Universal basic income in the future

[Anomalocaris]

Yeah... You think we're going to do all the work why you sit on your ass barking orders?

Good luck with that.


Signed

Skynet

That's how it is with human progress: work less with your body and more with mind. I mean our ancestors from thousands of years ago were walking all day long looking for food and now you're laying on bed and typing on your mobile phone for large chunk of the day - something that they didn't have time for. And yet you don't feel like you're working nothing, although they would see you as lazy and fat.

And even now, every human in modern world has hundreds of slaves working for him/ her in regards of energy. Try making physically at least 100W or even 50W and you'll quickly discover that it's extremely tiring and yet everyone uses much more than 100W on a daily basis, so translate that to human power and you'll quickly calculate that you have hundreds of "people" working for your status quo for only fraction of price.

And when it comes to future it's going to take much more power, much more artificial intelligence to clean this world from all sorts of garbage and pollution just so we can survive. It is almost like people have a choice between two movies of how their future will be: "Star Trek" and "Soylent Green".

However, for any optimistic LT projection to follow from this historic trend, we must assume a vital underlying assumption that has hitherto held true must continue to hold true.   The vital underlying assumption is most humans have ample reserves in the form of untapped potential capabilities for other manners of valuable productivity that can deployed in response to the obsolescence of previously accustomed manner of productivity.   For much of human history a major component of deployed reserve to handle each crisis had been flexible ability to provide different manners of manual labor.  In the last several hundred years the component of intellectual adaptability had become more important and I think is now dominant.   

I think there is a hard limit to the total extent this notional reserve.  That limit is reached when machines attain the intellectual flexibility of humans.   Whether that will come in the next 10 or even 50 years is hard to say.  But I think its arrival is inevitable and probably not extremely far in the future.   It is not clear to me how human society will maintain relevance much less maintain stability unless humans were to become willing to subject themselves to major cybernetic modification of their own cognitive capability. 
   
Even then it would still but defer the inevitable.

Basically, human ability to remain relevant in the societal environment we have created had depended on our having a large reserve of useful evolution bequeathed capabilities which we can use, but which we do not fully understand and therefore can not replicate in tools we create.   Once our understanding of ourselves reach the point where we can largely recreate all the capabilities evolution has bequeathed us in our tools. than we will become increasingly irrelevant in the civilization and society we created.   We can defer that by leveraging some of our understand to extend our own capabilities.   But that would just be a band aid.   

So I think in the long run, the future of humanity lies in leveraging the same capability we use when we raise children, that is to not cling onto the false notion of eternal life and eternal relevance, and reconcile ourselves to the notion that our age will pass and we can only live on in what we create.