The End of Work? AGI Will Make UBI a Necessity (Universal Basic Income) 

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UBI was necessary 10 years ago, we've been living off debt for far too long. It's time. Humans will be able to focus their time on things they love which means less depression, more time to love and teach children, more time for fitness, so many cultural and social benefits.

I find it funny that robots are pictured working at a keyboard. You would think that there would faster ways for machines to be in a data entry capacity...

There’s no easy answer to this problem. I wish our institutions would be working on this instead of wars / funding proxy wars. Ridiculous

What people don't understand is that the economy need consomption, your income will be spent to buy products and this money will pay other people which will consume back and forth, that's why everyone is overwhelmed by ads, if there's an AI capable of doing your job but doesn't have any human needs, the only one who will expensively consume is the human behind a company made up of AI employees, so UBI is mandatory for the economy unless you want to exclude everyone and get back to the Middle Age with only a small number of human extremely rich holding 99% of the economy. It doesn't matter wether an AI is sentient, it will be used as a tool by everyone, that's why everyone will have access to AGI.

"The lower incomes haven't changed at all" @18:00 That is not entirely correct. The data shown on screen goes from 10% to 9%, which for a person with a lower income is a 10% decrease in income. That is quite significant.

Its time for a new 'ism. There is no way we can have ultra smart ai and robots while people live on the streets

People dont understand economics. If you dont have citizens performing work, but citizens are the ones who can participate in an economy, and something else does the labour, then its only natural to tax those who produce goods and services, and give the money to citizens so they can participate in an economy. The point is circulation. Nations need to circulate money so that wealth is distributed, maintaining the nation. Think as to how the mental health system works in lets say for example, the UK. There are workers who produce and provide services, but there are also people who cant work. So the government gives them money. Does the economy shut down? No, in fact because of those benefits, money is circulated in the economy, supermarkets, coffee shops, pubs, electric companies all get a share. The economy still goes on. UBI in a world of robotics would allow for people to circulate money, produced by robots, robots that wouldnt participate in the economy, leaving more wealth for humans as robots produce. It is a positive feedback loop.

Low income people should receive a universal basic income because we have had to suffer. About 40 million people are barely getting by. I would be able to save and invest more if i received this income. I'm disabled and would really appreciate it. I'm tired of living in poverty.

Just bring out UBI already! It will really make people look into what they're really good at, like, and enjoy doing! By nature, we as humans will always want what others have that we don't have. Since that Ai will be taking most of the mundane, boring, low to high skill jobs. There is only room left for the highly expertise jobs and they will be paying a lot because only a few can actually do them. These people will have an extremely higher income than those who decide to not further their skill set. UBI will give the opportunity to those who do want to further their education to do so and those who don't will have income to provide for their basic needs.

I live in the USA which is very anti welfare. Nordic countries with better social welfare protections like Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland will be more adaptive to ubi changes needed. Unfortunately, these welfare countries are harder to migrate into because they don't want people working the system designed for the citizens already living there. Xenophobia is a strong universal trait when migrations increase and puts strains on the system in place.

UBI will be enough to pay for one basic Netflix subscription

UBI will not increase inflation if the money comes through taxes, meaning it represents work that has already been done. however, if the money is printed, and created out of thin air, you will get inflation.

UBI likely will pay very little, something similar to unemployment benefits.

A Consumer based economy cannot survive if the consumers do not have enough funding to consume.

Unfortunately, the Right is dead set against UBI. Many red states have already passed laws against it. Of course, once unemployment reaches a certain point, lawmakers will either adapt or pay the price.

The main problem i have with all of this is that i can't trust these people we're talking about. Their pride to force this through is off the charts and people with those type of issues are always a path to tyranny. History shows us that this is probably what's going to happen. I do think it's going to be great for a specific time but, in the end... power will always be consolidated down to ONE individual. It's just a fact, historically.

Heres the thing.. people who have worked hard and obtained big houses and stuff are not going to have their property taken off of them.. so they will get all their current money plus UBI and live in paradise... Where as a person who does not even own a house who rents, will just stay in a tiny house or flat and near poverty... So UBI is not redistribution of wealth.. But its still better than nothing if it works. And so it would also be an incentive to work and find new jobs as you get extra money on top.

The problem is that big corporations haven't paid taxes in decades because of corrupt, bribed politicians. Money needs to circulate in a healthy economy. If they actually paid their fair share and the government stopped wasting trillions of dollars a year on wars and aid to other countries we could implement a UBI today.

