Is Universal Basic Income a Good Idea? | Ray Kurzweil Q & A | Singularity University 

Its 2021 and the universal Basic income movement is stronger than ever.

I'm all in... anybody else?

Basic Income is fundamental to Technocracy.

The simple reality is entire sectors of the economy are going to become redundant! And machines will be learning new jobs quicker than the average person can up-skill, so the number of people being employed will keep going down. Which leads to massive social instability! A universal basic income isn't just going to be a nice idea it's going to become necessary!

Awesome.

Eventually, work will basically mean telling a computer what to do and focusing entirely on being creative. Whether than means selling the results or simply creating what we want to enjoy ourselves, I couldn't say. I'm sure there will still be people who want things they haven't made themselves because different people create differently, and diversity and surprise will always hold some value to us. I really hope I live to see that day.

Sam Altman CEO of openai says we might have a Ubi by 2030

It is not about making money, it is all about not making / avoiding debt...

🌳🚀Nature and Technology Together

Work is a waste of life for the majority of people. No one I have ever known has truly liked their job. Everyone I have known that has a "career" pursues it because they have some degree of social retardation or deficieny and work provides a place where they feel purpose because they can't feel it elsewhere. It's an indictment on the human race. I have never understood why people don't band together and demand a change. I hope to see the idea that we need to work, breakdown in my life time.

"Money is primarily an information mechanism for labor allocation." ~Elon Musk, Libertarian

As long as somebody or something has to produce everything that people consume, there will never be a time when we can declare leisure as work, because leisure normally doesn't produce anything that we can consume.

Great thoughts. Depends on the amount set. Enough that matches the needs against absolute poverty to help subsistence of life. There will still be a relative poverty issue. But lives will be saved

people never think of the people that cant work for whatever reason i used to work and made a lot of money they suddenly got very permanetly ill and am disabled and can no longer work at any job

I live in Israel and the housing prices have been skyrocketing since 2008. Most of the population rents their homes and the prices still go higher and higher by speculators and greedy investors. Plus the population is also growing in a fast pace because here people prefer to have many children and thousands of people immigrate, too. Whatever amount of basic income they would provide, the landlords will greedily demand much more for a flat-rent. I don't see any solution on the horizon. I myself am fed up for paying so high rent, I consider moving back to Europe.

What if you become alergic to the 3d printed goods? The material used in them could be alergic

In my opinion money is first of all a tool, a very practical tool that should be available to everybody. As we all know, it is certainly not available to everybody and even suppressed from the masses by the few. However, I think we are at the end of an era and things will inevitably change. There was once a family were all the members worked hard to enhance their lives. Finally, after many years they made it so good that they managed to free themselves from the chains of the working class and the survival mode. From then on they actually could, and did hire non wealthy people to do their dirty work for them. However, the parents, being wired in a certain way, where work was to be respected and it is what builds and defines man, and to them was even primarily what contributed to their success; They just couldn't understand or accept the concept of anyone, even more so their own children, could get a free ride, a free living. Therefore, with the best morals and intentions in mind, they demanded that their own children work and earn a living. Because after all, everybody knows that that is how things go, people should earn their own living. PROBLEM..."there is no work Pop, all the servants we hire are already doing all the work that needs to be done, that can be done!" "How dare you son", answered the father. “How dare you find excuses for not to work, how dare you insinuate me to give you a free ride? Out of the house you go lazy one". And there you are, another person marginalised and put out in the cold. While the whole time the solution was for the parents to celebrate the fact that they are lucky and wealthy enough to afford this high standard of living, and actually pay the son a living instead of throwing him out , and by the same allowing the whole family to benefit from their excellent financial situation, freeing them all from the survival mode and liberating them to peruse their dreams instead of slaving to live. This is what is happening in our rich western societies; instead of letting poorer countries working for us while for example, taxing the goods high enough to pay everybody a basic salary. We have chosen to continue to give our work, our jobs to poorer countries while keeping all the benefit away from the masses and in the hands of the few; throwing thousands and thousands of people out in the cold. "WE AIN'T SEEN NOTHING YET". Just wait as robotics become more and more potent, which they are and in an exponential way. Affecting every aspect of our lives and industries. We are already there, in the next fifty years even doctors will be replaced by some super technology....BUT THIS IS ALL WELCOME. Only those profits have to be shared with the people, and for the people to be able to spend and make the wheel go round for themselves and society in general. In my opinion the basic salary concept is inevitable. The dream of machines working for man is on the horizon. Let’s make it happen.

