I'm considering "actual power", rather than "actual income".
Given that (allegedly) "your salary" won't be the answer for a significant chunk of the population soon, and all that money will instead (allegedly) go to the bosses doing the firings, and the AI companies they employ instead.
The entire Earth's population dead, with evil corporate board members holding votes underground as to who gets to be the CEO of the company.
Billionaires simply _should not exist_. The fact that the power to shape societies is concentrated in so few can account for many of the existential threats we face today. AI is not "the problem", it's merely the latest symptom of our broken system and the prioritization of the wrong goals and outcomes.
EDIT: grammar
Billionaires who inherit their wealth shouldn’t exist. But I have no problem with people like Bezos owning a sizable percentage share of valuable companies they created. When I was a kid, getting something ordered by mail took a week or two, even if you called in the order. UPS and FedEx existed, warehouses and storage trucks existed, but Bezos reduced that to a matter of hours. And now the sheeple can get their daily Amazon deliveries while complaining that Bezos is making a nickel on each one.
In a purely analytical calculation—without emotional nonsense—one Jeff Bezos obviously is vastly more beneficial to society than thousands of ordinary people. If we just had school teachers, or whoever else you idealize, we’d all be living in mud huts. The average person would be living like an animal without the technology created by exceptional people like Bezos. Why shouldn’t society reward them lavishly?
If American billionaires couldn't exist then America would be even poorer and underdeveloped than Europe, the entire tech industry wouldn't exist, and it'd be entirely at the mercy of China. Because nobody's going to start a business in a country that violently confiscates their wealth just for being successful. The envy of people like yourself is a deep moral illness that destroys civilizations if left unchecked.
Except for commercial flights (which I would easily give up for a hopeful society), I do not find anything on your list remotely relevant to my happiness or well-being.
Imported cheap goods are obviously something all of us consume a lot, but we only need them to feel good in comparison to our neighbours.
As long as we keep them for hospitals and medicine, the rest going away would be just fine. Children would play with whatever they can find instead of cheap plastic toys, we would have to learn to multi-purpose our tools instead of having a specific object for every minor purpose.
Comparing middle income 1st world citizens to dragons on their mountains of gold is disingenuous at best.
Also, a UBI is likely to cause inflation.
As a welfare replacement, it is much more efficient, since there is no effort spent determining who qualifies. People can spent their money however they want, rather than the patchwork of separate programs we have now.
It doesn't need to bring anyone down. It's just a different way of distributing what we already receive. For you ordinary workers, they will receive $X in a monthly check, and their salary can be reduced by $X (since the minimum wage can also be abolished).
That does mean that the desirability of some jobs will shift. Good. We have a bunch of very dirty jobs being done for minimum wage, even though demand is extremely high. I'd love to see the garbage men and chicken processors get more money for their dangerous work.
And if I get less for my cushy desk job, oh well. Especially since we seem to be putting all of the effort into replacing me, and none into the jobs that come with hazards to life and limb.
"cause increased prices for consumer/essential goods" is what you meant (since buying power is moved to people who are reliant on buying them), but this is a one-time transition to a new equilibrium (so is mitigable by increasing the UBI to account for it), not a constant ever-looming devaluator.
We're talking about an increased federal budget in the hundreds of billions/trillions to support such a UBI. That will cause a massive increase in taxation on the people who can still find jobs.
To make matters worst, the government in 10-15 years will likely be spending ~25% of it's budget on interest payments alone. Hiking the federal budget up even more sounds like a hard sell.
If AIs simply replace people, the same total work gets done. It's just a matter of who gets the profits from it.
It won't be that simple, to be sure. Nonetheless we already produce far more than subsistence, and there's no reason why a UBI would change that. If it increases the price of some commodities because now everyone can buy them, I'm ok with that. It already horrifies me that some go hungry in the fattest nation in history.
Even if it were true, you still have distribution. You can’t get goods across a nation, let alone the globe, without significant inputs.
Are you checking the local grocery store and extrapolating globally?
Were you talking about specifically how do you restrain the power of massive corporations to harm people? AI is coming but a lot of the other things that are happening are preventable - like the rise of no-benefit gig work.
Money is just a way of keeping track to how high of a fraction of the future output of the civilization any one person or entity is entitled to. This is by consent.
With AI all is subject to change.
Nope. AI is an accelerant that makes the divide between rich and poor grow even faster.
The richest nation in world history and we can’t spend any of it for the betterment of our citizens. It’s disgraceful.
