Well, it poses an even more interesting necessary change as well: taxing the wealthy. Because when everyone is out of work and has no money, there is no tax revenue being generated.
But let’s face it, AI will be used to increase profits and slowly put tons of people out of work for a _really, really long time_before they even move one fucking micrometer in the direction of UBI and closing corporate tax loopholes and going after offshore money and the überwealthy.
Yepp… Americans and wage laborers need to learn to use the tax system to their advantage like the rich.
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Setup “Small businesses” (candles? doesnt f*ing matter), start doing a shit ton of tax write-offs, open shell companies in Panama, Luxembourg and maybe the U.S. Virgin Islands or Delaware for domestic.
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Wash those funds into your shell businesses, write-off some more in a new country (maybe even using physical cash transfer systems to avoid direct-exchange records, like systems in Asia and Western Asia/Middle East do), stash the gains in foreign accounts with high interest rates/ market funds/whatever.
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Profit ??? (Hopefully, keep it secret, keep it safe tho)
Congratulations, you’ve now probably dropped your U.S. income bracket level a notch, lots of things are paid for through your LLC now to shield your assets while using your corpo to bear the brunt. All while potentially making extra revenue at a potentially lower/non-taxed rate (depending on cashout, gains, yadda yadda yadda).
Have fun kids, make sure to share the wealth!
And once you get that all figured out to the point that you’re both rich and bored, run for president!
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Let’s be honest, they don’t need AI to increase profits and put people in misery. This argument is a stupid hope at best. Like let’s hope that if there is no AI we will live decently one day. It won’t happen.
AI is an opportunity to change the system, and it cannot be worse.
UBI is a good short term solution but the appropriate long term solution is to ask whether our style of consumption and ownership is appropriate in the first place. We can stop the grind.
cough cough Socialized opt-in mixed economy cough cough
Except they don’t need consumers.
If the purpose of AI is to automate all parts of the economy, the economy becomes functionally useless. All they need to do is sit back and relax.
The one thing they’re not accounting for is the droves of poor, starving angry people who aren’t just going to all decide to die quietly.
They’ll have AI predict the areas most likely to cause trouble and dispatch police to “rectify the issue”.
This could have been the case with automation. Just in my own lifetime/career, I’ve seen entire rooms of support staff be replaced by totally hands-off processes.
The fact that UBI is attractive to any degree at all means the whole economy is worth throwing away. Why are people producing and not receiving an adequate portion of what the economy produces? Nixon’s dream is only going to put snags and clogs in the economy, the only question is where. The purpose of the global economy is to siphon wealth from the poor to enrich dynasties, a UBI will either wither it’s own funding or get rolled back as this purpose is obstructed.
Not an original observation but an important one nonetheless
But then that money you give to these unemployed losers might not come back to you! /s
