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RE: This Post About Universal Basic Income May Shock You!
A UBI isn't going to result in consumers having more money than they do now. It will result in mitigating to an extent losses to income and wealth that are going to result from technological unemployment.
Have you read a book called Why Nations Fail? It gives a story about how people were concerned about unemployment from the rise of the machines over 400 years ago, but getting past that (a couple of hundred years later) led to the Industrial Revolution.
I understand your logic, but do you think we're close enough to having the machines take all of the jobs?
It's already happening. And reports from MIT state up to 40% of all jobs will be automated within 1 to 2 decades. The reason it is different this time is that the machines increasingly can do everything a human can do, and faster, more accurately, and more efficiently. And by everything, I mean everything (bar creativity, at this point; but that's gone too if true AI is achieved).
Unless the machines are owned by everyone, won’t the benefits of automation accrue to the people who do one them? That’s why people were wrong 100 years ago when they predicted that we’d have so much leisure time.
Whoever owns the machines will own mankind...
Yeah absolutely the owners of them will (and already are) reaping the rewards. Bill Gates has suggested we need a "robot tax" to pay for a UBI. By whatever mechanism, we need to increase taxes on the rentier class and the new "productivity rentier class"*, and get that money into the hands of consumers if we want to stop capitalism from collapsing in a screaming heap.
* A term I just invented to describe those automaters who benefit massively from productivity gains through automation, while the wages they pay to their dwindling human workforces barely increase at all.