The biggest conundrum coming. I've gotten as far as thinking that basic food, services (phone, power, water), and housing payment will all have to be paid thru a ubi and digital currency. Still racking my brain on how other economic problems can be solved.

With AGI everybody can get a personalized solution or advice. We won't need universal anything.

Thank you for this video man, people urgently need to understand this concept

i think it was back in the 60's, we imagined that automation and technology would create a world where it was not necessary for everyone to labor 40 hours a week for the man :) now we are here, and just can't seem to accept it :)

I agree with you 100%. I saw Sam Altman say that perhaps UBI should just be a “slice of GPT7 compute”. -// I have no idea how that pays someone’s rent. 🙏🙏

I always saw UBI as a transitional solution that would last at most 100 years, hopefully enough time to build an infrastructure to support a cashless society

How did they deal with this issue in the Star Trek universe?

There is a fundamental misunderstanding of the impact of AGI on UBI (also have a look at universal basic services and other tax regimes/models). The short-term impact may be to introduce UBI etc but very shortly thereafter it will lead to the end of Capitalism entirely as long as you get over a few extra hurdles.... Robotics, Energy, sustainable resource management.

Interesting topic. I‘m definitely pro UBI but I think that this will only be a solution for the transition time from capitalism to abundance.

Good video. All the focus on alignment risks and things like that sometimes distracts from this real-life problem: soon most people, and perhaps then almost all people, will not be worth hiring for any reason. Yes, a system like UBI is not ideal, but most would rather UBI than going hungry in the street. One thing about this: presumably AGI/ASI will still be rapidly improving so we could quickly approach a condition of superabundance where people on UBI are not just scraping by but can suddenly afford amazing things like home robots, personal health assistants and trainers, near zero cost food and housing. UBI would be maybe depressing if AGI never improved anything but that is not likely to be the case. Thanks for making this, it is a very necessary discussion.

I'm thinking at the point where this becomes a major issue ai/agi can be used to gamify scenarios for best path

I'm in Canada and the cost of living oin the past 4 years has gotten to point where you can't make enough money working 1 or even 2 jobs to pay your bills. The average cost to rent an apartment here is about $2000+ a month when 4 years ago it was about $1000 a month. I'm working right now to point of burning myself out all the time and I never seem to get ahead even with s small online business. I think if I had more money per month available to me I could ditch the job and focus on the business which I could potentially be built up to a point where i'm making more money then I could ever make working a job if i could find the right items that sell well.

Inflation… Deflation is more likely as automation lowers the cost of production significantly as labor costs drop. No human workers. No HR issues. No lawsuits from unhappy workers. Workers (ie robots etc) work 24 hours a day. All of this makes things cheaper not more expensive. Less “money” is needed not more.

I know of crypto (who doesn't right?) But this is the first time I heard of banks or the fed programming money. I personally liked Yangs policy on UBI. Opt in and lock yourself out of certain social serves for UBI. Really offsets the price tag along with some of those transactional taxes that you'll hardly notice. I believe with his plan there would be government revenue from it after a few years, not printing money. The only other plan I've heard as far as UBI policy was Zoltan, but his plan would be much harder to pass, but 100% revenue. A fair amount of the public wouldn't agree with it. I heard Bernie had UBI as policy years before his last run, though I have no idea what the details were. I guess it was his run before the federal jobs policy was introduced.

Given how hopeless the job situation can be in America, combined with the absurd pricing for houses and such, I for one am all in favor of this sort of AGI/UBI arrangement. A controversial opinion, I know, but think about it: a world where no one has to work, and where they can just live their lives carefree, able to spend them doing what makes them happy without fear of going bankrupt? That sounds like a pretty great way to live, if you ask me.

AGI just needs to create the Star Trek replicator and no one needs anything else but some raw matter toner cartridges and a power outlet. Capitalism over buh bye. UBI? Don’t need it I have a replicator thanks.

Won't be inflation if robot take over in every section. Home builders, produce, general labor... due to companies competition

Companies do not pay taxes, they just pass it on to their customers. (Inflation). Also, since no one will need to plan for retirement, this will most likely cause the stock market to become useless. Pensions and retirement funds are a big chunk of the market.

14:52 cbdc could exist in parallel to decentralized crypto tbh. idk if the government/banks would allow it, but theoretically it could

Im all for UBI. Work is essentially a prison. Working for 30 or 40 yrs just to get by, blows my mind. Most of if my life is just work. Life is not enjoyable to me, this way. I dont think most jobs should require college either. Ppl can be yrained on a lot of regular jobs except for doctors and certain ones. A secretary and other lower jobs could be attainable. I also have bad back problems with daily chronic pain and its very uncomfortable and painful to get through certain days, even though my job is easy.

meanwhile, still waiting on that full self driving car.

