I get that it’s taken a long time and a lot of hype that hasn’t panned out. But once the tech works and it’s just about juicing the scale then things shift rapidly.
Even if you think “oh that’s the next generation’s problem” if there is a chance you’re wrong, or if you want to be kind to the next generation: now is the time to start thinking and planning for those problems.
I think the most sensible answer would be something like UBI. But I also think the most sensible answer for climate change is a carbon tax. Just because something is sensible doesn’t meant it’s politically viable.
People are usually obedient because they have something in life and they are very busy with work. So they don't have time or headspace to really care about politics. When suddenly big numbers of people start to more care about politics it leads to organizing and all kinds of political changes.
What i mean is that it wouldn't be current political class pushing things like UBI. At same time it seems that some of current elites are preparing for this and want to get rid of elections altogether to keep the status quo.
If all else fails you can simply bomb city blocks into submission. Or arrange targeted drone decapitations of troublemakers. (Possibly literally.)
The automation and personalisation of social and political control - and violence - is the biggest difference this time around. The US has already seen a revolution in the effectiveness of mass state propaganda, and AI has the potential to take that up another level.
What's more likely to happen is survivors will move off-grid altogether - away from the big cities, off the Internet, almost certainly disconnected and unable to organise unless communication starts happening on electronic backchannels.
Well, if one believes that the day will come when their choices will be "make that jump" or "the guillotine", then it doesn't seem completely outlandish.
Not saying that day will come, but if it did...
Or even simply being voted out.
If AI makes it much easier to produce goods, it reduces price of money, making it easier to pay some money to everyone in exchange for not breaking the law.
Maybe the tech will at some point be good enough. At the current rate of improvement this will still take decades at least. Which is sad because I personally hoped that my kids would never have to get a driver’s License.
Tesla that got fired as a customer by Mobileye for abusing their L2 tech is your yardstick?
Anyways, Waymo's DC launch is next year, I wonder what the new goalpost will be.
LiDAR, radar assistance feels crucial
https://fortune.com/2025/08/15/waymo-srikanth-thirumalai-int...
It is also interesting that you did not mention food, clothing and super-computers-in-pockets. While government is involved in everything, they are less involved in those markets than with housing, healthcare, and education, particularly in mandates as to what to do. Government has created the problem of scarcity in housing, healthcare, and education. Do you really think the current leadership of the US should control everyone's housing, healthcare, and education? The idea of a UBI is that it strips the politicians of that fine-grained control. There is still control that can be leveraged, but it comes down to a single item of focus. It could very well be disastrous, but it need not be whereas the more complex system that you give politicians control over, the more likely it will be disastrous.
The costs of what you propose are enormous. No legislation can change that fact.
There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.
Who’s going to pay for it? Someone who is not paying for it today.
How do you intend to get them to consent to that?
Or do you think that the needs of the many should outweigh the consent of millions of people?
The state, the only organization large enough to even consider undertaking such a project, has spending priorities that do not include these things. In the US, for example, we spend the entire net worth of Elon Musk (the “richest man in the world”, though he rightfully points out that Putin owns far more than he does) about every six months on the military alone. Add in Zuckerberg and you can get another 5 months or so. Then there’s the next year to think about. Maybe you can do Buffet and Gates; what about year three?
That’s just for the US military, at present day spending levels.
What you’re describing is at least an order of magnitude more expensive than that, just in one country that only has 4% of people. To extend it to all human beings, you’re talking about two more orders of magnitude.
There aren’t enough billionaires on the entire planet even to pay for one country’s military expenses out of pocket (even if you completely liquidated them), and this proposed plan is 500-1000x more spending than that. You’re talking about 3-5 trillion dollars per year just for the USA - if you extrapolate out linearly, that’d be 60-200 trillion per year for the Earth.
Even if you could reduce cost of provision by 90% due to economies of scale ($100/person/month for housing, healthcare, and education combined, rather than $1000 - a big stretch), it is still far, far too big to do under any currently envisioned system of wealth redistribution. Society is big and wealthy private citizens (ie billionaires) aren’t that numerous or rich.
There is a reason we all pay for our own food and housing.
I just want to point out that's about a fifth of our GDP and we spend about this much for healthcare in the US. We badly need a way to reduce this to at least half.
> There is a reason we all pay for our own food and housing.
The main reason I support UBI is I don't want need based or need aware distribution. I want everyone to get benefits equally regardless of income or wealth. That's my entire motivation to support UBI. If you can come up with another something that guarantees no need based or need aware and does not have a benefit cliff, I support that too. I am not married to UBI.
Utter nonsense.
Do you believe the European countries that provides higher education for free are manning tenure positions with slaves or robbing people at gunpoint?
How come do you see public transportation services in some major urban centers being provided free of charge?
How do you explain social housing programmes conducted throughout the world?
Are countries with access to free health care using slavery to keep hospitals and clinics running?
What you are trying to frame as impossibilities is already the reality for many decades in countries ranking far higher in development and quality of living indexes that the US.
How do you explain that?
Is AI slavery? Because that's where the value comes from in the scenario under discussion.
This can also describe Nordic and Germanic models of welfare capitalism (incrementally dismantled with time but still exist): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_capitalism
Having had the experience of living under communist regime prior to 1989 I have zero trust in the state providing support, while I am totally dependent and have no recourse. Instead I would rather rely on my own two hands like my grandparents did.
I see a world where we can build anything we want with our own hands and AI automation. Jobs might become optional.
Unless your two hands are building murderbots, though, it doesn't matter what you're building if you can't grow or buy food.
