KARBYTES_JOURNAL_2022_ENTRY_366
For more information on the website author’s ideas for implementing a universal basic income (especially one using expirable money to prevent economic inflation and lopsided distribution of money), see journal entry # 331 of the Karbytes Journal 2022 section of this website.
13_NOVEMBER_2022: While browsing my Instagram feed today, I saw a video clip of Peter Diamandis talking to some other man about how Artificial Intelligence (AI) is arguably the single most important thing which can improve human society. They referred to how the energy usage of buildings on Google’s campus are controlled by an AI which pulls in multiple data inputs from sensors, runs multiple processes simultaneously to model the “real time” state of all the appliances inside that building, and outputs the voltage levels of each of those appliances accordingly (and how such a feat could not be accomplished by a single human being or even by multiple human beings because humans cannot relay information as fast as that AI can). The result of that AI controlling the energy usage of the Google campus is a 40% reduction in energy usage.
I was reminded of some other news I recently read while browsing social media (either Twitter or else Instagram): Amazon installing new robots which can do the same essential functions as the human pickers and packers at the warehouses (and picking refers to looking for specified merchandise on a shelf and placing it in a tote while packing refers to taking the items which are in a tote and packing them into a cardboard box) and that many warehouse employees at Amazon are being laid off as a result. (I thought to myself: why not lay off all the human employees doing what that robot can do cheaper, faster, and with less errors? Then I thought: because the humans need hands on activities which immerse them in what happens outside of their homes so that they do not become too complacent, stupid, and ungrateful for how far technology and civilization has advanced).
I believe that the means to allow every human being to subsist on a universal basic income exists. All that needs to be done to instantiate a viable universal basic income for all adult citizens is ensure that the wealthiest individuals are taxed sufficiently much and/or more money has to be minted and sent directly to the poorest individuals first and the richest (who earn less than a specific maximum annual income) last (but that money has to be roughly proportional to the supply of commodities which are in demand and which are most urgently needed). Therefore, I cannot talk about instantiating a universal basic income and automating jobs without calling attention to the issue of overpopulation and the issue of people being too busy working long hours (typically at low paying, low skilled jobs which could easily be outsourced to robots) and too busy taking care of small kids to do much other than look after their household (instead of pursuing a higher education, extracurricular hobbies, traveling the world, volunteering, and other activities which are not merely about basic survival and homeostasis). I would insist that only those who are sufficiently rich, sane, law abiding, educated, and healthy be permitted to give birth to and to adopt (a limited number of) children while everyone else is temporarily sterilized against their will (though I think that last sentence is a bit extremist and probably unnecessary).
I think one of the main obstacles to automation taking over most jobs and every adult being guaranteed a universal basic income is not a lack of material resources nor a lack of technical knowledge, but rather, a pervasive fear that most humans would not know what to do with themselves if it were not for some employer giving them orders and structure to their lives and a society which basically forces people to work in order to satisfy their basic needs (because having to be forced to work absolves people of responsibility so that they can blame the government and capitalism for why they are so destitute, under-educated, and unhealthy instead of taking their lives into their own hands and deciding for themselves how to use their time).
I am afraid that most people are reluctant to pursue an education unless they are forced to because (a) our society associates getting an education with being employable in a competitive marketplace and (b) people in such a society seem to lack intrinsic motivation to pursue a higher education because they are conditioned to need rewards to do anything more than mere survival and homeostasis.
Lastly, given that technology is rapidly (and exponentially improving), commodities which are in demand and which seem to be currently too scarce for every person to afford simultaneously will eventually become so cheap to produce that there will be a surplus and an abundance such that people do not have to fight each other to be first in line to acquire such resources. (Depending on how large the human population is, how large the demand for commodity X is, and how physically available X is to procure, there will likely need to be some kind of “first come first serve” priority queue or else some kind of raffle which randomly awards people vouchers to purchase X if X is especially rare).
(The variables which are involved in determining what the universal basic income amount for each person is include population size, habitat size, physical resource quantities, commodity production time, demand for specific resources, and perhaps merit and or randomly assigned preferential treatment in terms of a customer being able to afford a commodity which is deemed to be a luxury whose supply is too low to satisfy all demand for that “luxury” commodity).
(One last thing: if I am confined to a planet which becomes dangerously overpopulated and sufficiently unpleasant for me to inhabit, I would to say that I would kill myself to “make way for baby” (i.e. to let someone else crowd me out of existence because that person gets preferential treatment for being a parent of one or more minor aged humans) instead of kill other people in order to make way for myself. That is not because I like people. Instead, that is because I am afraid other people will torture me and attempt to make my life miserable unless I agree to sacrifice myself for their sake (and I would rather die than have to fight for the right to exist against people who demand that I be sacrificed and stifled for their sake)).
(Okay, one last thing: it was suggested to me that I am almost always fighting “to the death” for a modicum of privacy. That is because the house which is my current legal address seems to be populated with or in the vicinity of people who stalk me and who attempt to micromanage me and to deliberately upset me. Hence, I spend most of my time outside (which means I am frequently a public spectacle). Why is privacy so important (and what is privacy)? In my own words, privacy is the quality of being able to limit the kinds of information which passes through a barrier. In my own words, privacy is important because it prevents me from experiencing a crippling degree of information overload from having to process too much information at once. Also, the observer effects the observed and, when I feel that other people are close to me and watching me, I feel that they are forcing me to pay attention to them and to curate my thoughts and actions so that those people do not “pounce” on me. It is easier to write as freely as I want to inside of some kind of opaque and relatively noise-proof container. Hence, I sometimes make trips up to the campgrounds in the “backwoods” of Lake Chabot Regional Park because there are some safe, quiet, and relatively private places to use my laptop with an okay Internet connection (and those places include outhouses which are large enough to sit on the ground inside of and those outhouses include a metal door which locks, small high frosted windows, and a non-flushable toilet in case I need to shit)).
This web page was last updated on 14_NOVEMBER_2022. The content displayed on this web page is licensed as PUBLIC_DOMAIN intellectual property.
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