I'm in a pretty unique position because I've never had a strong drive to work but got lucky and got that passive income without having it as a goal I worked towards. If I had no financial or social pressure I would do little else than play video games all day.

Considering how popular social media is I suspect I'm right about most of the population. I mean just look on the streets, in subways etc. most people are addicted to cheap pleasure

We just need these efficiencies distributed to more people. Eventually we should plateau into few hour work weeks for vital labor.

If you "solve" this in any way other than giving people better options for them that are inherently also better for the environment, it's unstable — even if almost every nation tries to enforce it at the same time, whoever defects (in the Nash game theory sense) literally inherits the Earth.

(And that's why I'm also expecting Von Neumann machines to be the environmental disaster of the solar system within a century of someone making one: game theory says that whoever does that sucessfully, inherits the future light cone).

How come? How is “going to a book club” going to be “better done by robots”? It is not an activity where there is an objective quality metric. If you enjoyed reading the book, and then enjoyed talking about the book, and had a good time then you did the book club right. Even if we have a robot which reads the book faster, extracts deeper meanings from it, and has a more engaging conversation about it you can still enjoy the act of doing it yourself.

Same with sailing. It is not necessarily the most efficient, fastest, or optimal way to get from here to there. It is on the other hand a challenge to your mind and body and that gives you satisfaction as you do it. Even if robots are faster, better equiped, or safer sailors they are not you. Only you yourself can can create the experience of sailing by yourself.

I do hobby jewelry. I design my pieces and then cast them, polish them, and gift them to friends. I don’t do it because it is cheaper than buying jewelry (it is very much not). I don’t do it because I’m better at it than others. (Very much not.) I do it because i enjoy the long walks while I’m thinking about a new design. I enjoy the challenge of figuring out how I can make a certain piece. Then i enjoy fidgeting with it until it casts just perfect. Then i enjoy polishing it, patinating it, polishing again, engraving, attaching gems. And finally I enjoy very much putting it in a neat little box and then meeting with a friend and gifting it to them. I also enjoy telling the story of how each piece was made, what things worked and what didn’t. It is a bucket of fun! But here is the thing. Even if robots were obviously better at it than me, i wouldn’t care. Wouldn’t change my enjoyment even a bit. How do i know? Because there are already right today othere who are better at it than I will ever be. Professional foundries make jewelry faster and cheaper I can ever hope to. Amazing and legendary jewellers design designs i could never dream of. Excelent crafters share their stories better than I could. So like why am I doing it? Because i enjoy doing it!

> Most people don’t ascribe any deeply satisfying meaning to mere personal enjoyment

I recommend you work on that. That is all I can say.

If you really want to get philosophical about it, what's the point of you serving someone else or adding value to society? Society, after all, is other people just like you. If you're trying to make them happy, why wouldn't you want to also make yourself happy? And if it turns out that we're at a technological point where everyone can keep themselves happy without any effort, why shouldn't we collectively just embrace that as a society?

Why do people still play video games? And not only that, but do crazy stuff like speedruns or self-imposed limitations that make it borderline impossible to win?

Think of your favorite food. Now, replace eating that food with watching someone else eating it. Is that as enjoyable? Now fast forward to 1000 years in the future where robot humanoids are eating your favorite food and turning it into their form of nutrition.

I mean agree to disagree and stuff, but I just cannot for the life of me understand why someone or (some entity) doing something removes from your own pleasure of doing it yourself, your way.

But LLMs/transformers are not this technology. We need some significant advancements before we start seeing things like this.

The predatory institutions will still be there in the UBI future and price things accordingly, do a little hostile takeover here and there, bribe some politician and get a totally not monopoly started in as many sectors as they can.

For UBI to actually work it needs to spring out of the goodwill from a monstrous institution that brutalizes all other financial entities or from a financial apocalypse that leaves virtually no one standing.

A much more likely entry point to "free living conditions" is free as in advertisment driven data mining and resale. Think of Google being your landlord, offering free Google fiber with some extra packet inspection clauses. McMeta down the street offering free fastfood adhering to the latest "dietary meta" catchphrase. And Palantir hands out free phones with preloaded internet and bomb homing beacons to streamline military interventions against you when the gov decides you're a terrorist.

That's a more likely "UBI scenario", simplified by a few steps as whatever UBI money you'd get in a cash scenario would end up pocketed by the usual suspects anyway

It produces a two tier society where different rules apply to the rich and the poor.

It insulates the rich from the negative impact their actions have on the poor.

It results in the rich having a much greater say in democracy than the poor.

It produces problems when the rich and the poor are competing for resources (e.g. housing).

It can encourages the market to focus on the desires of the rich at the expense of the desires of the poor.

It damages social cohesion due to the rich and poor having increasingly different life experiences and worldviews.

That's like saying "the fact there's a black hole in the centre of the galaxy is not an issue."

Extreme wealth distorts the universe around it. There are people who have no business making nation-state level decisions that are still on the speed dial of the people who are, because of their financial positions.

There's also a strong case that education blocked by finance, on a second order. Wealth creates flight opportunities. Parents who can afford it take their kids out of the default public school and take them to a magnet, charter, or private school. Not everyone can afford that, even if some are nominally tuition-free-- if they don't offer the same bussing, for example, that's going to add thousands of dollars a year in bus or petrol costs to get the kid to and from campus.

But aside from that, when the parents take their kids away, they also take their volunteerism, activity support, and holding staff accountable. The public school ends up supported by the least resourced and least concerned parents, and the students left behind suffer.

