Machine Economy vs. Universal Basic Income

The UBI:

I posit that the idea of a UBI is not much more than attempting to bring communism into the 21st century. The notion that the profits of private businesses will be mandated to pay the wages of employees they don't have makes little sense, and the transition thereto would be too chaotic. If the proceeds of production are to go to a workforce that doesn't exist, it is only a government that can mandate this. They would have to convert everyone in the country to government employees and pay us accordingly, but what does that do to the relationship between our now constitutional government(without semantics here) that protects our rights, and a federal employer that reserves the power to restrict the rights of its employees? There's only one way to achieve this and that is nationalization of the means of production and the distribution of resources from a centrally controlled authority.

When you read the explanations for how a UBI would work, its intentions become more and more clear: The centralization of economic power and control of the people thereby.

The Machine Economy:

With the growth of automation, we cannot ignore the automation of the transfer of value(digital currency). For instance, a digital currency can be used for service interactions between machines. Excess energy from your solar power system can be sold via this currency as a service rendered. We're not taking work out of the equation, we're taking who does the work out of the equation. But those machines are still owned by people, in this equation, all proceeds go to the person, while the machines do all the work. The key would be to decentralize the digital/and machine service transactions linked to a single ownership account on a Blockchain. The same account holder can use said digital currency for his/her own transactions as well, as all proceeds from work done would go to the account holder.

I find it interesting that a scientific community advocates old-world political ideas for future concepts. I'm talking about making money far less relevant in our lives by means of technology. That's a star trek economy. UBI is just a digital version of centralization.

If we're going to automate production to the point of even considering a UBI, then it lacks imagination in the sense that we've neglected to automate the exchange of value. If we automate the exchange of value, fundamentally change money(which has gone through a few major changes in human history) to be a means for our machines to transact, all we have to do is become the account holders. If we can decentralize and automate a machine economy based on production values, then even your cell phone and your electric car can contribute to the economy, while you reap the benefits.

The question then becomes:

If you automate industry AND the exchange of value between machines for services rendered and converted the human labor force to individual account holders for the properties they own that will render these services, then what is the daily relevance of the act of commerce for human beings?

I say it would be minimal to non-existent. At that point money as it is understood today becomes nothing more than a constantly updated ledger that tracks the exchange of goods and services for the purposes of managing resources.


Currently, there are several cryptocurrency and blockchain ideas out there, right now, that are testing decentralized IoT automated transactions. I believe if we want to rid ourselves of money as we understand it today(slave to money then you die), then the UBI is the exact opposite way to go. We're supposed to use technologies to free ourselves from the constraints of menial labors, to enjoy more time learning new things, developing new ideas, and focus more on living the lives we work so hard to attain today.

NY Times: How to Prepare for an Automated Future

“The ‘jobs of the future’ are likely to be performed by robots,” said Nathaniel Borenstein, chief scientist at Mimecast, an email company. “The question isn’t how to train people for nonexistent jobs. It’s how to share the wealth in a world where we don’t need most people to work.”

A lot in this article was left open to interpretation. I believe we need to embrace the idea of automation in nearly all aspects of current life. But if we think we can rely on a system whereby all the world's people are beholden to their governments for their very lives,(and at meager subsistence wages) then you can guarantee that those who administer the central authority will be in charge of the VAST majority of the world who would be their slaves.

I disagree with your take on UBI, but you're right about machines. Blockchains however can't solve the issues either, because it's not something that can exist in the everymans hands. Industrial scale mining and payment processing locks others out of the market.

Instead, let me give you an alternative scenario that I believe could work.

We create a national corporation, similar to what the post office is today. Their job is to own, maintain, deliver, and service the robot labor that others rent. Every citizen in America would be entitled to a few shares of this company, and corporate profits would go back to the shareholders. Shares could be bought and sold, as well as offer regular dividends. So some could save money and obtain more as an investment if they wanted.

Use this system to distribute a UBI.

Basically, nationalize robots, rent those robots to the old owners, use that rent to cover UBI.

The way I look at it is, automation represents diminishing returns for the industrial revolution. Every invention or system invented for mankind follows an S curve



It has a slow growth period, than an accelerating growth curve where the benefits of the system provide prosperity for the entire economy but at the end stage the benefits level off, and then the owners of the system receive all the benefits not the economy.

