The Wall Street Journal has weighed in on a Universal Basic Income (UBI) again. For those that don’t know, UBI is a government issued basic wage that would be issued in the future in the event that mass technological change or a calamity renders traditional wages impossible for masses of people. Dan Nidess, in the article Why a Universal Basic Income Would Be a Calamity, made a good case for how and why a UBI would destroy the economic and social foundations of the American way of life as we know it. I don’t disagree with his analysis at all… as far as it goes. After making an informed eloquent statement of UBI woes, he addresses everything except how people will eat, when, (not if) we suddenly lose tens of millions of jobs in the not too distant future.
All of the high profile people warning of the robo-pocalypse to date on both sides, including Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, have been vague on details. Answers tend to fall toward statements like: ‘We need to put our creative minds to work’ or simply, ‘It will never actually happen because we’ve always been able to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and we always will’… until we don’t. The UBI itself is not much further advanced. The mega-rich pay for it, the poor souls take the money and are ‘freed up to do creative things’. We all live happily ever after. Both sides, in different ways, fail to take into account that huge yawning gap in self worth that is tied up in work. A lot of human experience says that most people freed from the tether of work do not go out and climb mountains and write poems or music. They do tend to watch TV reruns, take drugs and rot. Pro UBI is at least correct in saying that there will be a crisis and that a solution needs to be anticipated.
Lacking the realism of an inevitable robo-pocalypse by the anti-UBI-ers or the moon beam glib generalization of the pro-UBI-ers; what all of them fail to take into account is the propensity for the disenfranchised to embrace what we now call ‘crime’, except in a dystopian future, the word ‘crime’ will not come close to capturing the scale of a highly structured sub-society dedicated to the plunder, revenge, or destruction of their technical overlords.
Some say that fears of the robot/AI revolution are overblown and that all will progress well under the watchful eye of the scientist birthing the new day. UBI would perhaps slow the progression of the worst factors of vocational displacement but as Nidess of the WSJ points out, at a great societal cost. All of the people (now finally) debating this, live worlds apart from how vocational disenfranchisement already manifests. You see it in cities like Baltimore were sub-classes have given up on any pretense of mobility or independence from government support systems. We are not quite ‘well’ now, we are not improving the fundamental prospects of groups such as Millennials, and we have not stopped the erosion of the middle class. If the scientist class does not show any regard for the difficulty of the structural economics of struggling peoples now, why should they be entrusted with an answer for another 50 million new sub-class citizens a decade from now?
Technology, the displacer of your job, is regarded as inevitable and irresistible, an external force that happens to us. “No” is inconceivable and impossible to the technologist. We must build the robots, we especially must build artificial intelligence AI, we must re-engineer our very human biology, we must make machine and human as one. We must embrace the coming Singularity. Why? We created the nuclear technology to blow ourselves from the face of this earth and yet to date, we’ve had the collective restraint to not use it.
Why can we not draw a similar line in regard to our ability to work? Why can we not voluntarily accept some form of inefficiency as a concession to the highest principles of humanity? Can we not partition some forms of our labor for the explicit purpose of human purpose? Is that not a worthwhile endeavor?
We see signs of vocational preservation in some European communities such as France’s approach to quality food production or in what I’d call the ‘hipster’ movement, where numbers of them forsake coding for butchery for example. These are not micro-economic scale endeavors, these are values held by larger demographics and supported by those not directly involved. So lets be blunt here, its all well and good for Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg to warn us of robotic demise and vaguely hope for a million new poets, but they would be of far greater help by studying, endorsing, supporting and perhaps even bankrolling community economic structures and products that have nothing to do with a computer.
When Dan Nidess, just one of many writers in denial of any conceivable circumstance where UBI would be needed, when he observes the first half million truck drivers heading for the soup lines because Amazon’s Bezos just switched to drone delivery, I hope that he too will think outside of his box. Maybe the UBI would be useful within a certain context, not as an end but as a means. This topic is growing in visibility and its time for all to start thinking with their feet on the ground, not in vague denials or abstractions.
