UBI, AI and reality, always in the wrong ORDER

Who came first? The AI chicken, or the UBI egg?

Confusion around the place and role of "Artificial Intelligence" (AI) continues to increase. Let's try to at least put some things in the right order.

World history, read from end to beginning

Much recent writing about what will or should happen because of AI seems to me a summary of "History of the World, from 1900 to 2023"... read in reverse order, from last to first page. I refer to the pieces whose conclusions are some variant of this two part thesis, taken as example from here:

1. "[Since] more and more jobs are being replaced by AI ... the mechanism used to distribute wealth through society in the form of employment and income will become increasingly unviable if entire sectors are replaced by AI."

2. "The [sustainable way to distribute wealth after AI] can be found in the form of a Universal Basic Income (UBI). A UBI guarantees each adult citizen a no strings attached monthly payment from the government."

This way to frame the world's problems and history really hurts my brain. Ditto for the concept, from here, that we may not survive AI due to the impossibility of "aligning humans to the values of the technoprogressives and their newfound AI".

The REAL problems are those that AI turbocharges, NOT "create"

The first real "alignment" that should occur in all these discourses is the proper alignment of issues like these, that are hardly "technoprogressive" and all existed well before AI become the stuff of prime time news:

1. Very superficial ethics and morals

2. Physical lack of STUFF and ENERGY

3. Lack of TIME

4. Too MUCH work, not too little

Let's look at them, one at a time.

1. Very superficial ethics and morals

These are things like (source) "careerist ideology, with the Protestant Work Ethic in mind, [and] the general concept of hard work being desirable". More precisely, ethics and morals so superficial that still mix purpose with money, via broken, or at least uncomplete definitions of "work".

Human beings need purpose, feeling useful and doing stuff that matters at least as much as they need food, water and shelter. But in 2023 it is not even wrong, just unsustainable, to keep believing that all that must be tied to, and measured by, money. Specifically, money coming from a paid "job".

There is nothing wrong with really loving one's job, when that happens! It's a blessing, actually. But de-facto sanctification of every legal activity that yields money just because it yields money, no matter how empty it is, is half ridiculous, half toxic, and eventually can only make everybody feel like this:

In a world where any "busywork done with the mind is [by definition] prestigious and valuable" (including "content creation") and too many "jobs" aren't just the "ass-backwards way to organize work" of the picture above, but provide "goods and services that would have been, from the perspective of previous generations, totally unnecessary"...

... maybe the people who believe that the only, or even a necessary way to be happy and worth of existing is to have a job need counseling, not a job.

The hardship, both individual and social, stems from missing, or negating, that people don't need "jobs". People need both purpose AND some money, to buy what fills their material and non-material needs. In this order.

As far as jobs are concerned, "most people make their living being mediocre, by definition" (source), but I hope we''ll agree that this shouldn't have the slightest impact on their human rights, should it now? On the other side of paychecks, I really don't understand the hard-working, self-made entrepreneurs who would rather die than endorse UBI because "work is holy" and "UBI would give slackers my tax money for nothing"... but spend at least as much time to complain about how hard it is to make their employees work seriously. Why do they oppose a safety net that would make it much easier to get rid of such people and really optimize everything, eventually saving them money, is beyond me.

For a deeper dive into the same concepts, please see my longer essay "On Work, Money and Purpose".

Short digression on getting "digital" right, vs meaning in life

If the management of services and products that modern societies really need was implemented, at last, in ways that fully, fairly, openly exploit all the advantages of AI and other digital technologies, instead of just rebooting digitally whatever cargo cult was celebrated on paper before... things could be much simpler, efficient and fairer than they are today. With this in mind, consider this cartoon by Juan Astasio, for the New Yorker:

Surely many people will fear this as a nightmare: the Matrix made real, just with bicycles instead of pods.

Me, I'll dare argue that many of the people on those bicycles could and would, after the initial shock, be both healthier and happier than before. Because they would be doing a healthier, greener, more intellectually honest, more actually useful job than whatever they left to the servers in the background.

I'll dare argue that, for many people living paycheck to paycheck with a "bullshit job", that other way to pay the bills, on schedules surely much more predictable and sustainable than before, and consequently more time and energy to live, that cartoon may very well be an improvement. IF "digital" things were managed as I just said of course, which must happen as soon as possible anyway.

2: Physical lack of STUFF and ENERGY

Forget ideologies and politics. Look under and around your own feet. Regardless of AI, there is not enough affordable energy and raw materials to keep eight billion people pacifically busy, for enough time to make enough stuff that then all of them could buy. More precisely there are, in no particular order and without claims to completeness, - not enough lithium, surely not to make enough batteries, soon enough, for all the EVs that a society based on mass car needs - not enough parking space that won't collapse under the same EVs - not enough rare earths outside of unworkable war-ready places to make all the same EVs, plus mountains of FAKE innovation, and AI servers, of course - not enough groundwater, after throwing away so much of it (e.g. on sodas, hyper-thirsty crops, lawns that '"need to die") that we literally tilted the PLANET) and may go to more wars for it - not enough concrete that's free from fossil fuels or sand-grabbing rackets - not enough money to "extract more minerals in the next 30 years than in the preceding 70 000 years" (source)

In one sentence, "Business as Usual has become its own undoing": there is no physical possibility to keep eight billion people doing any version of "Business as Usual". Not within the working lives of those people for sure, especially if AI is used to just "accelerate what we were already doing", with its own hidden, but huge extra costs.

