You’ve made UBI dollars already

UBI has here for decades and I’ve received it on several occasions especially in my early twenties.

Back then, every line of code I wrote for companies (in exchange for them paying me) did not make the world a better place. It was to, say, make things more efficient, but those very things were, in hindsight, a layer that the world could’ve done without. So if I had received the money and built nothing in exchange … perhaps the world would’ve been better off still. And me too, for I would've had my time back.

Today I look around I see this everywhere. People are designing marketing campaigns, drafting reports, crafting presentations, participating in meetings, and writing bullshit software for companies building products that ultimately don’t inspire, or at the very least, cure a deep-seated intrinsic human pain.

Even something that makes you laugh, pleases your taste buds, or immerses you in something fun or wholesome or riveting … or something so stupidly practical like a nice walkway by trees and water … all without making collateral damage … that stuff is as rare as it gets.

Instead, most of it is bloat. It’s abstractions on top of the institutional apparatus we’ve built and apparently need to maintain, and maintenance kills. Yet, money is being distributed, isn’t? Money that was Created from the tiny slice of genuinely valuable activities.

UBI is alive and well.

Can we turn our world into one where there is no waste, no useless work being done … this is clearly not a question of cognitive difficulty. The knowledge isn’t missing. What’s missing is the willingness to look at how much of what we do is just circulatory.

This is why I think UBI can be implemented overnight, en masse, with no real effect on inflation. The same salaries that are being paid today can be gifted as UBI tomorrow.

But there is a narrative of legitimacy that would be lost. Same reason the government continues to tax while they just print. It’s to uphold a narrative of legitimacy. Therefore it won’t be so simple of a transfer. There will be a lot of ego getting in the way.

Before we close, let’s look at UBI from one final angle, and its relationship with AI. For this, I will treat UBI the way much of society treats it, that is, a one-way flow of money from the government to its citizens.

AI will become such a friend to us that trying to implement UBI would be so pathetically frivolous. The logic is rather simple.

Usage-based pricing AI is, as we already see, a race to the bottom. You charge for something whose marginal cost (compute) is diminishing.

Subscription pricing is worse for it rewards underuse. So, it is fundamentally incompatible with a technology (AI) whose entire purpose is to be used constantly, deeply, and across domains.

So where does that leave us? It leaves us with AI that is accessible, ubiquitous, and steadily more capable. And a true human companion.

UBI, however, requires management via a corporation or government, and therefore, it is destined for failure by means of corruption or sheer stupidity. But evidently, the more interesting point is that we will not need UBI.

We will not need it when AI is your chef, your gardener, your concierge, and your assistant in every genuinely helpful sense. At that point, what matters is interaction. How you work with it, learn from it, use it. You may be guided, or challenged, or corrected, or even mocked. But that depends on you.

I am specifically talking here about artificial integrated intelligence.

UBI, ultimately, will be seen as so menial. It would be offering food stamps to someone who has been handed a fully stocked pantry and a fertile garden.