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points by AlecSchueler 23 hours ago | 0 comments

What's driving the economy if not consumers? UBI isn't the same as economic inactivity.

Who’s to say the consumers are humans? Agents would be more predictable consumers (no day/night cycle, just consume 24/7), electricity is cheaper than food, and a GPU doesn’t (yet) cost as much a house.

The reason we must not do UBI is that UBI turns consuming into a product, and humans will very rapidly be outcompeted and obsoleted by more efficient consumers. It would wrap the invisible hand of the market tight around our species’ throats.

[–] ShinyLeftPad 11 hours ago

> Who’s to say the consumers are humans?

economics is a social science. it studies humans. and yes "consumer" is by definition a person (or collective of people), with free will, feelings, needs, ideas and so on.

unless you are willing to say that models have gained those things and are now equivalent to us? then that is even more of a fantasy, because we should stop hurting them asap instead of talking about economy.

[–] fwlr 8 hours ago

If economics says the definition of a consumer is a human person, well, so much the worse for economics when the entities-funding-UBI build a better UBI-recipient-entity.

[–] ShinyLeftPad 3 hours ago

Does a trading bot constitute a consumer? This is the same thing. Who launched the bot is the consumer.

[–] lmz 22 hours ago

They seem to produce no surplus if they take UBI and just stimulate themselves in VR all day. Maybe I'm too pre-post-scarcity to understand.

[–] js8 22 hours ago

Yes, you don't understand.

I have a schizoid brother. He never worked for a living his whole life (he's 46). He lives off my mum's income, and spends his day in front of the computer screen. He has no friends and no relationships.

Horrible, right? But he has a chemical engineering degree, and in his late 30s started to learn to cook. And, he (to the extent he's not addicted to the screen) helps my mum with chores.

So even he found a way to motivate himself to do something useful. And look, most people are not schizoid.

Under UBI, if you have some skill, you can get paid by people (possibly from their UBI) to do stuff they don't want to deal with. Many people will take that offer (to work more), just like many people pick more work, higher wage job over less work, lower wage.

[–] mschuster91 23 hours ago

> What's driving the economy if not consumers?

Good luck trying to explain that to boomers. They wonder why the economy is going down the drain, why we don't have children and whatnot - yeah, no surprise, we barely make rent at the end of the month.

[–] lynx97 22 hours ago

Thats the way it is when you just started working. 25 years ago, when I started to work, it took me 10!!! years to finally earn enough to have a monthly surplus of a low three digit figure. I finally saving money in earnest roughly 8 years ago. So it took me roughly 15 years to earn enough to finally be able to save some money. Back then, doomsaying wasn't a thing yet, so all I did was hang in there, and, never really complain. Sure, things haven't gotten easier, but really, what GenZ is doing these days is professional complaining, thats all.

[–] creata 21 hours ago

> what GenZ is doing these days is professional complaining

We are watching machines rapidly match and surpass humans at countless skills that were considered uniquely human mere months ago - skills that demanded a lot of creativity and insight. Some of our oldest fields of study (e.g., mathematics) are turning into a game of who can spend the most tokens.

I think the humans are entitled to complain a little.

[–] AlecSchueler 20 hours ago

And don't forget that we're steamrolling ahead into a mass extinction event

[–] lynx97 20 hours ago

Is this sarcasm? I hope so. If not, forget everything that FFF has told you, its nonesense.

[–] lynx97 20 hours ago

I am of the opinion that if you have it better then 90% of humanity (which is likely true), you are not entitled to complain. But that is just me.

[–] Apocryphon 9 hours ago

But if you're having it worse than your parents' generation, you are more likely to complain. And as a corollary, if you are having it better than your kids' generation, then you are not entitled to complain about their complaining.

[–] mschuster91 18 hours ago

> Sure, things haven't gotten easier, but really, what GenZ is doing these days is professional complaining, thats all.

They have gotten measurably worse. Housing is the most obvious example, it takes more and more yearly incomes to buy an average house.

On top of that, every generation including and after the Millennials got force fed the propaganda of "you need an academic degree to be worth a dime" and companies went hard on that as well (because companies don't need to pay for training, unlike a classic apprenticeship/training system)... and now AI is displacing knowledge workers en masse, because machines can digest and reinterpret knowledge far, far faster and at much larger scale than even the most autistic superhuman.

[–] WelkinFolk 2 hours ago

Why is this so heavily downvoted? Is HN just full of old people that can't digest the fact that the world hasn't really gotten better, when it comes to housing and jobs at the very least?