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Normies / statists believe that when AI takes most jobs, UBI will save them.
I think there is a potential problem with that: it sees government as something we have, because we want it. It comes from a belief in democracy. The naive belief that we the people have created a government, so it can serve us.
The reality may be much less bright for them: government is a business and as such, it's subject to economic incentives. If you're not useful to the market, you may not be useful to coercive authority either. It's not obvious, because people have traditionally been useful. We tend to only look at history, and we don't have a history of human uselessness to go by.
Government can be viewed as a farming business. The politicians in power are farmers and their job is to look after their livestock to maximize the harvest (milk, fleece, what have you). The livestock is kept on life support, because what it produces is worth the cost. And it's worth the cost, because it's essentially slave labour.
But when machines replace humans, farming people will no longer be economically justifiable and the business model will die. The state won't get defunded or destroyed; it will simply be abandoned.
Tomorrow Not Guaranteed, amazing compilation from Flowgnar on Fountain;
farming people will always be economically justifiable by parasitic psychopaths, because that's a supply of stem cells and organs for longevity; that's only one example! The Matrix (1999) clearly explained that people will have been turned into a battery; simple example: patients in the ICU (intensive care unit) are on life support in order to keep the dollars flowing and medical staff working;
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Stem cells and organs will definitely be in demand. It should go hand in hand with the biological immortality Ray Kurzweil predicts.
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People adapat faster and in ways it's hard to believe. Think about people living in Venezuela, how it was before and how it is now.
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This is spot on. The closest we will ever get to UBI is COVID stimulus, and we saw the inflation of asset prices and consumer goods. If AI takes most jobs it is more likely to end our system of government than to result in any kind of basic income.
Democracy is a temporary interlude, ye interregnum where civil war is rendered non-violent, licensing a group to enact violence on behalf of the state on citizens in order to maintain the illusion of peace. In a majoritarian democracy one vote is a proxy for a gun that would be used if the democratic peace were to fall. Women are given the vote because the men with the guns need them and they therefore have influence. The old and infirm have votes because they have experience, influence, and other skills in case of renewed violence.
But now we have consensus collapse so the peace is unstable. If jobs are decimated then the peace will unravel, as states will no longer have a monopoly on either the monetary system or violence, rendering them entirely redundant.
In the case of a civil war you need to pay fighters, but you can't pay them in a fiat token if they are not certain that you will win. You need to pay them in something that they can still use in case you lose and they have to escape. So if a UBI is distributed it will just drive up the price of an equivalent digital token that they have complete sovereignty over.
In the case of violence all of the weapons come from other countries where they are manufactured. Literally anyone can access cheap weapons now, whether from Russia or China or Iran, given a sufficient degree of organisation, which is granted by the stability of the non-state monetary system.
So if the "far right" or any unsanctioned parties were to legitimately win but not allowed to govern they would have absolutely no reason not to turn over the table and declare the end of the democratic experiment.
The best case scenario is a distributed participation income system that makes it worthwhile for the people with the capital to put down their guns and accept a new model for the welfare system that is market-based and not administered by a self-interested bureaucracy.
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Tax cattle. That's what we are to the state. When you have to many cattle you either sell them or slaughter them.
Don't be a cow. Be a pig. Pigs break free when they choose and come back to grab food. Cows easier to control. Cows might walk through an open fence but they might just stay 20 yards away. They have no desire to be free. Pigs have never been fully domesticated.
Don't be a cow.
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