Christine Lemmer-Webber @cwebber@social.coop
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Liz Fong-Jones says:

> we need to ramp up the pressure to tax these companies and fund a UBI *now*. if we don't, by the time they've already eliminated these jobs it will be too late, and they'll hold all the cards.

bsky.app/profile/lizthegrey.co

I agree.

I wrote a piece recently called "A letter from 2016 to 2026" about a fictional person (not me, but based on conversations I was having) writing a letter to open 10y later dustycloud.org/blog/a-letter-f

Part of it is the *promises* we were made of what life with AI was going to be like.

Liz highlights UBI as necessary here, and it's actually correct FROM THEIR ARGUMENTS. All the big CEOs of tech were talking up UBI as the answer to what would happen when AI automated everything. So we should hold them to account.

(They also said we'd be automating away the tedious stuff so we can focus on creative things like writing, code, artwork, and music. Oops! Funny how that worked out, huh?)

Liz Fong-Jones (方禮真) (@lizthegrey.com)

we need to ramp up the pressure to tax these companies and fund a UBI *now*. if we don't, by the time they've already eliminated these jobs it will be too late, and they'll hold all the cards. [contains quote post or other embedded content]

bsky.app · Bluesky Social

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kat @zkat@toot.cat
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RE: social.coop/@cwebber/116172866

UBI in relation to genAI harms is absolutely a red herring. Even if it were implemented, when you play it out in your head it... doesn't look great. So let's talk about that?

What does UBI get you? A basic standard of living, not very fancy, still encouraging you to seek out work if you want more luxuries but at least you won't die in the streets. That's kinda what it is, definitionally. It's achieved through some level of taxation, wherever you want that to come from to make it effective, but corporations and billionaires are obvious big targets.

Setting aside the idea that both of those obvious targets are largely politically untouchable and will continue to be for the foreseeable future, what we're left with is a bunch of people who have been pushed out of work, who can only afford the very basic living standards in our society, and who have no way to climb out of that hole because all the "value" is being captured by automation, which is controlled by... the corporations and billionaires which must continue to be at least fairly profitable, and fairly filthy rich in order to be taxable and able to fund the UBI. It also removes the possibility of worker power being able to influence corporate direction in any way, which is terribly convenient.

The result of UBI in an AI world isn't a more comfortable world, it's a further-stratified world where even more people are pushed to "barely scraping by" than ever, the environment continues to be set on fire, and the worst people in the world have all the economic and political power.

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