Hardware

weirdly enough - this has been a turning point for me for UBI - I used to see it as a universal good - whereas now I'm starting to fear it will end up being implemented by the oligarchs to ensure they stay in power and avoid revolts - and we'll end up with an extreme level of inequality where the handful of automation owners will have unlimited power and control (by virtue of "their" machines providing the UBI for the masses) at which point they'll be untouchable and everyone else will have no agency, under constant surveillance and with the punishment for any attempt to dethrone them being to take away their UBI and let them die on the streets.

I just find it scary how something with massive potential for good will be turned into the ultimate form of control.

Industrial automation has been happening for many decades and has it's own dynamics.

While there are some experiments such as burger cooking robots (for fast food), the last I read about this, they weren't particularly functional or economicly viable.

I guess we'll see how things develop.

I haven't read that much about UBI, but the fact that it is promoted so heavily by US oligarchs is not a good sign.

Its an inevitable flash point and politicians across the world are totally ignorant and stupid regarding it.

We are entering an era where most work can and will be done by machines autonomously - humans will be redundant. The proportion of work done by machines without human input needed will grow and grow. Manufacturing first but then most office jobs as the technology progresses.

The critical question becomes who owns the machines and the AI. Who ones the technology and the machines that will make more machines and AI and do the work?

In a utopia, everyone owns these machines and shares the benefits. We would be entering a new era and the first days of the post scarcity society. People would be freed up to persue whatever they want, not having to worry about food or resources.

In a dystopia, the billionaire classes use such technology to entrench their power and wealth and we live in a new fuedal post-capitalist system. If you're in the ruling class you have extraordinary wealth, and you exert ownership rights at every turn. Everyone else are serfs with little value and no means to change their lives or compete with the machine owners.

The dystopia will likely end badly with violence and revolution. Machines can be hacked, weapons can be stolen.

In both scenarios capitalism is basically done as people don't have value in the new world - we cannot sell our time for money as machines will do it better. At the moment we are sleep walking into a dystopian hellscape. Politicians are either too stupid and ignorant to see what's coming or in the pockets of the wealthy elites and already doing their bidding in our current era.

At the moment I think the question is how bad do things get before we have violence and even revolution. This can all be prevented by political groups dealing with inequality now and laying the foundations for the future - AI and robots, and there produce need to be a shared resource for all humanity. That means we accept capitalism is done.