Google’s Chief Futurist: Basic Income Will Spread Worldwide by the 2030s

Megalith

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Google’s Director of Engineering, Ray Kurzweil, is a futurist who is famed for his wild predictions: one of his latest is that universal basic income will be ubiquitous in as little as two decades based on advances in artificial intelligence. The idea is that AI will be distributing UBI to humans based on algorithms.

Kurzweil thinks AI will pass the Turing Test easily within our lifetime and can be described as a technology optimist. Kurzweil has been pretty vocal that AI will not displace humans but enhance us. Perhaps he believes a UBI would do the same and empower human beings to find meaning outside of work and how income is paired to work up till now.
 
except there is no actual "turning test", it's a concept that has been proven all the way back to the 80's, and earlier, to not prove anything except to spark a conversation as to what the word "think" actually means. An AI programmer for Google should know that...
 
Let's pay a bunch of useless people to exist. That will end well.
Do you really THINK that this type of economy is sustainable. It's not. About 50% of the US is struggling pay check to pay check and just the basic Utils are going up every year and those paychecks stay the same so I dont think giving 300 dollars is a bad thing. I bet you were thinking thousands but dont worry your little head about it. It wont happen ever however that just means chaos will one day rule,think of Venezuela but a million times worse.
 
Do you really THINK that this type of economy is sustainable. It's not. About 50% of the US is struggling pay check to pay check and just the basic Utils are going up every year and those paychecks stay the same so I dont think giving 300 dollars is a bad thing. I bet you were thinking thousands but dont worry your little head about it. It wont happen ever however that just means chaos will one day rule,think of Venezuela but a million times worse.
If the economy cannot sustain humanity's numbers, then it is humanity that's the problem, not the economy.
 
Well if its"humanitys" number thats the issue then please be my guest and be the first to JUMP.
Idiocy. It's all about keeping humanity's births below replacement numbers, like is already happening in most First World nations. Of course your ilk must try and paint those with my views as genocidal Nazi monsters to bolster your weak arguments.
 
Idiocy. It's all about keeping humanity's births below replacement numbers, like is already happening in most First World nations. Of course your ilk must try and paint those with my views as genocidal Nazi monsters to bolster your weak arguments.
Well do you blame me when you said"cannot sustain humanity's numbers" sounds a little Hitlerish with a dash of genocide. Fact is still the economy and really the world economy system needs to change but lets say for my country 300x300million is 90 billion a lot of money BUT if for once we can downsize our overbudgeted and inefficient military spending then its possible to do. you would be surprised what that mere 300 would do for people in just this country alone btw humanity's numbers are starting to plateau a little,yes first world numbers are starting to fall and 3rd world are starting to plateau so hopefully the whole of humanity will never go over 10 billion.I would like to know some of your idea on how to solve this issue.
 
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Well do you blame me when you said"cannot sustain humanity's numbers" sounds a little Hitlerish with a dash of genocide. Fact is still the economy and really the world economy system needs to change but lets say for my country 300x300million is 90 billion a lot of money BUT if for once we can downsize our overbudgeted and inefficient military spending then its possible to do. you would be surprised what that mere 300 would do for people in just this country alone btw humanity's numbers are starting to plato a little,yes first world numbers are starting to fall and 3rd world are starting to plato hopefully the whole of humanity will never go over 10 billion.I would like to know some of your idea on how to solve this issue.

"Plato" is a philosopher
"Plateau" is the word you're looking for. Nobody is going to take you seriously if you can't distinguish between the two, and it makes you look ridiculous. I'm not normally a big grammar nazi, but this is egregious.
 
"Plato" is a philosopher
"Plateau" is the word you're looking for. Nobody is going to take you seriously if you can't distinguish between the two, and it makes you look ridiculous. I'm not normally a big grammar nazi, but this is egregious.
Plateau also means an area of relatively level high ground. Many words mean many things the question is Did you get what I meant.
 
Total LOL, but if I was a Jesuit I would certainly push this similar to the new credit control in China.
The real fix for job loss was written in stone in the 1970's its call the Georgia Guide stones. Second solution
for job loss co2=p*s*e*c.
 
