The AI Threat Isn’t Skynet – It’s the End of the Middle Class
<i>That threat has many thinkers entertaining the idea of a universal basic income, a guaranteed living wage paid by the government to anyone left out of the workforce. But McAfee believes this would only make the problem worse, because it would eliminate the incentive for entrepreneurship and other activity that could create new jobs as the old ones fade away. Others question the psychological effects of the idea. “A universal basic income doesn’t give people dignity or protect them from boredom and vice,” Etzioni says.</i><p>It&#x27;s funny how boredom, vice, and the indignity of receiving income without continual labor loom in importance if and only if we&#x27;re talking about technological unemployment. What of people receiving Social Security, pensions, inherited wealth, royalties from patents and copyrights, rents collected on real estate...?<p>Some people sound like they&#x27;re planning how to invent enough bullshit jobs to provide everyone a regular 9-5 schedule and a supervisor even after machines are doing all the strictly necessary labor. It&#x27;s like the worst of the Protestant work ethic married to the worst proposals from Keynesianism, so it&#x27;s one of those special bad ideas that people from all parts of the political spectrum can endorse. I&#x27;d rather trust adults to find their own amusements and purpose, like we trust adults who today have income-without-regular-labor, and trust the robo-police to curb those whose boredom turns to criminality.