I haven't personally seen how UBI could end up working viably, but I also don't see any other system working without much more massive societal changes than anyone is talking about.
Meanwhile, there are many many people that are very invested in maintaining massive differentials between the richest and the poorest that will be working against even the most modest changes.
The other system is that the mass of people are coerced to work for tokens that buy them the right to food and to live in a house. i.e. the present system but potentially with more menial and arduous labour.
Hopefully we can think of something else
Right now the communists in China are beating us at capitalism. I'm starting to find the entire analytical framework of using these ideologies ("communism", "capitalism") to evaluate _anything_ to be highly suspect, and maybe even one of the west's greatest mistakes in the last century.
> I see a world where we can build anything we want with our own hands and AI automation. Jobs might become optional.
I was a teenager back in the 90s. There was much talk then about the productivity boosts from computers, the internet, automation, and how it would enable people to have so much more free time.
Interesting thing is that the productivity gains happened. But the other side of that equation never really materialized.
Who knows, maybe it'll be different this time.
I think the reality is just that governments use words and have an official ideology, but you have to ignore that and analyze their actions if you want to understand how they behave.
Is there like a transition period where some people don't have to pay taxes and yet don't get UBI, and if so, why hasn't that come yet ? Why aren't the minimum tax thresholds going up if UBI could be right around the corner ?
So, AI may certainly bring about UBI, but the corporations that are being milked by the state to provide wealth to the non-productive will begin to foment revolution along with those who find this arrangement unfair, and the productive activity of those especially productive individuals will be directed toward revolution instead of economic productivity. Companies have made nations many times before, and I'm sure it'll happen again.
The destruction of the labour theory of value has been a goal of "tech" for a while, but if they achieve it, what's the plan then?
Assuming humans stay in control of the AIs because otherwise all bets are off, in a case where a few fabulously wealthy (or at least "onwing/controlling", since the idea of wealth starts to become fuzzy) industrialists control the productive capacity for everything from farming to rocketry and there's no space for normal people to participate in production any more, how do you even denominate the value being "produced"? Who is it even for? What do they need to give in return? What can they give in return?
Over time, as more things get automated, you have more people deriving most of their income from UBI, but the remaining people will increasingly be the ones who own the automation and profit from it, so you can keep increasing the tax burden on them as well.
The endpoint is when automation is generating all the wealth in the economy or nearly so, so nobody is working, and UBI simply redistributes the generated wealth from the nominal owners of automation to everyone else. This fiction can be maintained for as long as society entertains silly outdated notions about property rights in a post-scarcity society, but I doubt that would remain the case for long once you have true post-scarcity.
On the other hand, the Tesla “robotaxi” scares the crap out of me. No lidar and seems to drive more aggressively. The Mark Rober YouTube of a Tesla plowing into a road-runner style fake tunnel is equal parts hilarious and nightmare fuel when you realize that’s what’s next to your kid biking down the street.
I understand the argument for augmenting your self-driving systems with LIDAR. What I don't really understand is what videos like this tell us. The comparison case for a "road-runner style fake tunnel" isn't LIDAR, it's humans, right? And while I'm sure there are cases where a human driver would spot the fake tunnel and stop in time, that is not at all a reasonable assumption. The question isn't "can a Tesla save your life when someone booby traps a road?", it's "is a Tesla any worse than you at spotting booby trapped roads?", and moreover, "how does a Tesla perform on the 99.999999% of roads that aren't booby trapped?"
Baidu's system in China really does have remote drivers.[1]
Tesla also appears to have remote drivers, in addition to someone in each car with an emergency stop button.[2]
[1] https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2025/05/comparing-robotax...
[2] https://insideevs.com/news/760863/tesla-hiring-humans-to-con...
You just shift the emissions from your location to the location that you buy products from.
Basically what happened in Germany: more expensive "clean" energy means their own production went down and the world bought more from China instead. The net result is probably higher global emissions overall.
We need a system where being known as somebody who causes more problems than they solve puts you (and the people you've done business with) at an economic disadvantage.
If no UBI is installed there will be a hard crash while everyone figures out what it is that humans can do usefully, and then a new economic model of full employment gets established. If UBI is installed then this will happen more slowly with less pain, but it is possible for society to get stuck in a permanently worse situation.
Ultimately if AI really is about to automate as much as it is promised then what we really need is a model for post-capitalism, for post-scarcity economics, because a model based on scarcity is incapable of adapting to a reality of genuine abundance. So far nobody seems to have any clue of how to do such a thing. UBI as a concept still lives deeply in the Overton window bounded by capitalist scarcity thinking. (Not a call for communism btw, that is a train to nowhere as well because it also assumes scarcity at its root.)
What I fear is that we may get a future like The Diamond Age, where we have the technology to get rid of scarcity and have human flourishing, but we impose legal barriers that keep the rich rich and the poor poor. We saw this happen with digital copyright, where the technology exists for abundance, but we’ve imposed permanent worldwide legal scarcity barriers to protect revenue streams to megacorps.
What corporation will accept to pay dollars for members of society that are essentially "unproductive"? What will happen with the value of UBI in time, in this context, when the strongest lobby will be of the companies that have the means of producing AI? And, more essentially, how are humans able to negotiate for themselves when they lose their abilities to build things?
I'm not opposing the technology progress, I'm merely trying to unfold the reality of UBI being a thing, knowing human nature and the impetus for profit.
We "made cars work" about 100 years ago, but they have been innovating on that design since then on comfort, efficiency, safety, etc. I doubt the very first version of self driving will have zero ways to improve (although eventually I suppose you would hit a ceiling).
