-- In such a future, people will have minimal income (possibly some UBI) and therefore there will be few who can afford the products and services generated by AI
-- Therefore the AI generates greatly reduced wealth
-- Therefore there’s greatly reduced wealth to pay for the AI
-- …rendering such a future impossible
-- In such a future, people will have minimal income (possibly some UBI) and therefore there will be few who can afford the products and services generated by AI
-- Corporate profits drop (or growth slows) and there is demand from the powers that be to increase taxation in order to increase the UBI.
-- People can afford the products and services.
Unfortunately, with no jobs the products and services could become exclusively entertainment-related.
We may find that, if our baser needs are so easily come by that we have tremendous free time, much of the world is instead pursuing things like the sciences or arts instead of continuing to try to cosplay 20th century capitalism.
Why are we all doing this? By this, I mean, gestures at everything this? About 80% of us will say, so that we don't starve, and can then amuse ourselves however it pleases us in the meantime. 19% will say because they enjoy being impactful or some similar corporate bullshit that will elicit eyerolls. And 1% do it simply because they enjoy holding power over other people and management in the workplace provides a source of that in a semi-legal way.
So the 80% of people will adapt quite well to a post-scarcity world. 19% will require therapy. And 1% will fight tooth and nail to not have us get there.
UBI can't fix it because a) it won't be enough to drive our whole economy, and b) it amounts to businesses paying customers to buy their products, which makes no sense.
You got this backwards - there won’t be need for humans outside of the elite class. 0.1% or 0.01% of mankind will control all the resources. They will also control robots with guns.
Less than 100 years ago we had a guy who convinced a small group of Germans to seize power and try to exterminate or enslave vast majority of humans on Earth - just because he felt they were inferior. Imagine if he had superhuman AI at his disposal.
In the next 50 years we will have different factions within elites fighting for power, without any regard for wellbeing of lower class, who will probably be contained in fully automated ghettos. It could get really dark really fast.
I like your optimism, though.
A while later, the world is living in a dichotomy of people living off the land and some high tech spots of fully autonomous and self-maintaining robots that do useless work for bored people. Knowing people and especially the rich, I don't believe in Culture-like utopia, unfortunately, sad as it may be.
> You got this backwards - there won’t be need for humans outside of the elite class. 0.1% or 0.01% of mankind will control all the resources.
Let me rephrase that from 'So then there's no need for AI workers.' to 'So then there's no money to pay for AI workers.'
The UBI approach creates a closed economic loop: Company A pays taxes → Government gives UBI to consumers → Consumers buy from Company A → Company A pays taxes... This is functionally identical to Company A directly paying people to buy Company A's products, which makes no economic sense.
It's like Ford paying his workers $50/day, but the only customers buying Ford cars are Ford workers spending their $50/day wages. Ford would go bankrupt - there's no external value creation, just money circulating in circles.
Where does the actual wealth come from in this system? Who are the net buyers that make the businesses profitable enough to sustain the UBI taxes?
UBI in an AI-dominated economy can't create a functioning economy - it's just an imaginary self-licking ice cream cone.
On the other hand, on a much broader scale, the planet itself is a closed economic loop. There's a finite amount of resources and we're all just cycling most of them around back and forth.
Arguably, a significant amount of "growth" has come from taking resources that formerly were not "on the books" and putting them on. The silver in the New World wasn't in (Western) ledgers until the 1500s, the oil under the Middle East was just goo until the late 1800s. The uranium ore in your backyard suddenly got a lot more interesting after 1940.
New value can come from inventing new and useful applications for existing resources or by finding new external inputs (maybe capturing some of that radiation the giant fusion sphere overhead is blasting in our direction).
Ask how many of your neighbours can name three Supreme Court justices (or hell, their senators and representative) versus who can name three Khardashian sisters?
TBH, I'd hope for the end of "broad" social status. I'd love to see a retreat towards smaller circles where status is earned through displays of talent and respectable deeds, not just by dominating/manufacturing/buying a media presence.
Or the technological singularity happens before that, and either AI will kill us all, or humans will merge with AI.