Philosophy Discussion Forums | A Humans-Only Club for Open-Minded Discussion & Debate

[Lagayascienza]

JackDaydream, I think you're right. It's not just in your country that governments are giving the unemployed, and those on other forms of social security, a hard time. I am currently helping a friend apply for the aged pension here and the hoops they are making him jump through are just ridiculous. And cruel. He's old and has no income FCS! Lifestyle choice my ass! It's enough to make anyone worry about both their physical and mental health.

With AI, the loss of jobs, and the concentration of wealth at the top, governments are going to have to start taxing the trillionaires and their mega-corporations and institute something like a Universal Basic Income. As you say, it should be enough to live on, but not enough to stifle people's desire to do better for themselves if they are able to. There needs to be incentive, but it's unseemly, and dangerous, to have old folks in dire straits and kids growing up in abject poverty and in wealthy nations. What will those kids be like as adults? How will they cope? How will they see the world? Will they want take out their frustrations on the societies that threw them m the scrap heap?

We cannot prove that it is "morally" right to help those on the bottom of the heap. However, we can vote for governments that will do so, even if just for prudential reasons like societal cohesion and so were are not having to pick up bodies from the streets each morning.

[Sy Borg]

If people aren't producing and productive, their lifestyles will diminish. The UBI will be enough to survive - as long as a person lives with multiple others in a one-bedroom flat. We can see where this is going. Hong Kong has people cages, a network of human-sized cages that poor people can rent to get off the streets.

Why would government/corporations need to provide accommodation that facilitates work? They won't need people for work, only for study. Ever more oppression is coming but most the people of the future won't mind; it will just be normal to them. It's us oldies, in the midst of a fast-changing world, who most struggle to adapt.

[JackDaydream]

If people aren't producing and productive, their lifestyles will diminish. The UBI will be enough to survive - as long as a person lives with multiple others in a one-bedroom flat. We can see where this is going. Hong Kong has people cages, a network of human-sized cages that poor people can rent to get off the streets.

Why would government/corporations need to provide accommodation that facilitates work? They won't need people for work, only for study. Ever more oppression is coming but most the people of the future won't mind; it will just be normal to them. It's us oldies, in the midst of a fast-changing world, who most struggle to adapt.

It is hard to know how it would work because monetary value is shifting so much. If rents go higher many may gradually not be able to afford even 'people cages'. It may end up with a far worse situation than the Victorian workhouses and many first world countries being equivalent to the third world, except for the elite. Many people may be cut off from access to digital technology at all and life expectancy may be very short for the extremely poor. It is hard to know how fast this could happen and may depend on many unknown variables.

Of course, this is the worst scenario and, hopefully, it won't get that bad, but it is extremely hard to predict. It will be extremely sad if the great advances in knowledge and technology result in such a situation. But, it is hard to know where the relationship between authoritarianism and restrictions of freedom may lead. The loss of privacy is about stripping people of what Western individualism and the ideals of liberty and democracy were about.

It would be the end of civilisation as we know it, equivalent to the fall of Rome. It is hard to know if there is any such plan is an intentional one to manage the prospect of petroleum running out, with only a small minority being able to have the luxuries people are accustomed to, or whether corporations and the government are in deep confusion. We need some visionaries to come up with some radical alternatives of how human civilisation can continue in a way to give people quality of life in a way beyond the values of consumer materialism.