Elon Musk , however, isn’t losing sleep. He’s been repeating for years that society won’t just need a universal basic income — it will need something bigger: **universal high income**.
The latest reminder came after tech commentator David Scott Patterson claimed on X that by 2030, “all jobs will be replaced by AI and robots.” Musk replied, “Your estimates are about right. However, intelligent robots in humanoid form will far exceed the population of humans, as every person will want their own personal R2-D2 and C-3PO. And then there will be many robots in industry for every human to provide products & services.”
That prompted another user to ask the obvious: “When robots replace working people, how will those who become unemployed sustain their lives?”
Musk’s answer: “There will be universal high income (not merely basic income). Everyone will have the best medical care, food, home, transport and everything else. Sustainable abundance.”
And just think all this benevolence will be delivered by Tesla robots around 2030! TA DA!
ROFL
I expect this prediction/development will occur about the same pace is FSD.
Nobody has yet been able to explain to me how UBI is going to work. Currently, companies aren’t willing to pay people decent livable wages when those people are working for them, giving them the value of their labor. But when the people not even giving them their labor anymore, they’ll be given not only income, but high income? Make it make sense.
Musk is nuts, but smart. If he is correct about stuff, then everybody will get at least a lot of money, but who will have most of the power? Vaguely reminds me of the story of Jacob and Esau from Genesis 25, something about “birthrights” and “pottage” and “hunger”.
Keynes famously predicted that because of productivity gains, by 2030 the average worker could meet all their needs in just 15 hours labor a week.
He was wrong for two reasons. First, most people simply wanted to work more so they could make more money. Secondly, most of the wealth from the productivity gains flowed to the wealthiest, not to the workers.
Musk is making a similar prediction here. In a future where Optimus is creating so much wealth by building houses and repairing iPhones there will be plenty for everyone to share.
My prediction is that whoever owns the robots will be rich, and everyone else will be fighting for scraps, just like it has always been.
Keynes made that prediction in 1930, and average income in the U.S. (adjusted for inflation) has risen about seven-fold: from $6.8K in 1930 to about $45K:
In raw dollars, personal disposable income per capita grew from $609 in 1930 to $55,698 in 2022. Once that’s adjusted for inflation, it rose from $6,836 in 1930 to $45,343 in 2022. That’s about 6.7 times higher than it was in 1930, all of which is growth beyond the inflation rate.
“Have average real U.S. incomes improved or declined since 1930? Answer: They have improved — and substantially,” said Gary Burtless, an economist with the Brookings Institution, a Washington, D.C. think tank.
So the average worker almost certainly could earn enough today with only 15 hours of labor to buy the bundle of goods that would “meet all their needs” as they would have existed in 1930. Not luxuries, not vacations or fancier versions of things - their needs. Fifteen hours of work per week at the national median hourly wage is about $15K per year, which (it turns out) is around the federal poverty line for an individual - which also suggests that one could meet one’s needs with only 15 hours of work.
Of course, the timing of Musk’s techno-futurist vision is complete nonsense as well.
Exactly. I didn’t express my point correctly. Keynes not only predicted one could work 15 hours a week, he believed the average work week would in fact only be 15 hours.
Keynes believed this abundance of leisure time would post some unique problems:
“Thus for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem — how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.”
Keynes thought that people could use this time for self-improvement, building personal relationships, taking time to enjoy the simple pleasures of life and so on.
Yeap. And right there was the secret to financial success for me and sibs even though we spent weeks on glorious but free pursuits like mountaineering and surfing, all while carefully meticulously rebuilding our homes AND investing our excess of income over costs. The golden age for very easily LBYM while having a grand old time.
I’ve seen the future and it is not one I want to be a part of.
Martha Wells has written a series of novellas called ‘The Murderbot Diaries.’ The first one is All Systems Red and was made into a TV series by Apple. The way this sci-fi series ties into this thread is that corporations are the government on most of the planets in this star system. People are laborers who indenture themselves to do the menial, dull, dirty, and dangerous tasks on planets where commodities are produced. Androids are the police who enforce the corporations laws and provide security to groups doing research on unexplored planets. While they are providing security they are also tasked with stealing intellectual property.
Not really. He made two key predictions in that essay (the actual text of which starts on page 30 of the PDF linked below). As to the first, he was actually pretty spot on!