If UBI comes about and we had the opportunity to put that income into other opportunities then I don’t see what’s wrong, being able to invest in anything to make life better and be rewarded with additional income what’s wrong with that

When AI kicks in, I think we will have "Universal Basic Living Standard"

UBI means nothing if Inflation is not well controlled.

Do you really believe those in control will feed and house you, for nothing in return? Think again.

Any job have boudaries in term of task and goal. Due to determinism nature of coding, any job can be algorithizmed. The issue come from the confidentiality and access to these data that are mostly private. Human is still required for agreement but everything could be execute by machine as soon as both data and materials assets are available.

No, we should wait until human intelligence becomes obsolete and we lose all forms of negotiation to even consider starting UBI. For now, lets just keep hemoraging jobs to AI slowly and have 50 million uber drivers on the app and label each ride a new job to keep the numbers up and the stock market pumping.

If AGI makes workers unnecessary, won't we eventually be unable to purchase the goods and services from those companies? Tax revenues from regular folks will disappear as everyone is on the government dole. And the same will eventually happen to companies as there will be no revenues to tax because no one can buy their wares. The coming stampede to non-human workers sounds like a race to the bottom to me. First for the workers, but ultimately for the owners of these companies, too. We forget the promises of a flood of white collar jobs to replace the manufacturing jobs sent overseas by NAFTA in the 80's and 90's. Similarly, twenty years later, the tech revolution wiped out millions of jobs and replaced them with companies that used mere hundreds of software developers and technicians. I suspect those instances were a very small taste of what we're going to see happen with AGI.

huh im starting to think bussnis after agi will just be like a video game where you buy and sells stuff ect

People don't understand that money is a form of rationing - under an automated economy everyone's ration will increase (well, except for current billionaires and decamillionaires).

Just thinking. If costs are tending to zero why UBi is needed? Also the inflation part doesn't make sense. If costs go to zero shouldn't it cause deflation?

Sam said it best in 2015. On the growing artificial-intelligence market: "AI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there'll be great companies." The problem is resources and the location of those resources, and a much faster rate of needing those resources. AI is a race for resources to get more resources for control, at some point probably most likely after the hopefully not radioactive dust settles it will completely change most systems. UBI can't work in the US without massive regulatory, state, and federal tax changes. This inflation is not easily regulated, and the way it gets regulated goes back to the first point. Good luck with that. Also for future people in power who are controlling the AI, when it tells them that people are only doing damage and depleting needed resources, how do they respond knowing that? There is probably most likely an almost zero chance of this happening without much death. Thank you for giving many of the reasons.

You do not need UBI, you just need to be self-sufficient. Produce your food, energy and clothes.

I used to work in a packing warehouse, and i can tell you one thing for certain i did NOT derive my value from that shit job.

Thank you man I agree with your views we need social safety nets

I can see AGI taking over repetitive tasks. But, I can think of a huge number of tasks that people do, which requires creative problem solving. For example, a Product Manager has to balance out so many very soft factors, based on an understanding of consumer desires and the capabilities of their organization. Their ability to make either conservative or aggressive decisions defines the success of an organization. There are so many specialty skills like this that make up any organization, that I don't understand how AGI could take over the breadth of the skills that are needed to make any organization work.

With the rise of AI, we have a shot at providing everyone everything they need to flourish

your analysis on UBI being affected by inflation is wrong. Inflation isn't just how more supply of money reduces it's value, it it the increase in price across services products. Given automation will increase efficiency in business a lot, their costs will reduce, making the production of the same product cheaper. This is a deflationary force that should stability the inflation caused by printing a lot of money for UBI

UBI will be the solution and we can do things that we are actually passionate while collaborating with robots.

UBI without price fixing of the basic needs it purpose to satisfy wouldn't work, all those basic things will rise in price because of the higher demand.

Where does the money come from?

Damn, there's gonna be a lot more competition in "the streets" as one of the few industries where the biological human element is more challenging to replace with a non-biological contender.

Do we have to use the concept of money in the future? It will eventually be archaic and its honestly too slow for value

Money is an illusion. It's time for everyone to stop believing in money and adopt a better system. Enough stalling, let's do it right now.

The rise In demand leading to inflation assumes that the robots can't keep up with supply.

If everyone gets paid the same no matter what wether your employed or not, then what would be the point of having a job?

If AI takes care of all our needs... why have money at all?

