I don't know what you mean by "work ethic" (why does that have anything to do with UBI?), but regarding UBI, I think you're either exaggerating or misunderstanding some things, and I say these without any regard to my position on the topic (which is complicated).

When you think UBI, don't think "everyone gets $300k/year for free so nobody needs to worry about working anymore". Think more like "everyone gets $30k/year for free so nobody's life is paycheck-to-paycheck". There are lots of people who literally don't have the opportunity to do anything (even better jobs!) other than their current jobs, which they need to put food on the table and have a roof over their heads. One of the envisioned benefits of UBI is that it would actually give them some opportunity & breathing room in their schedules to do something else - whether it's raising a kid, learning new skills, applying for other jobs, or anything else. Most people would still have quite a bit of an incentive to work for a more comfortable standard of living - it's just that they won't feel like they have a gun to their heads as the alternative.

Does this mean UBI is obviously practical and we should start it tomorrow? No, there are lots of challenges, most notably including the funding itself - not many economies today are able to hand out that much money in a sustainable way, so there's some very hard rethinking necessary to figure out how this could ever work. Does this mean everybody will give a 10x ROI on it in the long term? No, some people would probably not do anything useful with the money. Does this mean UBI solves all problems? No, even if you do your best you can still have bad luck (get hit by a bus, medical bills, etc.). Does this mean UBI would work well everywhere? No, results might vary across different societies.

But we're rapidly heading into a world where more and more people are being put out of work, and can't pick up new skills fast enough (if at all) to make ends meet. Expecting everyone to just adapt is incredibly unrealistic. UBI is one envisioned plausible way to address this problem and others systematically. Nobody knows for sure how it would play out in the long term, but to my knowledge nobody has obviously better solutions either.

> Think more like "everyone gets $30k/year for free so nobody lives paycheck-to-paycheck

What impact would UBI have on inflation? I've read some things about minimum wage increases largely going to landlords. If everyone has 30k, 30k is not worth much, right?

> If everyone has 30k, 30k is not worth much, right?

I mean, I just made up the $30k number to get a completely different point across. I wasn't saying $30k is the magic number. The actual number will, yes, have to be larger to account for the self-induced inflation. I have no idea where the equilibrium would be. Maybe it's double that. Maybe it's location dependent, or something else. Who knows. But it will be somewhere.

And no, I have no idea how to fund it sustainably in the current economic system; some people think it's doable, and some don't. And other changes in how society/government/life works will almost certainly be necessary in the process. I think the point of the UBI debate isn't "the government can send everyone $30k checks tomorrow and everything will be fine", but rather, the point is to inspire people to move from "this is stupid" to "let me humor the idea and at least help spend some effort investigating to see if there's any way to make it work before we declare failure". There's no guarantee the approach would success if we try, but there is a guarantee that it would fail if nobody is willing to even consider taking it seriously.

This is a simplified version of the argument, but basically: right now, I am dependent on an employer for my survival. Keeping a roof over my head depends on my being competent at my job, AND my employer not deciding to fire me. One of those I can control - the other is completely outside of my control. If instead I was dependent on a democratic government for my survival and keeping a roof over my head, at the very least I and other citizens would have a say in the direction and decisions of that government every time an election happened.

Your point does stand in autocracies and dictatorships though.

You are not dependent on your employer. You're dependent on society having enough employers at any point that would match with the skills you can provide in exchange for salary, you can switch employers at any time you want. It's not 1-1, it's 1-many right now. By moving that to the government you're actually going from 1-many to 1-1 and getting a way worse deal.

Worse deal because the many employers are in competition against each other so you can rely on their self interest to remain in business, whereas the people that get government jobs, their self interest doesn't have an incentive system where it would benefit me.

On the surface, yes, there are many employers. How's that going for the folks that have been recently laid off from checks notes... Amazon, Facebook/Meta, Twitter, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, EA, Indeed, Yahoo, Github, Zoom, Dell, Paypal, IBM, Spotify, Goldman Sachs, Coinbase, HP, Cisco...

I'm not really sure that going from many possible employers who cannot guarantee my job to a single entity who can is a way worse deal, but ok.

> How's that going for the folks that have been recently laid off from checks notes... Amazon, Facebook/Meta, Twitter, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, EA, Indeed, Yahoo, Github, Zoom, Dell, Paypal, IBM, Spotify, Goldman Sachs, Coinbase, HP, Cisco...

They are applying to different companies? Do you believe these employees made a decision to work for one of these companies for life and will now never again get another job? What is your point with this part?

> I'm not really sure that going from many possible employers who cannot guarantee my job to a single entity who can is a way worse deal, but ok.