People don't spend most of their income on 3-D printable trinkets and gadgets. They spend it on housing, bills, debts, etc. Whatever the solution, it's gonna be a social/political issue, not economical.

We will need UBI in the transition towards a sustainable world until we can mind upload and transcend biology altogether.

He's a genius no doubt, but why is he Wearing 2 watches ???

as a wise commenter once said, "Ray K. Q & A makes me gay, Yay"

I think it is going to happen... and should. Quite frankly sometimes hiring additional people hampers things. Too many cooks in the kitchen... plus people that want to be doing something, or accomplishing a shared goal should be able to find eachother more easily without all this monetary red tape etc... really we have money because a lot of people just don't want to do ANYthing though. It's weird... Communism would be awesome if all you had was a bunch of awesome people. But we don't and that's why it can't work... plus people go in phases. You might be awesome for five years and just have an existential crisis for a while. I dunno! Unless we change our nature I just don't see a lot of people being capable of living in a post scarcity society. I mean I'm not sure they will be happy... and will become destructive. I don't know what the answer is.. guess we're going to find out or bust.

"RayK Q&A" "Thursray" ...

It is a great idea. Money is energy and it was meant to not become an eternal nightmare. We just deviated the total idea of it.

basic income is good for business people will spend more it will stimulate the economy

please hire me Google

Cut the BG muzak please !

seems inevitable

We need a Replicator™ - this will solve all resource problems, make money obsolete and solve most social and environmental problems as well. The whole idea of having an economy is obsolete then. RU-vid: *Scientists Discover a Way to Turn Light Into Matter*

The problem with universal basic income is how it treads on liberty (given our current tax system). In order for some jobless person to be paid for doing nothing, some other person with a job has to have their income forcibly confiscated. And if you don't think income tax amounts to forcible confiscation, try not paying them sometime and see how long you can avoid being imprisoned. There is always the threat of violence and/or imprisonment behind our current tax system. What makes it particularly nefarious is that productive person A's money is forcibly taken in order to fund un-productive person B's lifestyle. How can that not amount to punishing productivity? I continually argue for elimination of the federal income tax and the replacement of it with a graduated national sales tax. Sales tax offers a choice where income tax offers none. You can live completely tax-free if you don't buy anything. The amount of tax you pay is also a choice - certain items and/or price ranges would be taxed more, just as they are now by the states. Sales tax is the freest tax you'll ever pay because you want to buy things. So while I don't necessarily have a problem with universal basic income, I do have a problem with implementing it given our current tax structure. Perhaps as a better option, I'd like to see nationally-administered unemployment benefits. Right now the states each administer their own unemployment benefits and each has their own rules about how and when you can receive benefits. I lived in Chicago for 30 years, working and paying unemployment taxes. When I moved to Utah for a job that I was canned from for no good reason, I found out that I could not collect any unemployment benefits. I suspect other people have had similar experiences with unemployment. Unemployment is already very close to being a universal income, except for the arbitrary rules that prevent workers from collecting their benefits. If it were administered properly and people were able to draw upon that fund without such stringent rules and as long as it takes to find employment, we wouldn't be talking about universal basic income.