That's automation, in the beginning humans saw benefits as new jobs were created using technology and machinery but in the end automation ends up doing all the work. But it can only really do work that is suited for automation, high repetition with lots of predictability.

So the elite who know own almost everything want things to remain this way, however technology could be used to change the system. That's like disruptive technologies for instance 3d printing and de-centralized manufacturing.

So they want a UBI to maintain this existing system, like a snapshot image of the past with the future imposed on top of it. People need to learn how to use technology instead of being replaced by technology. But our educational systems cannot keep pace with the rate of change of technology, it has to be done on an individual basis where each individual pursues the knowledge and then figures out how to adapt the technology to offer new services and products.

UBI is just another way the cartels and monopolies will ensure their control, keeping people dumbed down and paid for with debt the people have to pay or their children have to pay. The last thing in the world we want is robot taxes because that will create entirely new monopolies for corporations, cost barriers to entry from start ups and small businesses.

$0.02

a reply to: Aazadan

All you've done is restate the definition of a UBI and repackaging it.

Blockchains are immutable, decentralized, and 2nd/3rd gen blockchains are scalable.

These experiments are already happening with great success.

Look into what VeChain and Walton are doing for IoT economics and logistics validation.

a reply to: SkeptiSchism

That individuality can be expressed in a machine economy by the decentralization of economic activity. Even education, as you stated, cannot keep up with the rate of change. In tandem, an outpaced rate of change in education, plus an outpaced adaptability to rate of change in economic expansion with respect to governments, requires that automation find itself being applied to an exchange of value and property rights.

It sounds complicated to some, but it is really a method of simplifying the overall economy by removing monetary and contractual intermediaries and replacing them with smart contracts and digital currency for the transfer of property and the compensation for services rendered or received of the individual account holders that I mentioned in my OP.

I'm coining the word "Mechaeconomics".

Someone probably already did...Though I don't see a definition for it.

So
Mechaeconomics
Noun;

the proposed theory of economic activities, including the exchange of property ownership(including real estate), and services that take place between machines, as well as between humans and machines in a vastly automated world, associated with decentralized distributed networking and cryptocurrency, smart contract technologies, and blockchain technologies in general.

What's interesting is we're facing a future where communism might be rendered something 'mandatory' when there's no jobs left.

Then how the same universities where the communist SJW's are erupting outward from, as the architect fountainhead professors are resident there, are the very same top universities campuses (primarily University of California & Stanford) where the top AI / AGI movement professors and their DARPA funded Dept.'s and all their fancy little compartmentalized .gov funded Technological Singularity related projects operate. The SJW's they're too busy with all their identity politics have any clue about there potentially being some ulterior motives, they the unwitting harbingers of the Transhumanist Movement. Where the elites, the insider professors, the Silicon Valley Technocrats, the adjacent 'Fountain of Youth Society' Hollyweird celebrity types, the politicians, they're after the tech promised land of immortality, while we're being bombed out economically so as not to be able to afford to become immortal, so for those in the know apparently they're decided for us that delivering us 'Neo-Communism' is them being our altruistic heroes or something along that lines I imagine they're rationalized themselves.

As if we cant even count on them to make good on that, but hey the concepts behind it will stoke the SJProgressives so it 'naturally' doubles with the ideology they're crafted for them so the social movement energizing side is already laid out....

great thread and something i think about alot although not nearly as in depth. i hope someone can figure out a solution because this is imo a problem that has to be solved within the next 100 years

a reply to: projectvxn

Okay I have not looked into the specifics of smart contracts, they could work but what I was trying to get at is the idea of continuing the economy of the industrial revolution into a post-industrial, automated economy. It won't provide for general prosperity and that is what provides the best opportunity for peace and stability.

In general, the economy needs to develop solutions and that comes from millions of people making individual choices then the best solutions rise to the top. The system we have now has been optimized for those with the greatest amount of wealth, they can afford lobbying at the legislative level which allows them to craft favorable laws and regulations solidifying their control.