Taxes - Taxes should be raised on companies replacing workers not everyone through income taxes. The reason is during the transition to replace all jobs it would be unfair to tax everyone as the workers who are still doing their current jobs won’t make any more money to pay for those who don’t. “If” the government prints more money to pay for the displaced workers then that would cause inflation that would again hurt workers still working. Thus the initial UBI should be an “unemployment” tax that should be paid by individual companies as they lay off workers. The automation driven companies will have greater profits that cause their stocks will rise, but only 50% of Americans have 401ks or stocks. The transition will be tricky. Tax the companies who benefit, but don’t tax “everyone” or the people still working will be footing the bill, which won’t work.

as someone who has worked in tech and it and repair my whole life, im sure ai could replace me repairing (object/program/service, anything i can do) eventually but being the guy who repairs stuff and can think outside the box about problems that need fixing sometimes will always be needed, maybe 5 years, 10 years, 20 years, however long, there will always need to be someone to fix the back end of infrastructure when stuff breaks in weird interesting ways

The PC error sound touched my soul

If this technology keeps increasing exponentially, God knows where we will end up

UBI should not just be a subsistence income. It should provide for a modest but descent life. The big problem is paying for it with taxes which opens up a whole can of worms.

I used to love the idea of UBI but as time goes on it looks more and more like a human sized venus fly trap.

I'll give a warning to all small to midsize companies: there is only enough energy for 10 AGI models that will use as much energy as Holland, Greece and Portugal combined. So only the super large, super rich will be able to buy that for their company and they'll take over everything. And as money becomes worthless...

I think income will come from an investment type system for societies and social groups.

If the Government decides where demand should be how can the market respond? The Soviet Union had this problem as they could not efficiently allocate resources.

What happen to people with huge debts at post UBI? (EG. mortgage?)

I think UBI is a bandaid solution and not likely to fix much if it ever gets implemented. We live in a sort of techno-feudalism society where the income gap is so large that it's comparable to feudalism times. We're gonna need something close to a revolution to fix our problems, appropriate the data centers for the people or something idk.

UBI will be an equalizer, which is not an option in the minds of most middle and upper class persons. Who wants their lifestyle demoted? There had better be massive increases in stock dividend payouts, for example, to make up the difference caused by the inability to get a job to maintain one's lifestyle.

Thanks for this video. People need to imagine the future of mass unemployment before it hits.

Do you think that in 2035 with the advent of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) and ASI (Super Artificial Intelligence) they will introduce universal basic income!? a subsidy!? there will be free will!? an era of abundance will begin!? the intellectual and motor capabilities of robots have already surpassed the average human and before 2035 there is talk of them surpassing those of any human and then again those of any human combined! regarding both body and mind! answer me please...

Es curioso cómo cuando alguien dice compartir la riqueza, la gente automáticamente piensa que "el socialismo es malo", basta con mirar a Venezuela... PERO nunca se escucha a la gente decir eso sobre los Emiratos Árabes Unidos, donde los emiratíes no tienen que trabajar, y la mayoría de ellos tampoco. Se cree que más de la mitad de todos los ciudadanos en edad de trabajar están desempleados. Obtienen generosos beneficios, hasta $5,000 cada uno al mes y alojamiento gratuito. Además, la electricidad, el agua y la atención médica son gratuitos (para ellos).

capitalizm is like Scream energy on Monster Ink and UBI is like Laughter energy.

My gut tells me the ideal format would be something where income tax goes negative after a certain threshold; in a continuous manner, curving towards full living wage for people with zero income, and in the other direction curving up so that billionaires have to run as fast as they can just to stay in place; and that's where the money will come from, I call it the tax treadmill; let the decrepidly rich keep their obscene inflows, but scrape it off their wallets to keep the rest of the society well. I'll leave figuring out the exact curve and the crossover point to the more math inclined; but it is important that the reverse tax never shrinks faster than people's earnings grow; you don't wanna discourage people from doing stuff that makes them more valuable to society.

12:18 well wait a minute here Even with all of the extra money that was created it appears that the dollar has risen fairly strongly against most other currencies recently but of course it could be stated that also the other major nations on earth created a bunch of money as well during that time. Once again I pause it that the time is not quite right for a UBI until of course we have supply push deflation.

Im ready for a digital and physical gd standard with UBI

The billionaires didn'tt create the t tech lmao, they invested money sure, but people like me invented the tech, and mostt of us engineers will be unemployed in 10 years, we already seeing mass layoffs in tech for over a year

there are better systems than the current immature_UBI_theory for ASI-AGI_AI era to keep the randomness of the human society.

