Isaac Asimov describes how AI will liberate humans and their creativity (1992)

I have a genuine question I can’t find or come up with a viable answer to, a matter of said “unpleasantness” as he puts it; how do people make money or otherwise sustain themselves in this AI scenario we are facing?

Has anyone heard a viable solution, or even has one themselves?

I don’t hear anything about UBI anymore, could that be because after roughly 60+ million alien people flooding into western countries from countries with a populations so large that are effectively endless? What do we do about that? Will that snuff out any kind of advancement in the west when the roughly 6 billion people all want to be in the west where everyone gets UBI and it’s the land of milk and honey?

So what do we do then? We can’t all be tech industry people with 6-figure plus salaries, vested ownership, and most people aren’t multi-millionaires that can live far away from the consequences while demanding others subject themselves to them.

Which way?

I have soured on UBI because it tries to use a market solution to deal with problems that I don’t think markets can fix.

I want everyone to have food, housing, healthcare, education, etc. in a post scarcity world. That should be possible. I don’t think giving people cash is the best way to accomplish that. If you want people to have housing, give them housing. If you want people to have food, give them food.

Cash doesn’t solve the supply problem, as we can see with housing now. You would think a rise in the cost of housing would lead to more supply, but the cost of real estate also increases the cost of building.

I've always thought there should be a 'minimum viable existence' option for those who are willing to forego most luxuries in exchange for not being required to do anything specific other than abide by reasonable laws.

It would be very interesting to see the percentage breakdowns of how such people chose to spend their time. In my opinion, there would be enough benefit to society at large to make it worthwhile. For a large group (if not the majority), I'm certain the situation would turn out to be completely temporary-- they would have the option to prepare themselves for some type of work they're better adapted to perform and/or enjoy, ultimately enhancing the culture and economy. Most of the rest could be useful as research subjects, if they were willing of course.

Obviously this is a bit of a utopian fantasy, but what can I say, Star Trek primed me to hope for such a future.

There will be relative scarcity. Consider a scenario where iPhone 50 is manufactured in a dark factory. But still there is waiting period to have access to it. This is because of resource bottlenecks.

>how do people make money or otherwise sustain themselves in this AI scenario we are facing?

1% of the labour force works in agriculture:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-the-labor-force-...

1%

let that number sink in; think about it really means.

And what it means is that at least basic food (unprocessed, no meat) could be completely free. It make take some smart logistics, but it's doable. All of our food is already one step, one small step, away from becoming free for everyone.

This applies to clothes and basic tools as well.