Seems like a no-brainer to me. I must be missing something though. What is the catch? If implemented, there is no slipping below the poverty line anymore. So if you get a job, you can live on your salary + $12,000 year. If you lose your job, at least you have a backstop. My opinion is that the UBI is fine, but then get rid of all the rest of the social safety-net programs. Seems far more efficient, and, since everyone gets it, no one can complain that only bums get it. Finally, with the advent of A.I., huge swaths of people will be unemployable very soon. And it isn't just the low wage jobs that are going to be hit: Doctors, Lawyers, Truck Drivers, Teachers, Computer Programmers, and others I haven't imagined are going on the unemployment line in the next 10-20 years. A $1,000 per month cash handout would grow the economy by $2.5 trillion, new study says Catherine Clifford 50 Mins Ago Getty Images Giving every adult in the United States a $1000 cash handout per month would grow the economy by $2.5 trillion by 2025, according to a new study on universal basic income. The report was released in August by the left-leaning Roosevelt Institute. Roosevelt research director Marshall Steinbaum, Michalis Nikiforos at Bard College's Levy Institute, and Gennaro Zezza at the University of Cassino and Southern Lazio in Italy co-authored the study. The study made economic forecasts for three proposals: a full universal basic income in which every adult gets $1,000 a month ($12,000 a year), a partial basic income in which every adult gets $500 a month ($6,000 a year) and a child allowance in which parents get $250 a month ($3,000 a year). The larger the universal basic income, the greater the benefit to the economy, according to the report. A $1,000 cash handout to all adults would grow the economy by 12.56 percent after eight years, the study finds.Current Congressional Budget Office estimates put the GDP at $19.8 trillion. The cash handout would therefore increase the GDP by $2.48 trillion. (Vox first did this extrapolation in their coverage of the report, and Steinbaum confirmed the accuracy of the extrapolation to CNBC Make It by email.) The $250 allowance would grow the GDP by 0.79 percent and a $500 a month payment would grow the GDP by 6.5 percent. "THE LARGER THE UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME, THE GREATER THE BENEFIT TO THE ECONOMY, ACCORDING TO THE REPORT." ETC https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/31/100...d-grow-the-economy-by-2-point-5-trillion.html
Any profession that is basically applying in an algorithmic way a large database of knowledge to arrive at a probabilistic prognosis or conclusion with very little creativity in between, will be done away with early versions of AI coming in the next few years. Doctors and Lawyers are among the first to go. Auto drivers obviously too. More creative professions where you are creating things will be taken over later by AI. They are more resistant to the early AI we will be seeing. So "grunt" programmers where the programs that are relatively easy to describe but require minimal creativity, will be automated away even sooner than maybe any other job. AI Computers programming dumb computers. The hard part are the more creative professions is when a AI computer has to be able to "interview" a human being to get the input, and be able to understand the requirements for the output. In fact, in all of this, it is the interview process of computer/AI and the human being that is the hard problem. Once the AI computer has the facts, it is just a massive search problem, perfectly suited to layers of networks like those seen in Deep Learning that was applied to beating world class Go players. The crazy part is that they can train themselves to learn a profession in months (with more powerful hardware making that training collapsing to maybe a day in some cases) what takes humans many many years to master.
Frontline management should go. I've worked for people that could have been replaced by a DOS program! One moron would hand out work all over but never kept track of who had it! He would never share priorities or details about what the customer wanted... He also threw tantrums. An AI program wouldn't throw tantrums, no?