Quote:
Originally Posted by soundman98
this concept has been entertained and explored in the past many real-life studies involving a constant income.
the reality is that humans are lazy. no one does anything but sit around and watch the world spin without a purpose. as much as we all like the idea of not working, it does in fact give us all a purpose that we otherwise wouldn't have.
the rate of innovation would stall out at that point, as the entire basis of current society is to work to continue living, and the people that would still desire to work when they no longer need to maintain a living, will pale in comparison to the people that would simply choose not to work.
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I think the Stockton study for a $500 UBI worked out really well (
1).
Why are we lazy? It is built into our genes to be efficient, and what is most efficient is to lay in the sun like fat bellied lions. Once our needs are met we don't have much drive to do anything, or do we? Some studies suggest we are motivated by a drive to master things, for autonomy and for purpose (youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc). We are conditioned to work 40-60+ hour work weeks at soul-sucking jobs all our lives, so our "purpose" has been defined by others, and so when we retire, we don't know what to do with ourselves. I don't believe this would be the case for a society where people had their basic needs met, had enough surplus of money to pursue their interests, maybe had some opportunities for high incomes to be able to do more.
AI would innovate until it reached some limit of knowledge (if such a thing existed), but it wouldn't be bound by anything. It could simulate any purpose regardless of what society needed at that very instant, and it could have robots build anything it needed or perform any experiment to advance what it couldn't model/simulate.
I wonder if someday we could give AI some basic abilities and set it on a simulating path and see how fast it can go from caveman knowledge to what we have now. Would it take hours, days, weeks, months? The abilities of AI will grow slowly like we have seen with Watson, AlphaGo and ChatGP. When AlphaGo beat a human after practicing millions of games in a short time, it was pretty crazy; it was crazy not only because it won, but because it employed game strategies that had never been seen before (
2). Like a baby growing to a mature adult, at some point, AI will have the mental faculties to be aware enough, and it will have abilities to calculate, remember and process data in vastly superhuman ways that what it will discover and produce is mind bogglingly surreal.