You should read the whole thing. It basically discusses the utter catastrophic failure of the modelling of providing a Universal Basic Income to the underclass (which ultimately means everyone but the elite).
We’ve often talked about how the elites typify a detached aristocratic conception of society which treats humans like a string of code to be tweaked and optimized. It’s why their worldview so perfectly aligns with the modern managerial ‘Longhouse’ paradigm of restructuring the natural, unmappable human anima into a sort of antiseptic DMV or HR mode. It also quite snuggly conforms to our materialist age’s mandate of ‘The Science’, sensitivity, and victim culture which aims to reduce human activity to a sterile, programmable state.
This is a literal war of the Technocratic Machine against human nature itself, in all its flawed, unchartable, and impure chaos. It is the imposition of routine over adventure, regulation over mystery, and a mathematically deterministic model of existence over faith, chance, and fate. It’s the destruction of our ancient calling for the sake of a grotesquely misplaced sympathy for abstracted suffering. Rather than let you suffer the agonies of a papercut on your finger, we’ll force you into a medicated ‘safety’ strapped in perpetuity to a gurney in an inoffensively white-walled room.
It’s the epitome of protecting us ‘from ourselves’ for the sake of an increasingly disconnected moral framework.
But in reality, these diversionary half-measures ignore the real root causes of every moral and social issue of our times.
Ultimately, the question of a societal panacea in the form of a UBI drip-feed to keep us half-consciously plugged in to the consumerist-banking-financial panopticon doesn’t even pass the most basic competency assessments.
Primarily: if the whole question of UBI is being brought up due to AI robots eliminating our jobs, then shouldn’t the very same robots provide so much cheap excess labor that prices then consequently plummet in every economic category? The need for a $1,000 monthly check would be obviated by virtue of rent, food, etc., dropping to the equivalent tune of $1,000 owing to robots making those things cheaper.
After all, Sam Altman himself stated:
Altman’s interest in universal basic income is related to his work as CEO of OpenAI—if AI eliminates jobs, could guaranteed cash help workers who lose their income? In 2021, Altman said he believed AI could generate enough wealth to pay every U.S. adult $13,500 a year. “He was definitely thinking about future labor market changes—not just what happens if robots take jobs, but also a recognition of the challenges we’re facing today with distribution of resources and opportunities across the population,” Rhodes says.
Unfortunately, that’s where the Great Lie of our rent-seeking economy rears its head. Production costs have already historically plummeted since the ‘80s with the onset of globalization, but the bonanza of extra profits gained by corporations were absorbed for pure greed, being financialized back into the system via derivatives, stock buybacks, executive pay hikes, etc.
A corporation would never re-circulate excess profit back to the little guy if it didn’t have to. We can only expect the age of AI to drive another bubble to be gobbled up by corpos to fund massive buyouts and mergers until only a few megacorps remain to consolidate their control of the globe.
Some have even proposed futures consisting of ‘gamified’ forms of UBI that will see our daily lives be relegated to the plasticity of a cheap mobile sim.
I said about 30 years ago, in the early 1990s (circa 1993 to 1995) that the average person was so stupid that perhaps they should all just be given VR helmets (they were a possibility of new tech that usually made people vomit when they tried it out), shoved into huge buildings filled with little condos, hook them up to free pornography and computer controlled sex toys and attach intravenous tubes for feeding them glop.
Essentially I had come up with the concept of The Matrix several years before it came out. Perhaps the Elites were spying on me already back then (I was definitely hacked by government level people for my discussing antigravity technology and writing The Face on Mars) and they decided to basically execute that half-joke.
I don’t know where the future is heading but I think it’s gonna get a lot darker before anyone sees any light.
On the other hand, I am hopeful that when the light does come, it will be a cleansing fire, that will rid us of a lot of the Satanists, Freemasons and evil servants of the Enemy.
One thing the ‘elite’ all have in common is a fundamental misunderstanding of their fellow humans.
We’re no different than any other animals. If you feed us to often we forget how to take care of ourselves. Humans are at their best when they have to cooperatively compete to survive.