There is no one "director of engineering" at Google and Kurzweil is a known propagandist for the technological "New World Order" where closed-source code is going to be deciding our fates in place of crony capitalism, which amounts to no difference at all in practical terms. It's all bullshit. Strong AI is a myth, and current attempts at producing it amount to nothing more than increasingly convoluted iterations of the same algorithms. Nothing that will be able to achieve consciousness is ever going to come out of it. Aliens will land on the White House lawn before that happens, probably literally. Cyborg-human intelligence with computing networks augmenting biological brainpower is more practical than anything of that sort. Don't believe his lies, lads.
 
UBI is a socialist's wetdream.
Never going to happen.


I know what is to come. Buckle up motherfuckers, you're in for a very bad time.
Is this one of those Russelite protestant warnings?
Did any if your religion's end-of-the-world warnings work out to date?
No?
Didn't fucking think so.

Universal basic income?
Put your dicks back in your pants. UBI, Jesus and Bernie aren't going to save you from having to go to work Monday.
 
The planet can sustain a much larger population than we have now, just not if we continue the excessive consumption that advertisers tell us we must have. Why must a family of two have a 3000 sqft home? When I was growing up most families of 4 or 5 needed even less than that, much less. People complain they need more money to live, but they continue to buy larger homes, which cost more to heat and cool, have more gadgets which draw more power, ect. Not saying we all need to buy into the "tiny house" idea, but at least moderate somewhat.

What I really want to know is where does the money for the universal basic income come from? Just like welfare, it begins a cycle of pulling money from one place to try to fill a hole in another place, which just shifts the needs elsewhere. If there wasn't welfare, then the government would not need to take as much taxes from me, which would give me more money to spend to generate job opportunities for more people. Take more tax money from me, I have less to spend, which reduces the ability of the economy to sustain more jobs so the government has to support more people and ask for more taxes. If the UBI does not require some input into society then it becomes a drain on society. That is why many of the socialist economies like Venezuela and Greece have so many problems.
 
Sure, but there is a Turing Test.

Congrats, apparently there needs to be a test for auto correct on a cell phone screen as well because Turing isn't a common word. You get the point. The test is a concept and it's a flawed one at that that doesn't prove anything. Sure when the idea of a computer was first thought up that seemed like a good test but it's not, all it does is get people talking about definitions of words like "think" and "intelligence". It's not a litmus of AI, especially one that's supposed to handle treating the entire world fairly and apparently solving all the problems in the world...
 
lol. No it will not. Also, we'll probably have a third world war by then. Does bartering count as basic income?
 
What I really want to know is where does the money for the universal basic income come from?

From someone else of course. People who support this think there are rich people out there that would gladly pay for whatever socialist dreams they have.
However these "rich" are the same people who hire teams of accountants to take advantage of every tax shelter and loophole to pay as little as possible.

If the UBI does not require some input into society then it becomes a drain on society. That is why many of the socialist economies like Venezuela and Greece have so many problems.

Whatever cost they quote for UBI, they will be off by at least a factor of 10.
If you give enough for people to actually live on, many people working low paying jobs would quit and become completely dependent on the handouts.
Any attempt to then qualify who can receive UBI or to cut the payout would be met with riots.

All that said, I can see this happening some day, but that day is a long, long way into the future.
It would require the complete automation of many industries, that would result in a huge increase in production and a huge lowering of costs.

Robots planting and harvesting food, building houses, manufacturing and delivering almost every product, etc.
 
Looking forward to sitting back when AI diagnostics and setup makes most tech support jobs redundant.

The tears will sustain me.

I reckon 75% of jobs could be taken away from humans in time.
 
Looking forward to sitting back when AI diagnostics and setup makes most tech support jobs redundant.

The tears will sustain me.

I reckon 75% of jobs could be taken away from humans in time.
So you trust a robot to choose between what mushrooms you eat?
Robots to dispense your meds and do surgery?
Robot butchers SHOULD give you nightmares.
There is no way in hell 75% of jobs will be robots.
I'd love teachers jobs to be robots, so they are not giving out liberal ideas.
Other than that I see disaster.
 
Let's pay a bunch of useless people to exist. That will end well.
Or better yet, pay a bunch of people to work as a cashier or burger flipper. Good use of human labor. I'd personally rather have people sit at home and create blogs about their useless life than work for minimum wage at some store.

