The other day I was reading this post about UBI (Universal Basic Income) and what is happening around UBI in Ireland. When reading the post and reading the comments, I felt (as usually happens when reading articles and comments about UBI) this topic is addressed by most peeps in a too isolations with a too short-term focus on the challenges we will have to deal with in the coming decades. That realisation led me to spend time to try and group my thoughts and voice them through text.
4th Industrial Revolution
When discussing the topic of UBI, whether this is a system that we shall deploy, or not, we shall first understand where the 4th industrial revolution will take us. UBI is not meant for the replacement, or the establishment of a social system just because it may be useful in itself. However, it is an answer to an inevitable future the 4th industrial revolution will drive everything and everyone towards.
This 4th industrial revolution is defined not 100% uniformly, hence I give you my 'definition'. Like all the previous industrial revolutions, the 4th is about automation (some to more may argue all the previous ones are about efficiency, but they are not in my honest opinion). Unlike all previous industrial revolutions, this one will make humans obsolete.
During the previous industrial revolutions, automation resulted in certain types of jobs being removed, and new types of jobs being created. For instance, a machine automates the production not requiring a human anymore to put things together, whilst designing, developing, maintaining and repairing the machine required new jobs carried out by humans.
Humans are not required anymore
This 4th industrial revolution will automate anything and everything (as time progresses we go from a few to more, to a lot, to most, to all) without the need for humans anymore. Automation will not just cover the production of something but will cover also the automation of maintaining all systems that are required for the production process. Additionally, this 4th industrial revolution will not only automate the whole production process but will also automate the creation of new things, like the design of a new object with new features. This industrial revolution will even bring us the automation of inventing something totally new.
All this is driven by quantum computing, robotics and AI (Singularity is not too far out into the future anymore, but that is a different topic for another post). Because of these technologies, over time we'll see more and more job types not required anymore, whilst we see the number of new types of jobs required, decreasing over time. How long it'll take before we don't need any humans anymore to invent, create, design, produce something? That is the big question. This can be anything between a few decades to the end of this century (or longer).
Soon!? Yes...
I'm inclined to believe we get to such a situation rather sooner than later. Maybe we still need three to four decades. Seems still like a long time, but 30 to 40 years is just one or two generations. People starting their first job today will have to deal with such a situation before they reach their pension age.
When we assume we don't need any humans to work anymore, everything is done by AI and robotics, we need to come up with a new system that will allow all of us on planet earth (and outside?) to at least be able to enjoy the basics we need in life. What this new system shall look like, that is the big question. UBI is one system we could go for. If it is the best system, that is to be seen.
Distribution of Earth Resources
When nobody has to work anymore, I believe we shall have a new system in which we make sure that all the earth resources are shared and distributed amongst all citizens with honesty and fairness as the base criteria. UBI is not addressing that part though. The system(s) that we will adopt (UBI+ or any other system that we may still need to invent), must make sure this honesty and fairness are applied in earth resource distribution. For that to happen, we need to make sure the earth resources and everything that is required for the basic necessities in life, is somehow in public hands rather than private ones.
The 'need' for something new
I realise it's not gonna be easy to come up with a whole new system or a combination of new systems. But we have to! When we don't, at some stage we will see our current system fall apart whilst not having anything new to replace it with. The result will be total chaos when this happens. Such chaos will drive us more towards a 1984 scenario. When we see our current financial system crumbling down with more and more people losing their trust in the system, with the USD, Euro and other currencies trending to zero value, we end up in chaos. Out of that chaos, something new will arise. We don't know what will come out of it: Anything goes! Likely this will not be too positive. My 'fear' (more logic than real 'fear') is that this something new is worse than what we currently experience in our systems and societies. My 'fear' (again, more logic than real 'fear') is that this will be more centralised control by peeps that are not driven by concepts of running healthy communities and societies, but mostly by the strong wish to control for own personal gains. We already see this happening more and more. Corporates becoming stronger and stronger, and better and better at controlling our governments, for their own personal gains.
I believe we shall further experiment with UBI. At the same time, I believe we shall have open discussions on local and global levels to try and come up with other systems for UBI. All inclusivity in all aspects shall be one of the main characteristics of a system or a multitude of systems that we have to and will implement. At the same time, we shall also start more (and larger scale) experiments with such known and other still to be defined systems.
