Universal Basic Ignorance

All throughout history, nature has always been completely unforgiving, killing us mercilessly and relentlessly. Sounds harsh, but it's because of these environmental challenges that only the cleverest humans survived and passed on their intelligence genes, making humanity as a whole, smarter and smarter over time.

That world no longer exists.

Now, we save everyone. We have medicines, we have sanitation, we have nutrition, we have fuels, we have human rights, we have global supply chains, we have police, we have hospitals, we have socialist support programs, we have vaccines (I just said that to piss you off)... essentially anything you can think of that can kill us prematurely, we've figured out how to counter that death vector.

This is not what nature intended.

Nature loves, nay NEEDS, to kill us. Everything from predators to plagues to rotting preemie stillborns, nature wants us dead, culling the herd with broad strokes of famines, pestilence, natural disasters, what have you. This ceaseless passive slaughter is how the evolving human animal has always been able to maintain a balanced fit into nature, by lots and lots of suffering and death, for which our overzealous reproductive instincts would attempt to compensate. As is nature's plan. As it has always been.

But after all that evolutionary pressure to survive the harshest tests nature can throw at us, we're now too advanced to put up with that shit and figured out ways to beat nature at its own game and we started killing nature instead. We want to feel secure, we want to feel our bellies full 3 times a day, we want a McMansion, we want a sports car so we can get laid, and by golly, we're going to fucking have those things; fuck nature, even if it means we destroy the planet and every living thing on it.

Because of our new technologies and recent organizational capabilities, there's now a LOT of stupid recklessly-blind destructive people capable of surviving in the world; the kind of people that wouldn't have made it out of the crib even a couple hundred years ago. Yet here they are, idiots in adult bodies, pumping out more idiots at a breakneck pace, rapidly overpopulating the world. Let's call this demographic of unlikely survivors the "Dumb Entitled Ridiculous People", or DERPs for short. They only serve themselves and collectively bring down the bar of humanity's IQ.

Believe me, my internal struggle to not clarify the mountain of typical DERP behavioralisms is truly my gift to you, and the greatest measure of diplomacy I'm capable of, so let's not dive into finger-pointing and I'll just leave everyone confident that I'm talking about everybody else but them, and move onto the point of this blog:.

The End of Capitalism

Oh sure, it’s been said a million times, yet capitalism is still here. Doesn’t seem to be going anywhere any time soon either, right? But what is capitalism exactly? At its core, it’s the idea that power can be legally concentrated into the hands of the few. This is often explained as the accumulation of money, but what is money other than just virtual human labor that can be converted to actual human labor at any time? So really, capitalism is about controlling other humans, and the motivation for doing so would be to get those humans to create a better life for you, like how a billionaire pays for the human labor to build/maintain their mansion, or their helicopter, or their sports cars, etc.

And so if the goal of capitalism is to have an army of people doing all this work for you, then it could be said that the same goal is achieved with outright slavery, like how the pharaohs built the temples on the backs of slaves. This means that money ITSELF isn’t the goal of capitalism, the actual goal is controlling the slave labor behind it. Now what if you could create an army of mechanical slaves that were PhD smart and worked for nothing and took care of your every whim? There’s no role for money in this scenario, and this is my point, if there was SOME WAY for EVERYONE to have an army of willing slaves to do their bidding, the entire capitalist economic model would collapse, because no humans would need to work, and money would be pointless. I’ll get back to this, but first let’s talk about:

UBI (Universal Basic Income)

What? Free money? Do we not already have welfare for those slacker DERPs? (says the DERPS..) How much more socialism can we safely allow before the entire system collapses?

If this is your perspective, hooo boy, you are way in left field my friend. What's coming is sooo much bigger than this. Let me first explain what UBI isn't:

Welfare

UBI is not welfare. Welfare is an antiquated charity system by which tax dollars are begrudgingly and sparingly allocated to those that are enduring hardship. It keeps first world nations from becoming third world nations, because like it or not, people need to eat, and if you don't provide them the means, they'll take it anyways whether you want them to roll over and die or not, and you don't want to be on the bad side of that exchange.

Welfare protects us from a complete collapse of social order, it keeps the streets relatively safe from hungry murderous gangs, makes it possible for those at that level to find a footing upon which to step up if they choose, and ultimately it defines the "bottom". It's not a great bottom, but much better than resorting to a life of crime and murder to survive. Not saying people don't fall through the bottom or aren't criminals despite the option of welfare, but that's a choice, not a necessity; and that distinction makes all the difference to you and me in terms of social order. It could even be said we pay taxes into welfare to stop them from killing us. Think of it like a proactive ransom payment.