I do not want to work for the kinds of jobs "a single entity who can guarantee" jobs can offer me. You know what happens in that world? You receive a note from your teacher when you are in school, telling you that based on what they saw, you are going to be studying X for the rest of your schooling. After studying X the government will send you a letter assigning you to the job where you are needed, wherever it is, and assign you a home near that job. You have no agency in this world. I'm not making this up, this is the only practical way such systems have worked.

"Guaranteed work for life from a single entity" also means the guy that runs the "assignment office" for the government will now place his friends in good jobs, and you in bad ones.

People who are against corporativism and capitalism have a way of forgetting that if there's "bad people owning companies and houses and stealing our labor", those same defects would be in the people who would work for the government. Bad people don't go away because you change the system, so does your system keep them in check?

> They are applying to different companies? Do you believe these employees made a decision to work for one of these companies for life and will now never again get another job? What is your point with this part?

Who is hiring in tech right now? Honest question.

As for the rest of your post, the main issue is having a say. The ill effects you are describing can indeed happen in a single-employer system. But at least in a democratic state, every few years the population has a say in how the system is being run. Right now, nobody except the CEO and the board has a say in how a company is run. They fire thousands of people, many with mortgages and children and people who depend on them, with no regards for what that means. And then to top it off they pay themselves millions of dollars to make these savage decisions. AND, I have no voice and no vote in all of this. Yeah... no thanks.

This really got to the heart of what I was trying to say. I find the concept that we all live by the grace of our employers to be alien, coming as I do from a culture and society that prides itself on mobility, advancement, and self-sufficiency. I find the concept of living by the grace of government (or relying on government for more than services rendered in exchange for the taxes I pay from my own labor) to be odious morally and terrifying in practice. Many Americans, even ones on the left of the social spectrum, feel this way. Particularly ones with roots in the Soviet Union or other totalitarian states. But it probably isn't a natural revulsion or posture for people formed under mildly socialist Western European standards, and it seems to have been lost on the youngest generation in the US.

I went to a wealthy enough private school to have had an up-close look at what children do when they never have to work in their lives if they don't want to. It's not pretty. My father made all his kids start working full time at 14.

As far as the one-to-many vs one-to-one argument, you're absolutely right; the connection between having choices in work and having freedom is only not apparent to people who've developed a conveniently conspiratorial view of the world, in which corporations are acting in concert as opposed to presenting endless opportunities and edges to anyone with ambition in the faces they present. As you said, with a monolithic actor like government, it's just a single bureaucrat's opinion of you that matters, with no chance to prove yourself. This is obvious to everyone I've ever met who has lived under a dictatorship. And ultimately a dictatorship must be the ultimate arbiter of any form of UBI, because one way or another, people will be made to work to support people who don't want to work. And that can only be accomplished by force in measure to how offensive it is to the working group.

Whereas I have quit great jobs to work some incredibly shitty jobs and become good, then great at them, and I think I've become a slightly better human being at each iteration. I quit coding to be a taxi driver - I worked 16 hour days and wrote several novels in my taxi. There is your time to make art. I don't think either part of that would have been possible in a world with UBI or the control structures it would imply.

Everyone (to a close approximation) is already reliant on their government for survival. Taking yourself out of society and its interdependencies is already basically impossible. (This is not an argument against all points you are making, I just wanted to say something to that aspect of your comment.)

There’s a big difference between being indirectly dependent on the government to maintain society, and being hand-to-mouth dependent on the government for food/welfare. As most people who have been in the latter situation can attest (at least outside of super rich countries like Norway), it is a distinctly less dignified existence. You live in constant uncertainty that your source of food, source of existence could be withdrawn at any time by government fiat. This is the future our dear thought leaders want for us.

Current state of the world:

You live in constant uncertainty that your source of food, source of existence could be withdrawn at any time by corporate whim

Question: Who do you think the police work for? Hint: It's neither "citizens" nor is it "the government" They work for corporations. Go look at how they act. The whole goal is to provide security for private property holders (aka not you) and increasingly they are private mercenaries that have day jobs as city/state/county policeman. Ask a cop where their "overtime" pay comes from and it's typically protecting some business.

Economic and political power should be dispersed as much as possible into the hands of the citizens, not anyone who was able to wrest as much control as possible from others - which is how we apportion it.

Do you ask "how did this company I'm applying to get to this position?" If not then you're not doing anything different than picking a political party without due diligence.

The act of consolidating power destroys the ethical standing of the institution

If your job stops paying you then you can find a new job.

