Post
Topic
Board Politics & Society
Re: Basic income guarantee - opinions&criticism welcome
by
myrkul
on 17/09/2012, 18:20:48 UTC
I think basic income guarantee is a must for all societies in the future. Imagine if all of our production/research is handled by robots, and even the maintenance of the robots are handled by other robots. Basically imagine there will be zero need for human labor in the society, how would humans enjoy the fruit of these advance of technology? You would need some kind of basic income guarantee, otherwise everyone would be unemployed and starve.

Production, and even a large amount of maintenance, can be handled by robots. Not research. There are a great many jobs, even labor-intensive ones, which require a degree of judgment well beyond the capability of anything short of AI. Until we get at least human-level AI, there will still need to be humans in the decision loop, if only to answer the question, "Where do I put this?"

If all jobs that require repetitive, dangerous, or distasteful labor are automated, there will be no need for human laborers to do those jobs, but there will be plenty of other jobs to do... if nothing else, it frees people up for artistic endeavors. Remember that farming is one of those industries which has always been at the forefront of technology, and would therefor be heavily automated. Food would be cheap, plentiful, and may never touch a human hand until you pick it up. Starvation would be low on the list of worries. All a basic income guarantee would do is subsidize the lazy at the cost of the creative.