Is Universal Basic Income an Unavoidable Reality?
How Rapid Advancements in Technology Will Fuel the Need to Find Replacement Gigs for those Working in Fading Sectors
As the years go on, we are given a choice to either acknowledge change and embrace her lessons or to avoid and chastise them. Most will follow the age old tropes of side-eying the younger generations in favor of their own, feeling discomfort at the widening gaps in culture as well as behavior. Though this is nothing new.
It’s only been during recent decades that the problem has compounded, leading to deeper divides between the generations. Forcing individuals who lived in a time before personal computers to adapt to a world where kids are born seemingly prepackaged with an Ipad in hand. A strange world indeed.
Though while the older generations are forced to watch as society tumbles in a direction entirely unfamiliar, it should be noted that the same is also true for younger generations as well. The connections to the past that grounded individuals have become shaky and unreliable in the age of the internet. Self identity, morality and even basic concepts of interest have all but changed. Forced to adapt to the ever changing environment of the national and even globalizing will.
Recent advancements in A.I and robotics are about to change everything yet again. Self driving cars, robot retail and even automated programs to teach children are about to become a mainstream reality.
It was only 9 months ago when Elon Musk announced Tesla’s new ambition to mass produce a “working” robot that would in theory, be able to complete most simple tasks that a human could do. Claiming that the autopilot A.I they use in their self-driving cars can be repurposed into a functioning humanoid, with the stated goal of replacing all dangerous and repetitive tasks.
While Tesla aims to succeed in a large scale distribution of such a product, they will be far from the first to create such designs.
Boston Dynamics, which was initially founded in 1992 by Marc Raibert, has been dominating the robotics race since the early 2000’s. Recently releasing a parkour showcase for their most advanced design, “Atlas”. Who’s able to run, jump, flip and even vault over obstacles.
It may be a few more years before we get our affordable in house butler bot, but as for the industry today, its already started.
There are robots that can cook, complete deliveries, perform security operations and even recognize and react to human emotions.
Such is the case with SoftBank Robotics “Pepper” bot.
Who’s capable of using emotion recognizing A.I to detect and appropriately respond to people around it. It’s already being used in hospitals, banks, retail and is even being advertised to be capable of operating in an educational setting.
Soon you child’s teacher might not even be human.
It isn’t clear to me that most people are aware of our impending future. That is, if we don’t kill ourselves off, we may just find ourselves in a situation where most people would end up being considered “useless”. Historically not a great place to be. Though if we as humans can manage to get even a fraction of our shit together we could earn ourselves a well deserved age of abundance.
What would this look like?
Well, if we choose to put aside the more dystopian realities for a moment and consider some positives, it will mean that working will become optional.
We just simply won’t need the entire population doing tasks because most things people could do can easily be replaced by automated labor. Even art professions will be at risk.
The new and improved DALL-E 2 A.I is able to create original, realistic images relying only on the prompt that you give it. For example:
If you type in “An astronaut lounging in a tropical resort in space in vaporwave style”, you get…
DALL-E 2 can also make realistic edits to existing images from a caption. It can add and remove elements while taking shadows, reflections, and textures into account. Below will be a link to a video that does a good job explaining how they do it in more detail:
In a world with A.I capable of being more human than humans, it’s going to get a bit weird pretty quick and from my perspective it’s going to come down to individuals making individual choices.
Can you retain your grounding with reality and avoid the entrapment of losing yourself in metaverse like structures?
Will you be able to differentiate between the real world and the virtual world?
How will you digest and interact with the chaos that will inevitably become life?
What is humanity and what about it deserves your value?
All questions that whether we ask them now or never, will eventually come to play a major role in ones life.
There are forces at play in this world that would rather throw the controls of society over to hyper-intelligent A.I to make big decisions for us. It may be the case that it will happen regardless, but our awareness of its happening needs to become frontline if we wish to have any hope of synchronicity with it.
We as a species need to decide if it is life in general that we value or whether it’s the productions of life that we enjoy. I really enjoy using the shopping cart scenario to describe this problem.
You go out to your car after getting your groceries, you unload everything into the back and are pressed with the option of either putting your cart away or leaving it where it is. There are no punishments and no rewards for either choice, you’d be preforming labor with only the faint satisfaction that it might make someone’s job easier.
Much of life will become the same way. You’ll have everything you need so whether you do anything at all will come down to how you determine your sense of value.
It will be different for everybody and ultimately my personal opinion is that the human species will split into those who have managed to retain connection to the human spirit and those who lose themselves to the new age of augmentations.
Let me know down below, are you going to get the chip?
I’m revamping my style so expect longer format, higher quality articles but less often. Thinking of starting with 2 a week and doing a video breakdown in between. We’ll see how it goes from there.
Thanks for reading!
Greetings from beautiful Georgia buddy! ttyvs