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Showing posts from July, 2016

The Universal Basic Share

Universal basic income, or UBI for those acronymically minded, is in the news these days, along with other brilliant post-modern inventions such as Brexit or Trump. Unlike these other luminaries, though, UBI is a genuinely cool idea: give everyone a basic amount to spend, and let them do what they will with it. They could write poetry, compose sonatas, or study number theory. They could work for more income if they wanted. Or they could relax and do absolutely nothing. UBI is the offspring of a beautiful dream: the liberation of the human being from the drudgery of everyday labor. But it is also the product of a scary thought: the trend of ever-advancing automation, now accelerated many-fold by new deep learning algorithms . You see the connection, of course. If a bunch of creepy robots are going to pass the Turing test at the call center , or drive up shinily when you hail an Über , or stack boxes even as they are energetically prevented from doing so , or even dance while doing