Do you really THINK that this type of economy is sustainable. It's not. About 50% of the US is struggling pay check to pay check and just the basic Utils are going up every year and those paychecks stay the same so I dont think giving 300 dollars is a bad thing. I bet you were thinking thousands but dont worry your little head about it. It wont happen ever however that just means chaos will one day rule,think of Venezuela but a million times worse.

People have no clue what direction the economy is going. You have automation/optimization. Think of all the jobs lost to Amazon who basically just side stepped stores for an online website. No automation here, just replaced stores with websites. Then you have banks which are constantly fucking people over. We'll have another housing crisis eventually cause of them. Finally, antiaging technology. What are you going to do with a population that won't get old and die and lives off pensions and social security?

Either way this economy is fucked and can't see what will change in 10 years. UBI is inevitable.

If the economy cannot sustain humanity's numbers, then it is humanity that's the problem, not the economy.
The economy is not so important that we need to keep it alive. All the economy does is keep the rich richer. We can let the 1% deal with it. Especially when robots will end up doing most of the work, but who's going to buy the products they produce? Gotta have money to buy the shit these robots make.

Also, humanities population has nothing to do with it. We simply cannot effectively employ everyone with a living wage. This is why China makes most of our shit, cause we depend on communist countries with shitty living conditions to make our throw away crap.
 
Do you really THINK that this type of economy is sustainable. It's not. About 50% of the US is struggling pay check to pay check and just the basic Utils are going up every year and those paychecks stay the same so I dont think giving 300 dollars is a bad thing. I bet you were thinking thousands but dont worry your little head about it. It wont happen ever however that just means chaos will one day rule,think of Venezuela but a million times worse.
Huh. Communism = Venezuela. Universal basic income = communism. The citizens were essentially being given "universal basic income" through the oil companies that Hugo Chavez took over 10+ years ago. Chavez taxed the shit out of the oil companies and gave a little of the excess to the citizens through government programs. Now the country is collapsing, because the government ran that industry into the ground. Communism DOES NOT WORK!

Universal basic income is a stupid concept where, just like the minimum wage, it means the cost of goods of everything in the country go up, because everyone has more money to spend. It does nothing for people at the bottom, because the cost of imports go down and the cost of the country's exports go up - that means less money for everyone in the country.
 
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I've worked with a few people over the years that should certainly be paid to do nothing. Even with no-skill retail or service work there are people that just make the job more difficult for everyone else.

I don't pretend to understand the complexity of the economy at large, but the current system has people fighting for scraps at the bottom. If you're going to work, it should be something you are actually useful at.

I see the accumulation of wealth by a small minority as a natural side effect of competition. Many people are just too inept to be successful in this system - and they wont just roll over and die to be convenient, they will make life hell for everyone else that is able to produce. Is welfare cheaper than prisons?
 
So you trust a robot to choose between what mushrooms you eat?
Robots to dispense your meds and do surgery?
Robot butchers SHOULD give you nightmares.
There is no way in hell 75% of jobs will be robots.
I'd love teachers jobs to be robots, so they are not giving out liberal ideas.
Other than that I see disaster.

What you "see" is irrelevant. Robots are going to make most human labor redundant within 50 years.

Also, LOL at the "liberal teachers" canard. "Build that wall" indeed. :facepalm:
 
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I'm not exactly sure whether UBI is the answer, but this is a very real problem.
 
Let's pay a bunch of useless people to exist. That will end well.
Admittedly, this is not a topic I understand very well, but basic income is not just to compensate useless people. Those who take advantage of it unfairly are an irrelevant fraction of the population. A drop in the bucket compared to the population which such a program is intended to help support: those who work low pay, low responsibility jobs keeping the top-heavy corporations operating smoothly. Those foundational people are struggling to live in the same gentrified urban areas which corporate interests desire. The everyperson / general custodian of society is struggling to live in the "utopia" that technology is creating. Even while comprising most of the population of any city, it's very possible to live out your life and never take notice of these folks. Those who are severely struggling financially in spite of working 2-4 minimum wage jobs simply don't bitch about it. They don't even know their worth, and are scared to demand for more since they'd be dead on the street without a paycheque. Just because they missed out on an opportunity to make more money this year doesn't make them useless. In fact, most people I know working minimum wage are impressively educated and qualified, but there's simply very few opportunities for employment, and they don't have the initial capital to start something. If by chance they do come into a suitable employment opportunity, someone else might lose theirs.

