It’s an interesting idea for sure. And it is worth exploring imo as a solution not just to AI and automation. The skill and knowledge level and complexity job will required will be more and more difficult for many people to keep up.
Yeah. In coastal metro areas, $1k/mon probably wouldn’t even cover rent. It will certainly put less strain on low income families, but it’s not like you can live comfortably with that money as your sole source of income.
In more rural areas, that probably would be enough to cover rent, but not really enough to cover other necessary expenses. Plus, it might incentivize people who have a tougher time finding jobs in the city to move back to rural towns.
I just wonder how we can attach the amount of UBI per month to some type of economic matrix so that it will stay useful as prices and pay changes over time.
If you can’t live in a place like a city with the money, doesn’t it make sense to move to rural areas? Perhaps that’s not a bad thing? It might even alleviate rent in cities when people move away and improve economic conditions in more rural areas.
Just a though I had.
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I agree. It’s really weird how people attempt to live in places where they have little or no hope of earning enough to meet basic needs. Gravitating towards cities seems to be a human constant, but the fact is most of the people who do it would have been better off if they’d stayed out in the boondocks.
It doesn’t help that governments have (historically) always disparaged and dumped on rural folk, even though they’re the ones providing food for the pen-pushers in cities.
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That would need to be figured out and locked into place so it doesn’t get raised every few years.
I’ve been thinking of the homeless situation, specifically in California since I visited a few weeks back and this is a good idea that I don’t think any politician would dare to say. Discounting people who have mental and substance problems, a UBI to get them cleaned up and on a bus to a less expensive area would be a good plan (that would be spun to something like the Trail of Tears on Twitter).
It’s true though. They don’t have a home because it’s too expensive for even a working person. I hear people sleeping in their cars with a decent job all the time. They have zero real prospects of ever getting back in when they’re at that point. There is no other solution and it will just get worse.
Why not go somewhere you can afford to live in? Set them up there. Rural towns can get a boom in cash flow and even more development from this. Seems like it’s a potential positive aspect of UBI. I don’t know if anyone said it yet.
I was visiting Oakland in an industrial neighborhood that had studio apartments starting for $2k+ per month. First and last month deposit plus transportation plus utilities plus…oh, you want a parking space?
I would even support a federal program to help relocate people to areas that would welcome them to the community though a UBI would essentially do that with less paperwork and less expense.
There is only one thing that I do repeatedly in a short period of time - when are they adding stimuli boards to those robots?
Here’s my proposal.
Monthly UBI = 1000 + National Average Monthly Expenses (4 person household) - 4045 + 59039÷12 -National Average Monthly Income
Current figure
1000
So if the national average expenses goes up, but the national average income goes down,
Say if
National Average Monthly Expenses (4 person household) is 5045
National Average Monthly Income is 47040÷12
Then UBI goes up to 2999.92
So an average family makes nearly 1000 less per month, and spends more than 1000 per month, and they will get about 2000 more of UBI.
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you mean like, social credit?
Does it sting?
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How does one artificially inseminate with a neural network?
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ha … no. Not really. China’s “social credit” is a compulsory thought-crime policing system. I’m thinking of an entirely voluntary thing, a product. People could use it, or not. Although it is based on credit as opposed to debt.
In principle it’d be just an electronic record of transactions. A double-entry ledger. The “quantity” and “quality” of each transaction would be recorded by both parties, and both of those values would be somewhat subjective. People would perform periodic reconciliations by docking their portable device with a networked connection; at that point their transactions would be screened for consistency and fraud, but in principle you could go for days or weeks completely off-grid, which I think is an important consideration.
I’m still figuring out the details - I’m thinking quaternions would be a natural representation to describe transactions, but my maths isn’t great, so I could be off-base with that one.
Anyway, I think it has some commercial potential.
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We did when we first began modifying the site back in the beginning. Haven’t been able to bring things like that back. Those were fun times
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Not like that, but maybe the cow enjoys it anyway. Paging @Dr_Milker.
There are a lot of manual jobs that are immune to takeover from robots. Farming is one of them, although I can imagine robot “energy slaves” performing various agricultural tasks in the next decade or two.
Interesting. Which aspect of farming would you think is immune?
Two aspects: the thinking and the doing 
Expecting machines to run an efficient farm would be like expecting them to repaint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. They could probably do it, after a fashion, but it wouldn’t be an improvement.
He’s trying to do it, but randomly selecting people. Kind of like a lottery.
Funding for the program will come from the city’s share of CARES Act funds and the Mayors for Guaranteed Income national network.
The Office of Financial Empowerment will randomly select 150 participants from families that are already enrolled in CollegeBound St. Paul, another of Carter’s ideas that seeks to create a citywide college savings account.
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