3. Lack of TIME (and participants)

Time to avoid major social unrest, that is, regardless of everything else.

Ignore the material limits. Just get in the streets and look, seriously, at all the real people around you. You will realize that it does not matter if the technological innovation of today, that is turbo-propelled by software "in periods that are shorter than election cycles" will actually yeld, eventually, more jobs than it destroyed. The truth is that "we won't be able to retrain the majority of the workforce of today fast enough to take the new jobs in emerging industries". No way. Not with, and for, the overwhelming majority of the real workforces of today, from the aging ones in the West and China to the youngsters in South East Asia sweatshops' . Not even if increasing numbers of both mature and young people weren't already sick enough of the hamster wheel to "quiet quit" or "lie flat", from the US to South Korea, China , India and South East Asia. There is not enough time to “upskill” everybody before they stop needing it, even if everybody could and wanted to be upskilled.

4. Too MUCH work, not too little

I am deliberately ignoring the whole global warming thing for one simple reason: as far as this post is concerned, it is almost irrelevant, if not a distraction. If global warming is natural, it cannot be managed ignoring all the other issues listed above, which continue to exist. If it is anthropogenic, it is a direct consequence of the same issues, that is something that won't be solved, or become solvable, before tackling them first (and if you ask me, the sooner environmentalist start to present that way, the more they'll get).

This said, adding global warming to the discourse would just make it almost impossible to ignore that, "starting next Monday, an awfully big lot of people worldwide should really just sit still and smell the roses”, that is be paid to NOT work. Because the world just "cannot afford so much work" anymore, it needs to be lazy instead. Decoupling cannot work, and neither can Carbon Capture. So, let's just ignore global warming for convenience, and go back to "UBI, because AI".

It's NOT "UBI because of AI"

The question is not whether we should fall back on UBI because of AI, or if we could actually do something that would require "a grand cultural revolution away from any expectation of work, away from the ideology of the Career".

It is exactly the other way around. Yes, quoting again from "chatGPT job killer" piece, we must switch as soon as possible to "a new conception of human flourishing based on sufficiency, moderation, frugality, and non-materialistic sources of meaning and satisfaction."

We sure need to do that, but not because AI has come. Again, AI as it is today just ACCELERATES the problems we were already inflicting on ourselves.

We need a new "conception of human flourishing" because the one that everyone living today grew up with stopped to be aligned with physical and mental health realities decades ago, leaving in economic insecurity and hopeless loneliness, instead of flourishing, youngsters, seniors ,men and women everywhere, from the US to China Japan and South Korea.

When inequality touches even life expectancy and growing masses are so exhausted by insecurity or harried living to resort to giving up on relationships altogether, or opioids and generally rawdogging reality, that's not "flourishing". It never was. When you read it carefully, _"remove the necessity to keep on increasing production", is exactly what Bob Kennedy said 55 years ago.

In 2023, this isn't about ideologies anymore. If UBI is at all possible (more on this at the end), it's just the least unavoidable, least unfeasible path forward that's left, for the reasons above that are all far older, far more serious and urgent than any AI.

Consequently, the question that matters is not whether we should adopt UBI to counter AI: it is how (not "if", how) AI can contribute to make that transition faster and less painful for everybody, without hurting democracy and human rights.

The real problems: lack of politics, and then the REAL problem

As things stand today, the main barriers to tackling with a different AI the real problems we have, in the only ways we have left, is the huge persistence, among too many people of any class, race, religion and nationality worldwide, of self-inflicted delusions like:

• staying stuck to terrible misinterpretations of "work"

• calling any "dependence on government money" an immoral, worse-than-death slavery, while calling freedom the freedom to endure depression, debt, urban violence and lack of access to decent food and healthcare... while never being actually free from the same governments in any meaningful, reliable, long term way

• believing that laws and government cannot be changed, so hard and smartly to never bother to vote

That is, the real danger here is AI, that is: the will of the few, too few humans who control it today if things don't change, winning by lack of human intelligence (as in "ability to imagine and demand a different future") on the other side.

Last but definitely not least, the REAL problem. This piece is only about the unavoidability of UBI in and by itself, well before AI and regardless of AI, because it is a reaction to too many assertions, that can only hold by ignoring history, that UBI is the only solution to AI.

But here is another big part of the picture, maybe the biggest one, that too many forget, including UBI supporters. Quoting myself, surely it is possible only as "part of a larger reform of society, that starts from a reform of money and how it is managed, from creation to taxation."

(usual notes apply, i.e.: paid subscriptions and other help, especially pointers to speaking, consulting or research work help a lot to cover this and all the other topics I plan to cover here . Thanks, and for direct contact please email mfioretti@nexaima.net)