I don't have any issue with encrypted database currencies or smart contracts or any of these innovations as long as they are allowed to compete in the economy on equal footing with all other possible solutions, over time the best solutions win unless .gov interferes.

UBI and robot taxes are .gov interference created by the elite as a way to keep the industrial economy and their wealth/control in a post industrial age.

Personally I think we need to go outwards, use automation to get into space and colonize mars or mine the asteroid belt. We grow when we grow, not when we stagnate that always leads to oppression and suffering.

a reply to: Aazadan

Basically, nationalize robots, rent those robots to the old owners, use that rent to cover UBI.

Steal privately owned property and sell it back to the previous owners and then charge them for that too.

Industrial scale mining and payment processing locks others out of the market.

You can use distributed validation or proof of stake There are also non-minable coins. What I'm really discussing is the ability to instantly account for the exchange of equivalent values in assets and services. The type of coin used only matters in as much as it can be continually scaled upward.

Money, at its essence, is a system of communication. A language.

We went from the barter system to using items of rarity or perceived rarity to transfer the value. At this point, gold and silver were the predominant forms of currency. But the supply of these metals is finite and it wasn't easy to divide so our friends in China came up with the promissory note.

That migrated to Europe, and the Knights Templar spread it like butter on bread. This was the first FIAT currency.

The Gold Standard is based essentially on a promissory note model. However, I would argue that even the gold standard was a fiat as there was never any real way to determine the validity of the government's gold and silver holdings. In essence, it was the promissory note that denoted the worth of the gold and not the other way around.

Regardless, this model has the same problem with regard to exchanging of value that gold had when the promissory note was invented, scaling. Now we use fractional reserve currency. It's currency based on mathematics. The aggregate of our ability to produce which is equal to our credit and the faith our creditors place in our ability for our production to pay them back. In this process, it is the creation of debt and cash that go hand in hand-then we add leverage requirements and we get exponential growth until the inflation catches up.

What makes modern money obsolete is twofold: 1. You cannot prevent it from inflating. It's nature requires it regardless of what is happening in the overall economy. 2. Debt is required for its creation. This is supposed to balance out the inflation, but it doesn't. It simply moved it to one sector of the economy or another(generally exported as well).

So we go from barter, to metals, to gold standard fiat, to math standard fiat, all to support an economy where people are required to work.

Well, people aren't required to work in an automated economy so it falls to machines to make the transactions for their owners.

I think we need to fundamentally change the way we see money in order to meet the economic challenges of an automated future, and what our real relationship is with commerce.

So wouldn't all this requires immense amounts of power to be generated and distributed across a huge area on a nearly constant basis. Our current energy infrastructure can barely handle the load as is in many larger metropolitan areas, so I can't imagine the strain of automation and constant crypt mining on a national scale.

a reply to: projectvxn

Do you find it draining that not many are privy to the depth of crypto that you are in?

IoT, DPoS, PoS, DAG's, DAO's and immutable ledgers are complex terms. Were still a few years for things like this being common knowledge or even common among savvy techies.

We're part of a small, niche group that tries to keep up with a technology that is still in its infancy.

It does make me chuckle to see folks try to explain it though!

a reply to: Thorneblood

This is why you decentralize power generation as well diversification in energy generation methods.

Nuclear, thorium, solar, wind, wave. Hopefully, that will one day include fusion.

originally posted by: Thorneblood
So wouldn't all this requires immense amounts of power to be generated and distributed across a huge area on a nearly constant basis. Our current energy infrastructure can barely handle the load as is in many larger metropolitan areas, so I can't imagine the strain of automation and constant crypt mining on a national scale.

Yah that is the fly in the ointment. We are hitting peak energy, peak oil. Not that it's disappearing, but it is increasingly more difficult to find, obtain, refine and deliver to market.

We need to increase our energy density, thorium, fusion or perhaps cold fusion. Alternative, 'green' energies don't have enough energy density (energy returned over energy invested) to sustain our current level of complexity.

And we need to do it yesterday.

The problem I see with current cryptos is that you need to continually mine new coins to process transactions with existing coins. That means it requires exponentially more energy to mine the last coins, while processing transactions with previously mined coins.

