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It also makes me wonder about agriculture.
It's difficult to envision a post-scarcity future where food production is still manual-intensive. Mandatory picking service, as a civic obligation? And there are a lot of food types that require manual picking.
UBI would therefore effectively end production of those types of food. (E.g. more grain, less fruit)
Also, the inter-national implications of some UBI countries while others aren't...
Food production being manually intensive today isn't going to be the case forever. There are lots of innovations happening in ag-tech that continue to reduce the need for humans in the loop
* laser precise weeding
* drone flyovers + image detection for keeping tabs on the land without going out there
* purpose built harvesters that could eventually be driven by an autonomous agent
Manual picking is not so bad if you're only trying to meet your own needs, rather than trying to make a living at it; my family used to visit "u-pick" farms when I was a kid, and we could easily collect all the fruit we would need for a year in a few hours of work. My mother spent far more time canning and preserving it all than we ever did picking it.
Perhaps this idyllic post-scarcity future would include networks of community orchards, akin to the "p-patch" garden system we have in Seattle.
UBI would likely only be enough for the barest of necessities of survival. Gardening in an empty lot would be an obvious way to supplement that income, with the same benefits of a gym membership.
The point of UBI is that via automation and reduction in cheap energy, opportunities for useful economic activity will be harder to find. In the best case, most people would have a mixture of reliable but marginal income (gardening) and high-potential but risky activity (inventing) with UBI allowing enough security to make crime a bad proposition.
Why is that the best case? In my “best case”, all of everyone’s needs are met, people pick and grow more intense crops because they want to, artists just enjoy making art, and “income” from work just isn’t really a thing anymore. My best case is everyone has what they need and can access what they want.
It would require a lot of strong social structres. Because a lot of important tasks (like maintaining the floor cleaning equipment in the robot-tractor tyre factory) just really isnt that interesting but still needs to be done. I can see ways motivation can come from others. I'd argue my motivation to persist in my work isn't (directly) because of the money I am paid but rather due to social effects of my colleagues, and the money only contributed to building up this colleague social structure in the first place (alongside the potential value our work brings being an almost equally powerful motivator)
keeping these things going when people lose interest will be a challenge.
> a lot of important tasks (like maintaining the floor cleaning equipment in the robot-tractor tyre factory) just really isnt that interesting but still needs to be done
In a heavily AI-oriented future, why wouldn't that be done by the floor-cleaning robot?
Some people do a job for the pride of it because it must be done. I wouldn't want to be a plumber, but that doesn't mean there aren't plumbers who take pride in doing it. Same with the floor cleaner at the robot-tractor tyre factory.
Though I suspect on a long enough timeline, that job will be automated too and UBI will become a "here's a [weekly|monthly] stipend to live life on, but it's not too much to act truly foolish with."
I would say your best case requires technological advances that won't necessarily happen. In a truly postscarcity future I don't think we'd have any use for UBI. I do think UBI would help empower everyone to work on hard problems in a way that maximizes our odds of getting there, but I'm envisioning it existing alongside scarcity. We're just thinking about very different scales of time.
illegal immigration and migratant issues are already a huge problem. it's less about how good it is in modernized countries, and more about how shit it is in crappy countries. UBI may push that a little more, but it's nothing new.
It also makes me wonder about agriculture.
It's difficult to envision a post-scarcity future where food production is still manual-intensive. Mandatory picking service, as a civic obligation? And there are a lot of food types that require manual picking.
UBI would therefore effectively end production of those types of food. (E.g. more grain, less fruit)
Also, the inter-national implications of some UBI countries while others aren't...