Sam Harris #130 - Universal Basic Income (with Andrew Yang)

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I thought this was a really good conversation, and for better or worse I probably gave my first donation to someone running as a Democrat because I'd love to see the party up their game and get back on relevant topics. This one, mass unemployment from automation, is absolutely chilling to me and mainly for what I think the American populace would do to one another with this sort of crass non-religious aftertaste of protestant work ethic still hanging thick in the air.

In the US, we have this now; it's called "welfare". You get money every month.

However, only poor people can qualify for "welfare".

So, it seems like they want middle class/rich people to qualify too, so they re-branded it "UBI"?

I don't think the hysteria about automation causing mass unemployment is well-founded. We've automated many industries already and it hasn't caused unemployment, it's just freed people up to do other things.

However, I do think UBI is an absolutely essential policy, which has support from all over the political spectrum. Currently the power in the employer-employee relationship is shifted too far towards the employer; empowering employees with UBI (as opposed to bureaucratic welfare programs) gives them the freedom to walk away from an unhealthy work relationship.

There seem to be thresholds or tipping points to things where, especially with complex systems, people can't really see them easily until it's too late. It will be interesting to see how the fallout from the automation of trucking goes because that will be one of the first really big hits in the expected wave of changes. When people use the Clydesdale's analogy (I don't remember them pulling that out in this interview but it gets brought up often) I'd agree that we're a bit more versatile than horses, though at the same time our job market seems like the pay almost in inverse proportion to the number of people who can do a job with a slightly smaller nod to how much education the job takes. That suggests to me at least that the feedback loops will probably accelerate this once it starts happening and the inequality will probably start growing exponentially.

I think another key selling point with respect to UBI is risk, and I think Bret Weinstein does a great job of addressing what it does to human behavior in his interviews and lectures. When people are dealing with constant risk, not just jobs that open up and evaporate every few years but whole fields and people needing significant retooling which may even be beyond their intellectual capacities, it impacts their behavior quite negatively and if pushed hard enough across enough people that behavior can threaten the stability of civil society. If people have a cushion they can be as responsive as they can be, without one everything will clench and it'll likely turn toward a sort of workplace Hunger Games scenario.

As unskilled labor gets automated. The threshold for being a productive member of society is set higher. Untill now education was able to keep up with these changes. But there is certain a limit to our cognitive capacity and the bottom of the bell-curve will have increasingly more trouble keeping up.

I'm not sure this has to be about being fearful of automation, but creating a new model around it or even embracing it. It would be nice I think if we can actually adapt to it by creating a world where people don't have to work those crap jobs anymore.

Also, I happen to be a truck driver which I think is a terrible job with awful work / life balance. Last year I managed to get a more local job, but I'd rather see a robot do it in a system that frees me from it. I could perhaps stay home or find other productive things to do like continue to study computer programming. I failed to get a tech career going and have an unused 2 year degree; UBI might give me a second chance.

Interestingly a friend just asked me whether I'd heard this episode and what my thoughts were.

The main thing I told him - it'll have to happen when UBI is the second-worst option to doing nothing, unless we actually come up with an idea that serves the same purpose better.

Yes - a lot more people will be getting sick from sitting around and overdosing on drugs, yes there will be huge risk of government being able to pull our political strings because Uncle Sam becomes Father Sam. All of that's bad stuff. IMHO it's the second worse option to having deep rural poverty become the overwhelming norm and ending up with things as bad as civil war or massive roving gangs and brigand militias as illustrated in Mad Max. When the rules and incentives go out the window and there's no peaceful way to win - we get dark. UBI is bad but it's a temporary patch for a particular kind of technological transition. Letting things go third world with the way our structure operates? Much worse.

When super intelligent robots start keeping us as pets no human will be able to meet the threshold for being a productive member of society because none will match the robots for intelligence. The robots, having a better understanding of human psychology than any human ever could, will create simple tasks for us to keep us occupied and make us think we're actually contributing, rather like a zoo keeper who puts the monkey's food inside a puzzle box so the monkey doesn't get bored.