I don't see UBI as freedom. It shares a lot with slavery, in that someone else is feeding you, and therefore has control over you.
What I hope for in the future is a fully independent machine that each person owns and is capable of caring for them, by providing food, shelter, etc. and is capable of building a clone of itself.
In this way, you truly are free, having a machine which you own, and can shutdown and leave at anytime if you wish.
You are assuming there is someone (other humans) who are feeding you.
The point of UBI is that it's built on a realization that technology itself is feeding you. In the end, there isn't going to be any single owners because everything is better solved by the technology we are all going to be owning the means of production so to speak.
The post-scarcity society is where all basic needs are met.
If each person has their own machine you are kind of back to the same problem you have now. Who gets to use what resources?
and UBI is one form of Manifestation of 'Type 1 Civilization
> The post-scarcity society is where all basic needs are met.
> The point of UBI is that it's built on a realization that technology itself is feeding you.
> If each person has their own machine you are kind of back to the same problem you have now. Who gets to use what resources?
In my mind evolution favors the best information carriers and technology seems to be a better information carrier than humans. Also when it comes to going into space.
One argument for why technology would feed us is that until it's self-aware it needs us to be aware for it.
But I am fully with you on the non-certainty here. The premise is that humans are still around and thus needs UBI.
I think this comes from current thinking based on past history where we were more resource constrained, embodied by this:
"In the rest of society, however, we often both try to hire people who seem to show off the highest related abilities, and we let those most prestigious people have a lot of discretion in how the job is structured. For example, we let the most prestigious doctors tell us how medicine should be run, the most prestigious lawyers tells us how law should be run, the most prestigious finance professionals tell us how the financial system should work, and the most prestigious academics tell us how to run schools and research."[0]
Where as a more technological perspective might recognize how thinking purely along the current "dollars and cents" prestige lines, and might come to realize that by seeking to sustain every human to some increasing degree, will then "free" the marginal human to help maximize along some dimension that isn't necessarily the "dollar and cents" direction (think for every high/college/grad school drop out now making ~6 figures writing software, that could be if afforded a similar style of living/degree of autonomy in life as they do today, might choose to pursue something more likely to enhance technological development[well who knows, maybe I am just speaking for myself], or those who were born into a situation where everyday was a arduous to feed themselves who then will be "free" to spend more of this time to anything but relative foraging for sustinence). This can perhaps be embodied as a solution by recognizing this:
"This can go very wrong! Imagine that we wanted research progress, and that we let the most prestigious researchers pick research topics and methods. To show off their abilities, they may pick topics and methods that most reduce the noise in estimating abilities. For example, they may pick mathematical methods, and topics that are well suited to such methods. And many of them may crowd around the same few topics, like runners at a race. These choices would succeed in helping the most able researchers to show that they are in fact the most able. But the actual research that results might not be very useful at producing research progress."[0]
[0] http://www.overcomingbias.com/2016/06/beware-prestige-based-...
Right now, the labor market is feeding you, and very directly has control over you. You don't pick out where you think you can make the greatest contributions to humanity, you pick the job field that lets you make rent/mortgage each month.
Mind, I'm all in favor of fully automated luxury space homesteading, but a UBI or something like it will probably be an inevitable part of how we "convince" the economy to switch models from centralized infrastructure with competing workers to decentralized infrastructure with independent, mostly self-sufficient families and communities.