If your government stops paying you, you can’t find a new citizenship.

A world where work is replaced by UBI is not a utopia. It’s a dystopia where the government controls if you can eat today. In which politicians divide and conquer by differentially giving and denying nutrition to different groups in order to gain votes. Give me a corporate hellscape any day of the week over that.

UBI is one of those “semantic stop signs” where people just stop thinking whenever it is mentioned. The term is a stand-in for whatever utopian society the user has in mind. But the implications of UBI as a policy are completely contrary to the stated goals of the users of the term.

Hard work is only seen as a virtue and sloth a vice because of the context of the world we are currently stuck in. You assume a system of value which might not make sense in the future.

On the contrary, it's the natural state of all thriving organisms to do some form of constructive work. It has also been the human condition and the condition for prosperity as long as we've existed. That isn't to say that leisure and play and pleasure have no value. Not at all! But it's axiomatic that nothing has value without its opposite. And if you look at the wealthy who do not work (as opposed to the ones who do), it's clear that nothing is valued by people without the sense that they've earned it.

We are a long, long way from the end of work.

Work is simply what we do for others.

All we need is a just transition and an end to involuntary unemployment which is best achieved through a federal job guarantee:

http://www.jobguarantee.org

Also great: These people never explain how exactly the profits made from automation will be redistributed. This is a political problem, not an economical or technological one.

Already, profits from productivity increases go mostly to capital owners. This is why most of us have so little money, compared with what people used to have 50 years ago. This is why you can't afford a house.

If productivity increases had been redistributed such that people could work considerably less while maintaining an acceptable standard of living, we all would work 3-4 days per week. Instead, those gains went to the capital owning class. AI will worsen the situation.

I think what you are missing here is that we are quickly entering a time where employing humans for almost the entirety of management work will be unnecessary, as will a large swath of low hanging creative work, and in a short period of time, most manual labor. The cost of maintaining a human being will exceed to cost of automation in perhaps as much as 75 percent of the workforce.

How does an economy function when the surplus value of labor is derived from machinery instead of humans?

I know the past answer to this has been that people will just shift to operating or maintenance of the machines, but this shift is fundamentally different because the shift is of mind-power.

We have been able to build machines that can deftly do anything that a human can do, and even replicate this capacity in human morphology. The problem has always been operating these machines in a way that replicates or improves upon human ability. Now that we are building machines that can be trained on existing data and synthesize novel solutions based upon that training, the need for human intervention in automated processes, including in the maintenance and repair of this processes, will drop precipitously.

Let us consider the economics of a robot, assuming a general purpose anthropoid robot that ca be trained in most commercial processes, and presuppose that the mind for such a device will soon be available either by subscription or in an embodied form.

We might see something like this:

Mass produced cost will probably be similar to an automobile, at 20-200x the cost per kilogram of automotive engineering so about 30-300 thousand euros. Service life between overhauls at the indicated forces and speeds should achieve approximately 1 billion pivot revolutions if we assume the surface sliding/rotation movement durability of modern mass produced machines. This would translate to about or 8 billion steps or 1/8 rotation gestures. If we assume 1 such gesture or step per second, that translates into a mechanical service life of about 2.2 million hours, or a mechanical cost of 0.014 to 0.14 euros an hour.

Now let us consider the cost of batteries, assuming that cost per capacity remains flat.

Current production technologies allow for about $100 per kWh of battery capacity, with a 4000 cycle lifespan. If we assume that the robot exerts an average of 500w over its lifespan of 2.2 million hours, the battery maintenance cost of maintaining that output will be approximately 30,000 additional euros in battery replacements. The electricity itself, at .10 per kWh, will cost more at about 100,000 euros over the useful life of the robot.

If we add all of this up we end up with 300k in machinery (200x as expensive as a car, or 1/3 the cost of a fighter jet per kg), 30k in batteries, 100k in electricity, and 3000 months of mind subscription at 100 euros a month per unit, we end up at about 750k lifetime cost for a machine that should be operational for about 250 years if it operates 24 hours day.

Now, let’s assume that those same energy, compute, battery, and mechanical costs are compressed into only 25 years of useful service.

That would be about 3.25 euros an hour. But that assumes that it is 1/10 as durable as modern automotive machinery yet costs 200 times as much per kg, costs 1000 a month in compute costs and consumes 5kw 24/7. -a pretty pessimistic figure.

So we can say that GP anthropoid robots will probably cost between 0.33 and 3.30 euros per hour to operate and is less costly to acquire than a front end loader or a farm tractor. And it will be built and maintained by the selfsame machines.

This is what we are facing.

New solutions are needed.