Housing is probably solvable with a more holistic central-planning mindset. Everyone wants to live in a few desirable areas, but we have no mechanism to generate more desirable areas. A planned economy could help by steering new economic development to places where housing can be built affordably, perhaps with build-out mandates. The Chinese "Ghost Cities" are actually a great idea in retrospect-- if you build everything at once before the first residents arrive, you can avoid some of the very expensive retrofit problems. Building a subway on the barren ground of a planned city is a lot cheaper than drilling under Lower Manhattan.

A secondary problem is that housing costs and the need for retirement/end of life savings creates a doom loop-- if you're paying 60% of your income on a mortgage, you can't invest in any other way, so it HAS to be the nest egg. I'm not sure how to address that-- richer and more universal pensions might help reduce the load on home equity, and there are certainly ways to de-asset-ify land (maybe replacing outright land ownership with peppercorn leases-- people wouldn't be able to "buy" a house, at best they could try to bribe the existing owner to abandon the lease and hope to grab it when the property goes back up for redistribution)

The resources to improve the lives of the poor (and not just the very poor but the struggling middle classes), have to come from somewhere. They are not infinite. So unless you're creating a bunch of wealth from nothing, then it naturally requires a more equal distribution of existing wealth.

> China which has been consistently overbuilding housing for decades now. They still have housing issues.

This is in fact a problem of unequal distribution of resources: one of the main reasons there are housing issues is because houses have been seen as an investment and gobbled up by those who can afford to do so (all my friends in Beijing own multiple apartments), so prices rise and the poor can't get them anyway.

The future is a tiny elite leisure class with all the wealth and property and access to robotics and automation that does all the work for them and a huge underclass with nothing, nothing to do, and no access to that automation. Plus something that physically isolated the elites from the have-nothings so they aren’t in danger.

1) You get out of your house.

2) You don't have leftovers from a big meal to deal with.

3) You can duck out early without having to kick everyone out..

4) you can fit a LOT more people at a restaurant.

I wonder if you realise how dystopian your life already is to consider this question reasonable.

There is a difference between a co-located set of siloed people and a community. The inability to recognise this means your community is already broken.

Ironically, this reads to me like a rather American thing. Simply based on typical dwelling size. There's a lot of nights at a restaurant (or cheaper: some venue specializing in space + some catering for groups instead of the full restaurant experience) I could buy for the cost of keeping a dining room able to host a non-tiny group of friends around all year. In American sprawl, with those hardly-more-than-cardboard construction standards? Sure, no problem.

Taking a long tour along the neighborhood, to see what I want to buy first hand before pulling the trigger, or seeing an old friend and getting a nice coffee at that café are all valid reasons to go out.

Getting fresh air, regularly walking, seeing a couple of different and unknown faces are regular maintenance tasks for the body and brain.

I don't think humans should hole up at their homes and work/doom scroll/eat/doom scroll/sleep/repeat just because they can. That's unhealthy for every aspect of your body and life to begin with.

Parents and community are a massive influence, and parents will move as needed to attend better school districts, even if private schools are outlawed.

But why would the corporations (or rather, their owners) even bother to do that, once robots are producing everything? And what would the poor buy those robot-made goods and services with? For money to work as universal medium, it needs to circulate - but if everything that the rich consume is made by robots that the rich also own, and it's cheaper than a human's living wage, then all trade would happen in that circle, and money used for that would never leave that part of the economy. So people outside of it simply wouldn't have anything useful to buy goods with.

Or, to put it in another way - any wealth transfer from the haves to the have-nots in such an arrangement would be pure welfare. Which, given a socioeconomic system that does not encourage altruism, to put it mildly, would only be done to the extent that is necessary to prevent a torches and pitchforks situation. And even that would only be the case until making killer drone swarms is a cheaper way to prevent any would-be uprisings than bread and circuses - and I think that, thanks to the likes of Anduril, we're already well on the way there.

It’s nice to be able to carry on a conversation somewhere there isn’t a constant din.

Those are probably going to be quite a lot of help!

When we went from horses to cars, we increased the volume of shipments and percentually more people work in transportation now than in 1910.

Another example - programming has been automating itself for 60 years. Each new language, framework or library, each project on Github makes future work more efficient. Yet we have seen an increase, not a decrease, in development jobs, and good salaries.

I would say humans are the critical ingredient AI needs to be effective, at least for now. And in the far future where AI can work without assistance, then it just empowers everyone to not need to work. We can use AI directly for our own benefit, automating self reliance for people. Unlike UBI, you can copy an AI and give it to everyone for free.

In both scenarios: weak AI making room for jobs, or strong AI making work not necessary, it turns out ok. But have more faith in our insatiable greed, we won't run out of work before we run out of desires.

In modern America, $1 million isn't enough to not have to work outside of small towns and certainly isn't enough that the rules don't apply to you.

[1] I don't even necessarily mean big things like hiring high power attorneys to get away with crimes. I mean things like cutting through bureaucracy, access to influential people/resources, the ability to bend regulations, etc.

Or it becomes worthless when no one else has anything and demand tanks

AGI won't need people to advance further. That is pretty much the functional definition.

But the bar is even lower. Just as today's rich keep increasing the economic distance between themselves and the poor, with the middle and creative classes already feeling that gravity, so will the AGI's - even if they stalled out only as smart as we are, but cheaper in inference mode. (A limitation that is highly unlikely.)

No doubt humans will facilitate AGI activity in our economy and real world for practical reasons for a little while. But at some point, they won't need us physically or socially either.