The common, knee jerk reaction is: "why should I pay, with my tax dollars, for these useless people to even exist?" Well, first off, you already paid for these people to exist merely by making use of some modern technology. It's included in the price of gas, a phone or computer, sharing your information online (against your will or not, lol), your monthly bills... the money is gone. However, the money isn't currently being allocated to those people; mostly because those people are scared and feel lucky to even have a job at all. If you call them a pussy for not demanding a raise, and proverbially step on their neck, it's basically one tiny step toward denouncing all the conveniences within a modern society, technologies, and support systems. Whether you think you need them or not, those people collectively yield a certain level of convenience which is not being paid for.

Basic income is not a solution, it's a short circuit -- a way to fix broken mega corps on their behalf. Sort of pussyfooting around the problem. Since governments are afraid to penalize companies directly for abusive practices, they simply reallocate their taxes back to the poorest. It's no robin-hood act, it's just an ass-backwards, bureaucratic nightmare, but it's a little less nightmarish than the alternative of watching these incompetant companies sort it out on their own.
 
Whether you think you need them or not, those people collectively yield a certain level of convenience which is not being paid for.

Wal-Mart is a perfect example of this. Even full time employees are often pulling welfare benefits, effectively making taxpayers subsidize the labor force. Why anyone with a full time job should still need food stamps is beyond me - but apparently a lot of people would rather blame the player than the game.
 
#1 Kurzweil has LONG been a nutjob. #2 For a number of reasons, UBI won't (and shouldn't) work. #3 Even if it could work I don't want anything attached to this man or Google involved with it. :)

P.S. I've expressed my opinion(s) on UBI on the forum before but in a more general sense as related to this specific thread, I think it's funny that the imagination of a "futurist" is limited to something like basic income which was all the rage of discussion in Victorian times. If that's the best these guys can come up with, we're in trouble. (in previous threads I've proposed my own theoretical solution/possibility whereby citizens have a share of the AI/robotic duty cycle in manufacturing with a focus on entrepreneurship, something equivalent to 3D printing + cloud, but I won't get into that here; but before the anticipated "how is that different than a share of income" - because handing people money and making them dependent on the source is very different than empowering them)
 
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1. what's "easily" ?
2. Haven't they already passed the Turing Test?

To answer you second question - it's now widely-regarded that the Turing Test is insufficient. So it's pretty irrelevant anyway.
 
I've worked with a few people over the years that should certainly be paid to do nothing. Even with no-skill retail or service work there are people that just make the job more difficult for everyone else.

I don't pretend to understand the complexity of the economy at large, but the current system has people fighting for scraps at the bottom. If you're going to work, it should be something you are actually useful at.

I see the accumulation of wealth by a small minority as a natural side effect of competition. Many people are just too inept to be successful in this system - and they wont just roll over and die to be convenient, they will make life hell for everyone else that is able to produce. Is welfare cheaper than prisons?
Yes welfare is cheaper than prisons, average welfare payment per year in the US is $35,000, the average cost for prison per year is $60,000. I would like to call him a crackpot but really the way that automation and AI is progressing in 20 years what jobs will be left?
 
Basic income is not a solution, it's a short circuit -- a way to fix broken mega corps on their behalf. Sort of pussyfooting around the problem. Since governments are afraid to penalize companies directly for abusive practices, they simply reallocate their taxes back to the poorest. It's no robin-hood act, it's just an ass-backwards, bureaucratic nightmare, but it's a little less nightmarish than the alternative of watching these incompetant companies sort it out on their own.
Basic Income is a solution for the wealthy. This is not a benefit for the poor or for the middle class. It exists to save capitalism. If people lose jobs then people have no money. No money then no purchase power. Nobody to buy goods and services means no reason to produce. The system collapses and billionaires money are worth nothing.

It's not a good solution but the better solution is something that many people wouldn't swallow.
 
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