If you over think a camp fire you begin to forget its primary purpose of providing heat and light. Jobs/work do provide income but they also provide purpose. The vast majority of people that have worked at a for a long period of time but then find themselves unemployed will tell you that they miss "the grind". This is just another way of saying that they miss being a productive part of something larger. Gainful employment fulfills this basic human nature. Providing an unearned income will not only not fulfill this human need but will install negative incentives for unproductive human behavior. And, while what I just described may not be true for Ray and people of his intellectual capacity it is true for the other 90% of humans.

Choose one: immigration or basic income. You cannot have both.

If you had a society of 10 people and only 5 forty hour a week jobs that produce all the society needs...then you can't expect the 5 people to do all the work while the other 5 live on a basic income....it doesn't matter how big the society you MUST share the jobs and everyone gets to enjoy working less ...there would be no such thing as not enough jobs if the jobs are shared.

lol anyone else cringe when he says "every Thursray"?

I'm still waiting I have not received one penny. it's bullshit

Hey, don't give it to cats, I'll have it.

Any real economist knows this is a terrible idea

Wealth can only be generated by at least two entities specializing in goods or services and trading their surpluses. This is the basic unit of economic health. For one party to opt out, gaze at their navel all day long in order to find their cosmic center while having an actually productive individual or entity support them with resources is incompetent economics of the sort that made life in the U.S.S.R. a soul-destroying nightmare. While I agree with Kurzweil on many things this isn't one of them. If anything increased productivity might temporarily support such indolence as a technocratic mechanism of dependence to eventually marginalize and dispose of, what will be seen as, a useless surplus population.

Job Guarantee and Modern Monetary Theory is the way to go. Basic income is not a good idea

I don't think he understands UBI as well as he thinks he does. Normally in test scenarios with UBI people aren't working less, sometimes they even end up working more. In the case of a UBI it just frees you from having to work just to survive so instead you're working to strive for more. A UBI is going to become more and more necessary as jobs will certainly start disappearing at least in the interim before everything we buy gets really really cheap. The flaw in his thinking is he's contingent on large companies making things uber cheaply and then selling them for almost nothing. But what will happen is instead of building iphones like those today but for a penny, they'll build super-iphones that cost as much as today's iphones. Nothing will be cheap, instead companies will just make a lot more money. What we need is a UBI and a way of taxing those companies to pay for it, or a way of enforcing rules upon those companies that force them to cheapen their products significantly so they're not making 1000% up-sell profit margins.

Universal basic income is extremely problematic and unrealistic because of the fungible nature of money. What would be a _more_ realistic path (though not a guaranteed path) to the same goals is universal food, water, and shelter. Universal income will destroy the economy. Money doesn't grow on technological trees, but maybe food water and shelter some day will.

ray k q and a makes may gay yay

New name for an old concept "Socialism".

Universal basic income would be 100% useless. There is one thing nobody considers about it. What would happen if you would give X amount of money to all the people on the planet? All the prices would rise X amount, so that income would worth nothing. This is called inflation.

poop

No!! It's a crap idea and will enslave the dull.

I thought originally basic income was a decent idea to solve many problems of increasing tech and AI. But now I totally disagree!!! One thing we can't socialize our way out of this. It eventually lowers standards which eventually production falters. It puts to many controls on new products which people won't be able to afford. If your job doesn't love you back, then you shouldn't be doing it anyway. Go find a new one or get training. The common theme is, there won't be enough jobs.... Are there problems that need to be worked out? Yes!!!! But it is up to us to upgrade our lives. Need drives innovation. As fr as 3D printers are concerned,... they are not the cure all for creativity. What we need is a highly skilled labor force.... I can see large Governments shrinking, and small ones joining together.

This sounds like Marxist ideal ..

the UBI under the current model will create inflation. Instead, the govt should provide the basics (food, shelter, clothes, transportation) instead of giving people money to exchange for these items from private corporations who will keep increasing the cost of the product cause people can forever afford to pay more (look at college subsidies and how education has gone through the roof cause colleges are now building amusement parks essentially cause students gets federal subsidized loans)