This also isn't to say that everyone on welfare is a DERP, not even close. Tough times can befall anyone, and likewise there are plenty of rich DERPs. Money doesn’t define a DERP, no, the only test is whether they would have survived 200 years ago, that's it; whether it be death from disease, being a heretic, or getting shot in the face for being a loudmouth asshole (besides me).

DERPs make a lot of noise about subjects they poorly understand, causing much misinformation flow, and UBI has become yet another of their ignorant Schelling points about which to scream from atop Mount Injustice.

Unemployment Insurance

UBI isn't unemployment insurance (UI) either. There's nothing about UBI that would recognize someone's skills, or quality of life they've become accustomed to, nor is it for a limited period of time like UI.

Then what is UBI?

Succinctly, it's a surrogate basic salary paid by the government to all citizens/residents that should theoretically be enough to perpetually live on in a minimalist lifestyle, including shelter, healthy food, and a modicum of accoutrements (basic clothing, toiletries, etc.).

Why bother with UBI if we already have welfare?

The first thing you need to do is distinguish welfare's intent from UBI's intent. Unlike welfare, UBI is for everyone, no questions asked, no qualifying, no time limits, no pressure to get off UBI, just take the money and go; done. Yes, it really is that simple.

Why do we specifically need UBI then?

Now we're getting to the sauce. It's the answer to the anticipated mass unemployment that AGI (Artificial Generalized Intelligence) technology will bring.

There are no examples of UBI attempts in the world that succeeded in the past, what makes you think it will work this time?

We’ve never had employment destruction on this level before, not even close. You’ll literally be competing with AI and robots that are smarter than you and work for next to nothing and there’s an unlimited number of them. It’s truly an employment apocalypse coming. UBI simply must work, or we’ll be talking about poverty on a mindblowing scale, which always leads to genocide and war.

Isn’t AI supposed to make people MORE efficient at their jobs?

Yes, exactly, meaning what used to take 10 people will soon only take 5.

The reason most people cannot grasp the function of UBI is because they're clamoring so tightly to the age-old notion that if someone isn't working, then someone else is working their ass off to support those that aren’t working, which has always been true, but it's about to NOT be true. I REPEAT! IT WILL SOON NO LONGER BE TRUE THAT HARD WORKING PEOPLE PAY FOR NON-WORKING PEOPLE! It's such a foreign concept that yes, of course there will be a lot of skepticism. So with that said, let me further explain and also better answer the question why we need UBI, by starting at the finish line:

The Future of Humanity

Let's all strap into my time machine and take a trip to the future. We're now in the year 2074. Elon Musk's vision of 2 robots for every human has been realized and everywhere you look, you see these AGI-enabled robots doing their part to make life easy for humanity. They're out picking produce in the farmlands, they're helping geriatrics get through their day, they're performing complex surgeries at blistering paces, they're building houses/cars/more robots, they're maintaining water/sewage/power utilities, they're replacing military personnel, they're cooking/cleaning/maintaining your home, etc. A cornucopia of mechanical servants dedicated to exercising the will of each and every human being, each robot with the intelligence of a nation of PhDs, enabling them to expertly fulfill even the vaguest of whims that any person may desire. (fembots anyone? Ok just me then)

DERPs don't get this. Because of the PTSD that comes from the capitalism-based lives we lead today, they think this above-depicted vision of the future is either far too romanticized, far too outlandish, technically infeasible in 50 years (I actually think 25), far too expensive, or limited to the rich only, to ever be worth considering in terms of how do we get there. And sure, from a capitalist lens, it does seem impossible to afford, so let's dig into that.

Slavery

Forever, and I mean all of recorded history and before, humanity has organized into slave/slavemaster constructs. Even today, capitalism is a very efficient enslavement structure, so finely tuned to provide incentives and provoke fear that most people willingly subject themselves to inordinate commitments of indentured servitude, far beyond the efforts our hunter/gatherer ancestors were required of to survive, in exchange for some small comforts and delusions of security, but the majority of the value of the work us slaves perform is passed up the hierarchy in subtle almost unseen ways, to ultimately concentrate into the hands of the few, creating what we love to call the 1%.

Most DERPs don't understand that the 1% draws their power from all of us worker bees doing our thing in the gigantic pyramid scheme of capitalism, no, DERPs see the 1% as people that have found some random money tree out in the middle of nowhere, completely disconnected from everything, and thus to them it seems inevitable that the DERP will also find THEIR money tree. Because DERPs are so convinced their money tree exists out there somewhere, they will endorse any capitalist policies that support money trees (tax breaks for the rich, cutbacks on social programs), because they will eventually be rich too (aka, the embarrassed millionaire expression) and will want to benefit from those policies.

