvent their skillset every five years or less, moving from one set of problems to another. And yet, the more problems we solve, the more programmers we need. When self-driving trucks put truck drivers out of work, they won’t stay truck drivers for long. They’ll become mechanics, remote pilots, construction crew ... or maybe they’ll just ride around in the trucks they used to drive, keeping watch, scaring off highwaymen with a rifle and a drone shooting tranquilizer darts. Or maybe they’ll just quit, since everything is now slightly cheaper and they can stop being a dual-income household and spend time with their kids, like people imagine the 1950’s somehow was for the entire planet.
Hmm. Maybe that’s the pattern. I only ever see Universal Basic Income floated by single, childless men with little or no connection to their extended family. As if government-fed bachelorhood was the resting state of every person on the planet. Interesting.
As long as humans exhibit the basic trait that drove all innovation beyond survival - that of sexual competition - they will invent ways to pay each other for the means to move slightly ahead in whatever arbitrary yardstick is fashionable at the time. Automation has had zero effect on this behavior in ten thousand years. At the same time, it has clearly not done enough to eliminate extreme and abject poverty, which is still rampant in places far away from the air-conditioned cubicles and taco trucks of the Silicon Valley.
Maybe that's another thing that feeds into this assumption. In the Silicon Valley, you're either an engineer of some kind, or you're one of those other people, doing some other mysterious job, for way less money. That's what it looks like to the engineers, anyway, because when they're not hanging out with other engineers, who do they interact with? Food vendors. Baristas. Store clerks. Ticket takers. The FedEx delivery man. The cleaning lady. Their world consists of work, and paying money to have everything else catered so they can work even more.
So they mentally divide the world into two groups: Engineers who pull down big bucks from the sky, and other people who scrape a living together ... for now ... serving the engineers.
Naturally the solution that comes to them is to take these other poor people and stick them in a walled garden where everything is pleasant and catered, though boring, and meanwhile the engineers can move underground and do even more engineering, ... and occasionally sneak up in the dead of night to kidnap some surface-dwelling dunce for a cannibalistic blood ritual.
It's the future!!
I don’t see it that way, because I don’t buy into the assumption that lurks beneath it: That some huge proportion of the human race is only qualified for one job, and would be instantly and permanently useless if that job went away.
As a counterexample I don’t have to look any farther than the mirror. Computer programmers completely reinvent their skillset every five years or less, moving from one set of problems to another. And yet, the more problems we solve, the more programmers we need. When self-driving trucks put truck drivers out of work, they won’t stay truck drivers for long. They’ll become mechanics, remote pilots, construction crew ... or maybe they’ll just ride around in the trucks they used to drive, keeping watch, scaring off highwaymen with a rifle and a drone shooting tranquilizer darts. Or maybe they’ll just quit, since everything is now slightly cheaper and they can stop being a dual-income household and spend time with their kids, like people imagine the 1950’s somehow was for the entire planet.
Hmm. Maybe that’s the pattern. I only ever see Universal Basic Income floated by single, childless men with little or no connection to their extended family. As if government-fed bachelorhood was the resting state of every person on the planet. Interesting.
As long as humans exhibit the basic trait that drove all innovation beyond survival - that of sexual competition - they will invent ways to pay each other for the means to move slightly ahead in whatever arbitrary yardstick is fashionable at the time. Automation has had zero effect on this behavior in ten thousand years. At the same time, it has clearly not done enough to eliminate extreme and abject poverty, which is still rampant in places far away from the air-conditioned cubicles and taco trucks of the Silicon Valley.
Maybe that's another thing that feeds into this assumption. In the Silicon Valley, you're either an engineer of some kind, or you're one of those other people, doing some other mysterious job, for way less money. That's what it looks like to the engineers, anyway, because when they're not hanging out with other engineers, who do they interact with? Food vendors. Baristas. Store clerks. Ticket takers. The FedEx delivery man. The cleaning lady. Their world consists of work, and paying money to have everything else catered so they can work even more.
So they mentally divide the world into two groups: Engineers who pull down big bucks from the sky, and other people who scrape a living together ... for now ... serving the engineers.
Naturally the solution that comes to them is to take these other poor people and stick them in a walled garden where everything is pleasant and catered, though boring, and meanwhile the engineers can move underground and do even more engineering, ... and occasionally sneak up in the dead of night to kidnap some surface-dwelling dunce for a cannibalistic blood ritual.
It's the future!!