It's an ouroborus.

originally posted by: projectvxn
The UBI:

I posit that the idea of a UBI is not much more than attempting to bring communism into the 21st century.

What costs money is human labor.

It'll be awhile before we can remove all human labor from all work done to sustain the human population.

But, lets jump forward to the future time, where no human "has to work", in order that "all be fed and are happy."

In that time, the machines will dig up the raw materials from the ground. The machines will transport the raw materials to the refining plants. The machines will process the raw materials into various special materials...and so on, until the machines will make the end products, the cars, the houses, the food, the clothes, etc..that we all need.

The machines will repair the broken machines. And the machines, with Artificial Intelligence software, will design and create new machines and products, and "think up" new things to do.

We The People, will then go to our "Amazon" store, and just pick up off the shelf what we want, and walk out. The "Amazon" accounting system will record what we took, and debit our bank account for the part or product. And the goberment will deposit a fixed amount of funds into each and everyone's account, using some "digital currency".

Depending on what people choose to spend their free UBI on, the "Amazon" store will decide what to restock, and the machines will get instructions to make more of that particular stuff.

Machines doing all the work. So, nobody has to pay them anything. They are not alive, can't form unions, can't complain, and never get tired. When they get sick, i.e. "break down", a doctor machine will fix them, and that doctor machine, being a machine itself, doesn't have to get paid.

So...there's nothing to pay to get any product or service be "made available".

And the only reason why we limit what each person can "take" from the Amazon store, by giving each person a fixed montly allowance, is so that
1) we can determine what is most needed by the people, by examining how they use their scarce resource of funds
2) we can limit the "Waste" in the natural resources of the earth, that would occur if everybody could just take as much as they wanted.

Life will be simple then.

In the mean time, since that's about 100 years away, we'll have UBI for the "floor", i.e. to cover basic goods and services needed for survival. And then on top of UBI there will be corporations and consultants that can "earn" money to pay for more things, over and above the UBI level, for which humans will provide their human skills, talents, labor, etc..and get paid.

It's all simple, really.

OMG!

Robotics and A.I have grown by leaps and bounds thanks to DWave and the other dimensional help it gets from entities from other dimensions(thier words, not mine) and its almost time to roll them out and replace humans ability to earn a wage. The facts are in and here they are.

a reply to: SkeptiSchism

It is indeed quite fortuitous that you bring up Ouroboros.

There are different ways to mine or mint coins and still keep the network secure. Talking about machinery opens up the door to the internet of things (IoT). In this case, every networkable device becomes a 'miner.'

Using tons of CPU power and electricity was never a stable way to mint or mine coins.

a reply to: AMPTAH

Right. And as we transition away from human labor we will still need a way to communicate value.

This is what I said in my op:

The question then becomes:

If you automate industry AND the exchange of value between machines for services rendered and converted the human labor force to individual account holders for the properties they own that will render these services, then what is the daily relevance of the act of commerce for human beings?

I say it would be minimal to non-existent. At that point money as it is understood today becomes nothing more than a constantly updated ledger that tracks the exchange of goods and services for the purposes of managing resources.

We need to change the way we see money. The key is to see money as a means of communicating value(which is what it is fundamentally). We also need to recognize the fact that the communication of value has been with us since before humans developed the ability to read and write. In the end, you can do this by transferring both the labor and the means to communicate value to the machines you own. By extension of ownership(all IoT devices registered to your immutable blockchain account) any proceeds from the work of your devices or property is also yours.

One of the largest issues of the technology of money has always been scaling. You can't make everyone fat and happy by basing an automated economy on a dinosaur system that refuses to evolve with the times. Gold reached a point where circulation made no sense so promissory notes were created. That reached a limit so the Gold standard with printed denominations and valuations pegs in the form of paper currency was created. We are now reaching a new scaling issue with how large the global economy has become.

What I'm discussing will scale into the colonization of our solar system and beyond. Because all you need to be able to really do is account for all goods and services performed for the record keeping and efficient allocation of resources for any particular economic endeavor.

All information, processing power, power generation, information storage space, and the like can be bought and sold(and is today), adding this to YOUR ability to buy and sell(instead of others buying and selling your info without paying you) would ensure the unmistakable ownership of your data, and a real stake in the economy.