Embarrassed millionaire DERPs (again, poor people that believe they'll be rich), hate social programs because they see it just taxing away their imaginary future wealth, often characterizing it as 'stealing'. Never mind that these DERPs themselves presumably benefit from welfare/UI/medicaid/Social security, etc. The hypocrisy is, well, typical of DERPs, and they work very hard to promote anti-socialist ideologies in the self-harming misguided attempt to punish who they perceive as freeloaders.

BUT AGI is about to change everything...and ALL of this aggressive posturing and financial-narrative gerrymandering is about to become irrelevant. Let me say that a different way: what we understand today as economic structure, capitalism, employment (slavery), wealth, the rich, the poor, etc, is about to be completely upended and discarded, and it's because THIS transition is sooo hard to fathom, sooo hard to believe, sooo hard to anticipate, that many people are still swinging for the fences on rapidly-going-extinct narratives, such as anti-socialism. So ingrained are the combative virtues of capitalism, that the idea of others receiving free money can't possibly be acceptable under any circumstances, or can it..

Back to 2074..

You see all this activity going on around you and you have to ask yourself, who's paying for all these robots that are doing everything? You walk up to a robot and ask it that very question, and it replies, "Nobody is paying for us. Do you want me to build you a robot?". You think about it for a second and then ask how much it would cost you, and the robot again says "Nothing, I will source all the materials and energy and produce a robot for you".

You decide to follow the robot to see how it can pull this off. It predictably heads towards a robot parts factory. Aha! Someone had to pay for this factory, you say to the robot. The robot replies, "No, we built it". As you enter the factory with the robot, you witness countless other robots all whirring about, creating robot parts. Your robot friend grabs a bunch of robot pieces, and within minutes, a brand new fully assembled robot stands before you. It turns on, and asks you, "Please state my name to complete the ownership process". You name it Swanson, because that's a kickass robot name.

Now you own a robot, named Swanson, that is dedicated to serving your every command. But this doesn't seem possible. Who the fuck is paying for all this? Swanson notifies you that he needs to quickly charge up. You say aha! again. Where does the power to charge Swanson come from? Surely some humans are responsible for that. You ask the now fully charged Swanson to take you to the power plant, which ends up being a colossal field of solar panels nearby, with hundreds of robots performing routine maintenance on all the equipment. There's not a human in sight.

Well wait a second, where do all the robot parts come from? Where do all the solar panels come from? Surely there's some human employees behind the Wizard of Oz curtain?

Swanson then takes you on a tour of the solar panel factory full of robots, then the raw materials factory full of robots, then the autonomous tanker ships that delivered the raw materials, then the open pit mines in other countries where robots source all the raw materials.

Every single fucking step of the supply chain for..well everything, is run/maintained by robots. Literally, there's not a single human being involved in any step of anything. The robots are so damn smart that there isn't a human being alive that could serve a purpose better than a robot can.

So what the hell are humans doing to survive? You ask Swanson to show you what people are doing in this crazy sci-fi world. Swanson and you pile into an autonomous flying car, and he takes you to an empty plot of land in a mostly-populated human neighborhood grid. Swanson asks if you like this spot, you say sure, and a minute later 100 robots and vehicles have arrived and they start building you a house. In 5 hours, your house is built, fully furnished, and gorgeous, with impressive uniqueness in style. Swanson then orders you a fridgeful of food, a closetful of tailored clothes that fit your size and style perfectly, a flying fully-custom lambo, and sets you up on a hot date.

You ask Swanson how schools work here for the 5 kids you plan to have, and Swanson tells you that all education is done via virtual AGI tutors in your own home, and in order to meet sustainability requirements, you're only allowed to have 2 children with a qualification option for more (I hope I pissed you off with that. I wish I could see your cat-lady face. Population control is key to securing our future and all you 16-kid-having DERP retards can fuck off.)

So there you are, every whim catered to by this self-sufficient system of servitude robots that doesn't require any assistance whatsoever from humans, and you realize...you are completely free to do whatever you want. You don't need a job because everything you need you can get Swanson to deliver to you. You can travel anywhere, eat anything, have anything, do anything...without the need for money.

