Comments by "" (@grokitall) on "Universal Basic Income... there, I said it" video.

  1. Yet another video rehashing someone elses misunderstanding of what universal basic income is, but with a nice section dealing with the problems of advanced automation. Every video and speech dealing with ubi covers the silly idea of replacing all social security benefits with one single payment made to every adult at a large value, then fails to deal with how you would pay for it. Unfortunately while this simplistic model makes it easy to talk about, it does so at the price of ignoring what ubi actually is, and just discredits the whole idea due to not thinking about how to fund it. What ubi actually is, is an alternative to means tested benefits in the social security system. Means tested benefits can be complicated to work out, difficult to comply with the qualification criteria, and subject to lots of variability in personal circumstances resulting in an expensive to run system with significant levels of over and under payments, vilification of the poor who make innocent mistakes, and heavy handed efforts to claw back any overpayment. In contrast, a basic state pension is easy to work out. Have you reached retirement age, and are you still alive? If yes, then pay the money. It doesn't need rechecking every few weeks like means tested benefits do, only when the circumstances change, ie you reach retirement age or you die, so cheap to administer. If you don't like paying it to the rich, use the money you save from administration costs to do a one time evaluation of how much you would have to move the starting points for the tax brackets to make it revenue neutral and make it taxable. If you then decide to pay another ubi, like child benefit, it also has simple qualifying criteria. Are you between the ages of zero and when you decide to cease entitlement, alive and resident in the country? If yes then pay the custodial parent. Also make it taxable and raise the tax levels by the amount needed to make it revenue neutral like we already do in the uk. However nothing says you have to pay the child the same figure as the pensioner. If you then decide that you want to pay everyone a fixed amount on top of other benefits, you can make it payable either to every resident, or every citizen, and bring it in like we brought in minimum wage in the uk, start it at pathetically low amounts, and then give above inflation increments until it reaches the level you can afford. Again make it taxable and revenue neutral and set it to be at an increasing percentage of the total tax take as and when you can afford it. So you could take the usa population of 200 million, and give them all a social security number from birth. Then each individual gets a government bank account where the benefit is paid into, and you pay them 1 dollar per year at a cost of 200 million taxable dollars per year. Every other benefit either ubi or means tested can then be paid into the account keyed to the social security number, saving administration costs for other benefits. If the individual is vulnerable, then their registered primary carer can draw on it for that person. Now you have your model implemented, for what is basically a rounding error on your multi trillion dollar usa budget. Going back to child benefit, you can reduce it by the general ubi amount, and once it reaches zero, just delete it. Same with basic state pension, or unemployment benefit, or disability benefits. You get an even bigger benefit with means tested benefits, as every time you increase the general ubi amount, you move more people out of needing them, but more importantly it makes it easier to find a generic qualifying criteria for those who are left to move to another cheaper ubi, saving another fortune in admin costs.
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  2. ​​ @FutureAzA I just rewatched the video, and your funding proposal is basically to either live in a country with a massive resource dividend, which is not most countries, or use some combination of cost reduction through automation combined with some form of robot tax. Even worse, you expect a government which is by your own statements so dysfunctional that it took ages to decide to implement something as easy as a do not call list to suddenly get their act together to organise a pump priming robot innovation scheme and corresponding bot tax system. You asked in the video what did you get wrong, and please tell you in the comments, so that is what I did. First, like everyone else doing videos about ubi, you had a fundamental misunderstanding as to what ubi actually is, and confused that with the proposals for a generalised ubi. I therefore clarified what it is, and why the general understanding of ubi used in videos is not the right way to talk about ubi. You then proposed a funding model for this misunderstood version of ubi which was not politically practical, so I proposed an alternative way of doing it which is viable, and how to implement it. You also overestimated both the competence and speed of roll out of artificial intelligence which is at the heart of your "let bots do it" model. The speed of innovation needed for your model just is not there. We have been working on A.I. since the 50s, and while the progress is finally getting worth talking about, it is nowhere near the level needed to implement your bots plan, and that is just on the technical level. Using copilot as an example, technically it is little more than a slightly more advanced version of autocorrect as seen on mobile phones. Even worse, the model was made with a data set which did not include any tagging as to how good or bad the code was, it just slurped up the entirety of all open source software, ignoring that a lot of the stuff is written by people learning the languages and the tools, so the quality of what is produced is generally pretty dreadful. Finally, you have its biggest problem, it did not take into account the fact that all of that code used to train it belongs to other people, so what it outputs is usually in breach of both the software license, and the copyright of the originating author, so anyone using it and writing it is just asking to get sued back to the stone age. That is just the problems with creative A.I., if you then move on to safety critical A.I. you then get the additional problem of when it gets it wrong and someone gets injured or dies, who is liable for paying compensation? using your self driving car example, if it kills a kid, is it the driver for not overriding the software, the car maker for including the software, the software company for it not avoiding the kid, or someone else? All of those legal questions matter, and it will take decades of law suits to get to a position where the answers are matters of settled law, and it will be settled on expensive law suit at a time, because as you pointed out the politicians have neither the competence to figure it out, nor the will to even look at it. So yes, the previous post was long, because your approach provided a simplistic and impractical solution to a complex problem, and was riddled with bad assumptions, and that always requires complex answers. But in my defense, you did ask us to tell you if you got anything wrong, so I did. I also targeted you as the original author of the video as the intended audience, while trying to keep the explanations simple enough that other interested individuals can still understand it. As to do I expect people to read a long post, it is social media, which means that because the audience of all social media is below average, you cannot expect people to read anything more complex than click bait on simple subjects, and have to have even lower expectations as to their levels of understanding of complex problems. Having said that the only solution to that problem is to try and provide them with the tools and information so that they can get better with time, and who knows, the person reading it might actually be able to understand it and get some value from it. As to the specific post, I only expect 1 person to read it, the person who asked to be educated as to any mistakes he made. I also expect that as someone deciding to provide an opinion on the subject you will have done enough background research to at least be able to comprehend the feedback at a level that is slightly higher than your average netizen, due to having already got that background information. However I do not expect you to accept that I am any more right in my views than you are, only that you consider the possibility that some of what I said might be useful when you decide to do your next video on the subject, and then only because you ask for corrections for any mistakes. If anyone else finds it useful and informative and possibly thought provoking, that is just a bonus.
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  3. Ubi is not the Star Trek economy. Ubi is the use of simple to qualify for benefits paid to every qualifying individual at the same rate. Examples include old age pension and child benefit. Note that the children and the pensioners get different amounts. This is in contrast to complex means tested benefits which are expensive to administer and need to be reassessed very often. In contrast, the Star Trek economy is based upon a post scarcity economy. An example in current usage is taking the existing plastic bonet catch, scanning it in to a model, and then 3d printing a replacement. The original component costs 15 pounds for my vehicle. The scanner is basically a lazy Susan with the component on it, combined with an x-box multi camera tracker. This produces a computer model which can be distributed basically for free. It is then downloaded, and printed and the price is in pence. this is basically how replicators are used in Star Trek, and the cost is low enough to be basically free. This contrasts with how it was in the seventies, where everything you used had to be provided physically, with all of the costs that go with it.
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  4. you are all getting the timescales wrong. it took 20 years to go from everyone using horses to everyone using cars. it has taken 50 years to go from everyone being in low skilled low pay jobs to the point where most people can't even find such a job, and most of those jobs are things like being serving staff. yes we need to have the conversations about taxation, social security, upskilling those whose industries have been automated out of existence, how to cope with major disruptions like automation and global warming, but we need to start by asking where are we now, where are we going, do we want to and can we go somewhere else instead, and how do we change things to get to the right place
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