Let us, for the sake of argument, suppose that a hundred years hence we are all of us, on the average, eight times better off in the economic sense than we are to-day. Assuredly there need be nothing here to surprise us.
So Keynes was right on that point. Real incomes have risen a hair under 7x, not 8x. But he also made a prediction about human psychology that was absolutely wrong:
Now it is true that the needs of human beings may seem to be insatiable. But they fall into two classes – those needs which are absolute in the sense that we feel them whatever the situation of our fellow human beings may be, and those which are relative in the sense that we feel them only if their satisfaction lifts us above, makes us feel superior to, our fellows. Needs of the second class, those which satisfy the desire for superiority, may indeed be insatiable; for the higher the general level, the higher still are they. But this is not so true of the absolute needs – a point may soon be reached, much sooner perhaps than we are all of us aware of, when these needs are satisfied in the sense that we prefer to devote our further energies to non-economic purposes.
Yeah, no. We’ve satisfied the absolute needs, roughly on the schedule he predicted -working 15 hours a week will generally yield enough money to meet your most basic needs. We’ve just continued to devote our further energies to economic purposes because there’s just so much non-necessity stuff that we want to pursue. Getting to eat the foods we want, getting to travel across the world, getting to create and play with wonderful new toys and experience new technology, getting to hear music and watch films in ways one would never have imagined in 1930. We probably very much only spend 15 hours a week (or less!) on average making necessities, and spend a great deal more time making things (products or services or art or culture) that people want.
Yeah, but no. I suppose you could cap “needs” as “a plate of beans on the table every evening and a tarp over your head”, (exaggeration), but that’s not how it works in the real world. As income goes up “needs” go up. There is a fantasy of living in the “Little House On The Prarie” and being otherwise self-sufficient, but that’s not real.
If you want to “exist” in today’s society you have to have communication, and that means electronic. So cell phone. Maybe not the fanciest, super duper slick slate that everyone else has, but some sort of connection plan. And a TV. Probably a refrigerator (Those were only beginning to penetrate American households when Keynes made his prediction).
Next thing you know you need a washing machine instead of pounding stones down by the river, a stove instead of split wood and a pot in the fireplace, and soon enough some sort of transportation device a step up from a bicycle, preferably with a badge on it from Japan or Germany.
A boss once told me, in the same conversation as when I was getting a big promotion and raise, that it would be wise to “save some of it” because as soon as that big paycheck starts arriving it’s perilously easily to begin enjoying a finer cut of steak, a few more movies at the theater, a better car, and so on. Yes, those are “wants”, but in today’s society the “needs” are vastly different than they were in 1930.
Not sure that’s right, even on the terms you describe. Lots of working class people don’t have cars or own their own washing machine - they use the bus and the laundromat, if they don’t wash their own clothes in the sink or tub. Everyone’s got a phone, but you can pick up the most basic of plans for around $125 per year. There’s a reason why you can earn as little as $15K and not be considered by the federal government to be in poverty - you can meet your needs (even modern needs) with that amount of money.
But even so, I think what you’re describing is exactly what Keynes missed. He was thinking of this not so much from the individual’s perspective, but from the perspective of the economy and society. There’s only so much that people need to have (he reasoned), and we’re soon going to be able to produce all those needs with very few work hours - so even if we scrape that butter as thinly over the bread as we can, we’re not going to have more than 15 hours a week worth of work on doing all that stuff. What are people going to do with the rest of their time, once we need barely any man-hours to produce the basic food, clothing, and shelter people require?
The answer ended up being that humans (or at least Americans) would not just consume massive amounts of leisure. Instead we would develop lots of new things that weren’t necessities, but that people wanted. Bigger or better (or at least more resource intensive) versions of what people had (bigger house, bigger clothes collections, a better fridge, a better stove, a better mattress, better shoes, better food, better radios, better movies). To say nothing of more resource intensive leisure. None of that is necessary - a single worker doesn’t “need” any of that stuff - but we did it anyway, because people ended up mostly preferring it to extra leisure. Whether those preferences were the result of “animal spirits” or installed in people by the forces of capitalism is a different debate - but society went in a different direction than Keynes predicted in terms of our wants, not how many hours of work are required to produce our necessities.