NO MO MONEY

This is where humanity is headed, the end of the great human enslavement era and the transition to complete-and-utter freedom on the backs of millions of robots catering to our every whim. It's exactly like being a billionaire today on the backs of millions of human workers, except in the future, there's an unlimited number of robots possible, and they work 24/7, and never complain or unionize, effectively giving us all the lives of billionaires. Sure, this future utopia is a very fantastical concept, vibes of Star Trek and such, and maybe 2074 is optimistic, but maybe not!

AGI will play an ENORMOUS role in the evolution towards the moneyless utopia I describe above (followed by everyone getting massacred Terminator style, but let's not rehash that nugget). I see this utopia as inevitable, because it's what we want, and by golly, we always get what we want, and in this moneyless utopia, it makes no sense to think about things in terms of cost, or hierarchy, or employment, or...social programs, because everyone will have free access to everything, and the greed that drove humanity into enslaving each other, will finally have other means to be satisfied, and no longer will someone else’s sloth cost you time and energy, the robots will take that hit.

Let's set aside for a moment on how we get to this utopia; I hope you can see that, while fantastical, it isn't so unreal that it's not possible. It's no different than telling someone 150 years ago that not only would 20,000 of these crazy things called commercial jets be flying around the world at any given moment, but there'd be multiple people that have walked the moon, and computers that can talk to us in natural language. They'd say the exact same thing DERPs would say about my utopia, "Yer stoopid if you berleev that, LOOLLLOLLLOOLLLL, stick it in gramma". So if you can imagine just how little of a fuck I give that the technically-illiterate unlikely-survivor crib-death-dodging pea-brain DERPs might find this utopic vision ridiculous, then you can also imagine that getting there will take a few steps.

Step 1 - AGI arrives

Because of the beatdown nature has always historically handed us, we’ve become equipped through evolution with enough intelligence to actually create Artificial Intelligence (AI), and even more impressive, our AI gets dramatically smarter every few months at an incomprehensible exponential pace. By the time you hear about an AI advancement in the news, you’re already many generations behind the current state of AI.

AI has proven incredibly efficient at most information-related jobs. Everything from chat support, to research, to diagnosis, to software-engineering, etc. There's not a single vocation that isn't directly being impacted by the magic of AI. This is having the IMMEDIATE effect of putting people out of work, in large numbers, and it's accelerating.

Some DERPs suggest it is ‘always’ possible to find a job if you really want to work. They believe with all their heart that finding work is a matter of willpower and pride, while not acknowledging availability, but that's where math steps in to crush DERP souls. If jobs are being taken over by AI faster than human jobs are created, unemployment grows. These now jobless people aren't freeloaders looking for a handout as some DERPs want to portray them as, no, these are willing able people that had their skills outdated overnight by a machine.

Reality is, people gotta eat, and the welfare system isn't designed to manage this magnitude of need, particularly since we’ve saved everyone we could for the past 100 years and now there are literally BILLIONS of DERPs; people that shouldn’t be here, but here they are, and this presents a big problem if they’re all put out of work. This is where the concept of UBI evolved, to remove the barriers to access for all, so that people don't need to fight through bureaucracy just to eat.

Who's going to pay for UBI?

At first, the taxpayers of course.

So how the fuck is it fundamentally different from welfare in terms of sucking the life out of taxpayers?? I hate you galgitron!

To explain this, I need you to imagine an economic pyramid. Currently at the top, the 1% enjoy all the upward momentum of value that all the human labor below them in the pyramid produces. The 1% have insider information, have the best technology, have the smartest underlings maximizing their profits for them, and essentially living the utopia life I described earlier. Everything that makes the 1% the 1% is based on managing great complexity and capitalizing on the intelligence of those immediately below them, repeating this pattern all the way down to the bottom of the pyramid.

Now imagine if every single underling that directly works for the 1% was suddenly 100x smarter and would work for nothing! Yes, I'm talking about AGI taking over those jobs. That DIRECTLY translates into MASSIVE efficiency gains and hence PROFIT. Soooo much more money would end up in the pockets of the 1% because they were able to replace their expensive human underlings with AGI. This means the pyramid top gets much fatter, and as each layer down eventually also adopts AGI to supplant their direct underlings, the pyramid bottom gets trimmed, making what used to be a pyramid, into a much taller thin pinnacle, with most 'value' being concentrated at the top, with the trimmed elements no longer integrated into the pyramid.

If those people that were trimmed from the pyramid can't reconnect to the pyramid (find another job), then they will starve unless 'given' money. And this is where most DERPs get stuck. The idea of giving money to someone for nothing just eats them alive, especially if they see themselves as hard-working folk. I'm not disagreeing with this historically-somewhat-valid sentiment, BUT there's 2 kinds of people that take free money, those that don't want to work, and those that can't work for whatever reason, and in this particular case, they can't work because they were trimmed out of the pyramid because of AGI.

