- "machines doing more and humans doing less, and often less interesting, work." Only in the Archived Message
- John Lanchester makes the case for Universal Basic Income - Keith-264 July 14, 2019, 9:09 pm
- "machines doing more and humans doing less, and often less interesting, work." Only in the - Rhisiart Gwilym July 15, 2019, 9:26 am
- Gail Tverberg adds some realism re UBI. (Includes turning the current Climate Shift narrative - Rhisiart Gwilym July 15, 2019, 10:28 am
- "machines doing more and humans doing less, and often less interesting, work." Only in the - Rhisiart Gwilym July 15, 2019, 9:26 am
Posted by Rhisiart Gwilym
on July 15, 2019, 9:26 am, in reply to "John Lanchester makes the case for Universal Basic Income"
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pollyanna, growthforever, onward-and-upward-into-the-Startrek-future delusion-world of those who refuse to factor in to their fantasy-economics the herd of Synergising Global Crises elephants charging down on us right now. (To be fair, Lanchester does at least acknowledge one or two of the elephants; but without much stress on how tramplingly obliterative of all our current arrangements they seem bound to be.) Instead of lolling around on UBI whilst AI-robot slaves do the bulk of the work, the survivors of these profound changes will be working flat-out just to scrape up the basics of life; for a longish while, anyway, whilst the forests re-grow - if they can - and Earth recovers from the - anthropogenic - SGCs (and whilst the current human population-overshoot - one of the elephants barely mentioned by Lanchester - corrects itself spontaneously in the usual Gaian way; yes, we'll really be living in UBI-enhanced social security whilst that plays out; sure; even whilst we're living through Mad Max Meets The Road). There's really no point in radical leftists looking for a new Big Idea by extrapolating the indescribably-atypical, hyperextravagant economic cavortings of the past few decades - for the world's Pampered Twenty Percent, that is - into a future that can't possibly sustain this Single Giant Pulse event in Earth's history any longer - not unless we can work out how to harvest raw materials from the asteroid belt, using zero-point energy to power the whole shebang... (GLWT. DHYB!) If you want a genuinely-pertinent Big New Idea for leftists/radicals to get busy developing, think: Scarcity Socialism With Profound Ecological Responsibility Aspects. China-Russia might actually be forced to get to that idea more or less in time; though again: GLWT. DHYB. |
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