Well company holders will make more money with robots. The average person will have some to spent if dosent work. Everything becomes cheaper food, services. Some people will probably just work less instead of 8 hours it will be 4 hours.

Again - How come u r not talking about TVP and Copiosis and etc?

UBI would only lead to inflation, if the US government decides to print money instead of balancing the budget and tax the rich accordingly. UBI could be rolled out at any time and cause zero inflation if the UBI is 0.001% or 1% compensation. The talk that UBI would cause inflation is only jargon pushed by people that are worth more than 2 billion dollars !!

A bridge until a world of abundance, and income unnecessary. Then build, create for the good of humanity. Volunteering, helping others always felt better doing it because you want help people, not for money. People don’t need incentives, only the crappy ones. Work for your community to keep it healthy

You cant invest in OpenAi. Its a private company...

I am not sure UBI is the answer here, the problem of solving these issues in money terms is that there is right now inherent inequality in the world. UBI will likely exacerbate the inequalities between rich and poor countries and it will likely have severe unintended consequences. What the fist goal of AI should be is to create UBS (Universal Basic Services) globally. Being able to provide food, water, housing, transportation for free will basically mean that money will only have utility for luxury goods and services. This of course means that we have to rethink our whole economy, but if we get powerful AI (not even AGI) this will have to be done anyway or we are looking at a dystopian future. Providing UBS globally will likely improve global social cohesion and could be a launching pad for humans colonising other planets. That is assumin that we will solve our demographic problem first as birth rates are declining rapidly.

Social media of this channel?

@20:24...upload yourself,,,you become a AI yourself ...

This was one of my favorite videos of yours. I appreciate learning that you have a human side. The concept of UBI is quite polarizing. There are many people who have spent their whole lives, focused on building their own personal wealth. These people are terrified that someone will come along and take their wealth away from them and yet these are the same people that will walk past a homeless man on the side of the road and look at him with disgust. it’s so important that humanity learns to have empathy for one another. Anyway, great video, my friend. Keep up the good work.

that ship sailed years ago my friend.

not only will the large companies not share money they will hold most the wealth and getting rich after the current money system falls will be pretty much impossible while the large companies continue to get richer the only way to stop it would be laws to force business wealth caps any extra amount earned must go to a stimulus like equal spread money system and even then you'll still never have a chance to get rich

The crazy thing is 5 years ago this would have been crazy talk but today it seems like a given that most people will not work and AGI can work a lot of jobs with no help other than when it brakes then it needs fixed and 1 or 2 managers to give the AGI directions. Also the funny thing is AGI is being worked on right now but its just a gimmick largely so after the fad blows over in 2 to 5 years everyone will soon forget about it like well it never happened is what I think will happen for jobs like plumber or electrician or any manual labor jobs while most office jobs cut their staff by 50% or more over the same time frame then like a explosion in the sky say about 5 to 10 years after that AGI will be back and replacing people on Mass in manual labor jobs so one could say by 2050 we will have most people out of work or doing fake jobs its almost a given the best case is a UBI with citizens having free rights. the worst case is working fake jobs that most people hate and not having free rights like freedom of speech witch could really happen in the short term. this kind of tech will almost certainly start World War III but it could be a war with only resources based with fighting AGI with AGI to really no end and having some civilians dragged into it. it could be the most Humane World War we've ever had with only one or two instances of AGI wiping out a whole town of people it could lead to a nuclear war or biological warfare to try and save the country in question that is losing the war and its a situation where a gun is a gun so at the end of the day it does not make a difference it could lead to 50% of the world's human population going extinct. look at the end of the day all AGI really does is make country's obsolete and gives the masses a way to make a system with no one on top other than the AGI that can be used by any human to do almost anything witch is like a Powder Keg waiting to blow you could have a situation like in Fallout where a Corporation namely vault-tec starts a hot nuclear World War because they don't want there share price to drop so they launch a nuke in a AGI cold war that causes Humanity to basically self end itself. their goal at the time was just to keep tensions High so there company could keep making money off the conflict but it backfired in there faces hard and turned most of the earth into a nuclear Wasteland. the short of it is AGI is very dangerous for all the domino effect ways it can lead to something worse even in a scenario where we stop it from getting to smart and out of are control. witch most likely it will get out of are control and rule over the human race at some point and we will be little better than pets or a very small chance it will end us all.

UBI will not come until 100% of production is made my automated robots and services. Nowadays we are about 90% of what human do (objects) done by machines.