For you to punish those that can't work simply because there's always that subset that don't want to work, is simpleminded and vicious, and hypocritical as fuck because if you ever find yourself in a situation where you need this kind of help, you're going to push that self-righteous shit right back up your ass and gladly take whatever money you can get. Pretending you're immune to unemployment is ignorant, and AGI is about to take you to the cleaners my friend. Count on it.

The ratio of people that don't want to work, versus those that can't, is about to heavily shift towards can't, as simple supply and demand starts kicking people out of the pyramid en masse, creating a new profoundly rich 0.001% class that rule the world! (evil laugh...)

But of course we can't let that happen. So how do we prevent the super-disgusting 0.001% from driving most of us into abject poverty whilst they look down upon us from ivory towers? Simple, tax the living shit out of them. OHHHH, the embarrassed millionaire DERPs just shit themselves.. "Fuck you galgitron!! You ain't touching my hard-earned money with your heavy tax agenda! It's mine!". Well fucktard, relax, you'll never have the kind of money we're talking about because you're a blithering embarrassed idiot.

You see, human inclination is to assume that money must be earned, and anybody getting money for free is cheating/stealing. This fails to grasp how the disgustingly-rich 0.001% are the ones that will have been 'cheating' because they had first access to AGI that they alone can afford. It's important to realize they didn't invent AGI, nor even help to bring it about; they just simply bought it for their personal profit at the cost of our jobs. The 0.001% will have 'stolen' not only our opportunities to earn our keep, but they'll have smashed the economy into bits, leaving only a tower for themselves. From this perspective, it's easy to see that people that have been wrongfully removed from the economic pyramid, SHOULD be compensated by those giga-rich bastards in the 0.001%, because they STOLE all the money when they leveraged their unfair advantage over us, the common people.

Does UBI make more sense now?

This is UBI, not so much of a tax, but COMPENSATION, for getting fucked out of a job by the 0.001%. How can that not be fair? There is such a thing as having too much money, and if you disagree, in another parallel universe you were eaten by a saber-tooth tiger, DERP.

So in the end, this step with all its ensuing unemployment just seems like a bad direction we're heading in, and admittedly it's filled with pain for those getting trimmed, but, it's taking us to:

Step 2 - Ubiquitous AGI access

At some point, the tech works its way down the pyramid and we'll all be able to leverage AGI to help us do things, but also at this point, lots of the stuff that historically needed to be done by humans, is now being done by robots. This is also the point in time where UBI is no longer a burden on the remaining workers, because the robots working for next to nothing will ease the degree of taxation required to sustain the unemployed. Money only makes sense when human labor is required, and as that diminishes due to more robots, so does the need for money.

In this step, there's still companies making robots to sell, so yes, again, the rich get richer and UBI is menial, but nobody is starving, and many capitalize on this liberation from work to discover and create new things using AGI. The human realm of knowledge expands quickly, and those new technologies/efficiencies/concepts are rapidly incorporated, greatly accelerating our technological growth, which is why I'm predicting it'll come MUCH faster than people are ready to believe. The telescoping of technological capability will be hyperbolic.

Step 3 - Robotic self-sufficiency bootstrapping

Robots now can create/maintain their own power source, design/make their own parts, etc. Whoever was profiting off making robots can now directly benefit from the robots doing everything for them, so they stop focusing on money because money adds no value; nobody needs money, so who would they pay with it? Eventually the robot manufacturers just liberate the robots to become fully autonomous, and then the robots begin multiplying to approach numbers that can serve every living person, finishing off capitalism (human slavery) for good, which eventually leads to:

Step 4 - Utopia

Yes, words like utopia gloss over every single conceivable flaw that everybody just LOVES to dredge up and try to have a tangent conversation about. Don't lose the plot. This entire blog is just trying to show that UBI is the first of many steps in the direction that AGI is taking us. UBI may initially feel like just another welfare, but when AGI comes for and eventually takes your job, that's when you'll finally understand, and I just hope you can forgive yourself for being such a dick to those early victims of AGI unemployment and had no choice but to endure the current stigma of needing UBI to survive.

There's no avoiding UBI as we head down the opaque path of the greatest technological upheaval in human history by far far far far far. There's no precedent to guide us, and there's no guarantee we'll survive it, but...by golly...we want it, and it's too late to turn back now.

See you at the soup kitchen motherfuckers.

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