Beautiful work here, Alejandro. This is well thought out, and I agree that these are the types of risks we really ought to be thinking about. Every time I wanted to bring something to your attention, you covered it later in the piece. Well done!
One thing I'll add, just some food for thought: I think of the money flowing through the US as the bloodstream of capitalism, and maybe the central bank is the beating heart. They money has to flow throughout, or oxygen won't be delivered (economic power). UBI begins the process at the bottom, and while I understand the argument against innovation due to just giving folks enough so that they don't starve or become homeless, I'd argue that we would have a net gain in innovation and entrepreneurship, largely because there is an entire class of tens of millions of people who can't think about anything other than paying for rent and such right now. Given some stability, I would presume that some percentage of these folks would then become innovators, inventors, and entrepreneurs in meaningful ways they might not otherwise be able to do.
There's a great deal more to be said about this, but I just wanted to share a little bit about how I perceive economics: what I think at first is almost always too simplistic, and complexity and nuance is often buried under the surface, waiting to be uncovered (for me, this means reading a TON and listening to an awful lot of books over the last decade or so).
Agree! For the record I do believe UBI could be a great idea, even in a mostly market-driven economy. What I'm skeptical of is not the success of UBI as a policy, but the probability that a purely market-driven economy has the incentives to install UBI. If we can get past the dog-eat-dog fixed-size-pie zero-sum mentality of pure capitalism I think we have a change to find an even more prosperous sociopolitical system.
That added context does change the conversation a good bit. I do think it's inevitable, or else our society will simply collapse at some point. In every case throughout history when wealth has been as concentrated as it is today, that has eventually been clawed back through legislation, or else there has been a revolution.
I'm sure you can guess that I'm firmly planted on Team Legislation. It is my hope that we can get there through incremental changes, not all at once by way of insane violence and a very uncertain outcome.
A purely market-driven economy wants to have people spending all the time. If the production conditions are good enough, then a market-driven economy will create the conditions for people to consume that production.
In a world when most of the production is carried out by machines, and demographic problems are not problems anymore, the logical step (mainly for a market-driven economy) is to keep the money flowing.
There's also the risk, captured in WALL-E, of a slow decay into sloth through the use of AI and enabling technologies.
And to double down on your point about Autonomous Weapons. The Clone Wars in Star Wars highlights that Palpatine was able to manipulate becasue both forces he controled (The Republic Clones and the Separatist Droid Armies) were manufactured for that purpose. For all the combatants who died, only money was lost. No one on either side had skin in the game as so Palpatine could manipulate his way to power.
Beautiful work here, Alejandro. This is well thought out, and I agree that these are the types of risks we really ought to be thinking about. Every time I wanted to bring something to your attention, you covered it later in the piece. Well done!
One thing I'll add, just some food for thought: I think of the money flowing through the US as the bloodstream of capitalism, and maybe the central bank is the beating heart. They money has to flow throughout, or oxygen won't be delivered (economic power). UBI begins the process at the bottom, and while I understand the argument against innovation due to just giving folks enough so that they don't starve or become homeless, I'd argue that we would have a net gain in innovation and entrepreneurship, largely because there is an entire class of tens of millions of people who can't think about anything other than paying for rent and such right now. Given some stability, I would presume that some percentage of these folks would then become innovators, inventors, and entrepreneurs in meaningful ways they might not otherwise be able to do.
There's a great deal more to be said about this, but I just wanted to share a little bit about how I perceive economics: what I think at first is almost always too simplistic, and complexity and nuance is often buried under the surface, waiting to be uncovered (for me, this means reading a TON and listening to an awful lot of books over the last decade or so).
Agree! For the record I do believe UBI could be a great idea, even in a mostly market-driven economy. What I'm skeptical of is not the success of UBI as a policy, but the probability that a purely market-driven economy has the incentives to install UBI. If we can get past the dog-eat-dog fixed-size-pie zero-sum mentality of pure capitalism I think we have a change to find an even more prosperous sociopolitical system.
That added context does change the conversation a good bit. I do think it's inevitable, or else our society will simply collapse at some point. In every case throughout history when wealth has been as concentrated as it is today, that has eventually been clawed back through legislation, or else there has been a revolution.
I'm sure you can guess that I'm firmly planted on Team Legislation. It is my hope that we can get there through incremental changes, not all at once by way of insane violence and a very uncertain outcome.
A purely market-driven economy wants to have people spending all the time. If the production conditions are good enough, then a market-driven economy will create the conditions for people to consume that production.
In a world when most of the production is carried out by machines, and demographic problems are not problems anymore, the logical step (mainly for a market-driven economy) is to keep the money flowing.
That sounds true, but history has shown over and over that unrestricted capitalism converges to creating artificial scarcity.
There's also the risk, captured in WALL-E, of a slow decay into sloth through the use of AI and enabling technologies.
And to double down on your point about Autonomous Weapons. The Clone Wars in Star Wars highlights that Palpatine was able to manipulate becasue both forces he controled (The Republic Clones and the Separatist Droid Armies) were manufactured for that purpose. For all the combatants who died, only money was lost. No one on either side had skin in the game as so Palpatine could manipulate his way to power.