Capitol Hill Blue Forums Political Issues Finance, the economy & Economics Universal Basic Income? Guaranteed Job?

We will be forced to adapt to some kind of UBI/JG model no matter what the economic cognoscenti say because technological unemployment is a Pandora's Box which was already opened about a decade or so back.
Artificial intelligence and advanced robotics are here to stay and both fields are advancing faster than the consumer computer revolution did at the turn of the century.

Advanced robotics has already produced a walking bot that has most of the agility of a human body with rapidly advancing material handling capabilities. Boston Dynamics demonstrated a walking bot that can handle slippery steps and can maintain erect balance even when shoved or pushed, so bots no longer fall over or lose their footing on tricky surfaces.

Add in enough AI and it's easy to predict a "Bicentennial Man" model by 2020 or 2022, and five years hence such a device will most likely cost about as much as a luxury SUV.

By 2030 such units will most likely be able to do pretty much any skilled or unskilled labor we do now. Fifteen years is an eternity in the tech field, so don't underestimate this in terms of cost or feasibility. Industry has wanted to rid itself of the human component for as long as industry has existed.
Naturally they never think of the impact on the workforce, because that's "a government problem", right?

Well, here it is, and the small government advocates who worship libertarian tropes about personal responsibility and unregulated capitalism are about to stare down an abyss where no coin drop returns the echo of confirmation, because there is no bottom, and their arguments will be reduced to shouting at the darkness.

Technological unemployment is a threat to capitalism like no other.
It cannot be stopped, or even slowed, and it cannot be reasoned with. It will lay waste to well over half the workforce in the coming decade and possibly 90 percent of it by 2035.

We can ignore it or fight it all we want but there is no turning back. Ignore it at your own peril, because if you train for new vistas in employment you will quickly learn that the lifespan won't even outlive the sell by date on some of the technology you own now.

Fight it, and you're screaming at a tornado.

Rendering half the workforce redundant will trigger either a come to Jesus moment where UBI is the only available solution or it will trigger global revolution and unimaginable slaughter. No class of society will be safe.

Resisting UBI will simply trigger global economic collapse. The elites only get to choose whether it's a rapid collapse or a slow motion one.

UBI will be sold to them as a shareholder dividend. They get to own and manage the wheels of industry, society gets to share in the dividends.

PS: Techological unemployment will also raise, for the final time, questions about who gets to reproduce and why.
Watch for massive pushback from religious types but don't expect Armageddon because the only dividend from that will be a faster road to their own end.

Technological unemployment will force a sharp focus on the whole competition/cooperation paradigm in ways no one could heretofore imagine.