"Universal Basic Income"

Yesterday a brother sent me a link to A Plan in Case Robots Take the Jobs: Give Everyone a Paycheck - The New York Times

Their plan is known as “universal basic income,” or U.B.I., and it goes like this: As the jobs dry up because of the spread of artificial intelligence, why not just give everyone a paycheck?

Imagine the government sending each adult about $1,000 a month, about enough to cover housing, food, health care and other basic needs for many Americans. U.B.I. would be aimed at easing the dislocation caused by technological progress, but it would also be bigger than that.

My response is...well, yes and no. Bottom line: that's the right train of thought, but I don't think that it's quite the right track. We can do better.

I have favored a linear-tax scheme in the past, where by "linear" I just mean the familiar linear equation

y=m*x+b

or in this case

Tax=rate*income+base;

Say for extreme simplicity (with Congressionally-adjustable numbers) the government says: "You have a Social Security number? Okay, you have a bank account, and this one is for pre-tax money, like a 401(k). In it we deposit $100/week, your Supplemental Basic Income (small; makes no difference to a lot of people but a huge difference to others). Then we take 30% of everything you spend, i.e. everything that you move out of your pre-tax portfolio which can also include investments, savings, gifts, etc....if you deposit your paycheck into your pre-tax portfolio, that's exactly the 401(k) idea."

So, over the years, I've read Basic income arguments pro and con, starting with the ones that convinced me originally in Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom, roughly at The Libertarian Case for a Basic Income | Libertarianism.org or in Friedman's Firing Line interview at Milton Friedman - The Negative Income Tax - YouTube. I've found it pretty convincing.

Now we have a new kind of reason: geeks like me, developing the abilities of computers, are gradually making it (a) harder (at the median) and (b) less necessary (on the average) for people to earn a living in the traditional way. I've even written a bit about this recently, in the context of schools and the world that they're preparing our kids for, and I cited Pistono's Robots Will Steal Your Job, But That's OK | How to Survive the Economic Collapse and Be Happy, at HamiltonCentralOptions: SuperSchool

workers retiring this year at age 65 became high school students just about 50 years ago, in 1965. ...our total production, "real GDP", roughly tripled in that period... Manufacturing [jobs].... dropped from 25% to less than 10%, and we can expect the shrinkage to continue. The face of manufacturing is becoming the face of [robot] Baxter and his rapidly-improving successors...
Meanwhile, agriculture goes on "shrinking" in the same way: more stuff per person and much more output overall, but fewer people needed. ...

Does that mean higher unemployment? Not necessarily: it means that we produce the necessities of life with much less labor, so many more of our people will be producing goods and services, mostly services, which are not necessary for life....

And that leads into my current answer on the "Universal" or "Guaranteed" or "Supplemental" Basic Income proposal: we can do better than that. Specifically, the very information technology which pushes us towards a "yes" has a fundamental value for Great Gobs of Data; we can and should pay for that data, low pay (below minimum wage) at first but with increasing generosity as the years go by and we get richer overall. These are jobs for which anyone can qualify and make a genuine contribution to the Better World To Come.

What kind of jobs? Consider clinical trials as a model for social data collection. Everybody should be able to sign up for one of a large variety of studies, diet/exercise/social-interaction/education/long-term-low-dose-aspirin studies; these should pay people for their participation and ongoing feedback (via smartphone and associated sensors, as well as the sort of feedback that involves explicit clicks.) When an outcome is socially desirable, as in health and education, there should also be payment for achievement. In addition to these jobs, we should pay people for their perceptions, their knowledge, and even their opinions: Amazon product reviews add value to the world, Wikipedia edits add value to the world, YouTube tutorials add value to the world, this blog post probably doesn't but if there were a rating system with built-in rewards and AI protection against cheating, then the AI could find out if this blog post had added value to specific real people's worlds and it could assign rewards appropriately (both to the author and to the raters.)

And then we go off in many directions, of course...but we do so with more information, a broader base of understanding, than we would have had -- and we do so in a world where rewards come for having made a contribution to that world. Quite possibly we end up with an AI serving as the planetary village's Miss Marple, not the early-work gossip but the later version who sees all your public acts and some of what you thought was private, who can deduce a lot about your motivations (and in particular, what you gave up in order to do whatever you did and therefore what value your choice had for you). At that point we may simply drop our current insanity of "Intellectual Property" in which some of my thoughts belong to you whether I ever heard of you or not...



Or then again, maybe not.

update: An artistically inclined sister whose blog is probably more essential than this one asks via comment: "What? Art is not vitally essential?"
and that strikes me as one of the many questions that I don't want to answer for other people -- your customers in particular. My understanding is that many of them feel that life can be lived, or at least continued, without art -- and that means that art is a discretionary purchase, not "necessary for life" and therefore not recession-proof. Why Recession Isn't Good for Art -- New York Magazine

recessions mostly just yank young artists’ work off the walls. “If traditional art isn’t selling, galleries aren’t going to show emerging art.” ... In a boom, it’s cool to love art, see art, buy art. Art is taken seriously. A bust dismisses it as a luxury.

But my planetary Miss Marple would see that some people still wanted to look at, say, Raven With Shards, and you would receive credit -- spendable credit -- when they did so, even if they couldn't come up with the purchase price to own the original.

update 2, 20160610 A computationally inclined co-author suggests that I'm saying that "every human can get a job as a lab rabbit for AI", which is true in a way but

1. I think this system would be workable now, with no more AI than we've got already: as I said, "Everybody should be able to sign up for one of a large variety of studies..." and in addition I'd try to reward reviews, edits, etc.... so I'd rather say that every human can get a job as a content creator/reviewer/editor/respondent.
2. my hoped-for eventual AI wouldn't think of it that way. As I wrote more recently in A Small Note on Superintelligence Morality

   Intelligence needs to be attached to an actual person of some kind; a who not a what. This should not be called an artificial intelligence but rather an artificial person.

   .... The superintelligence need not be a biological homo sapiens, but does need to identify (correctly) as human, saying "we humans" not "you humans"; having human feelings, hopes and fears, including a feeling of membership in the human tribe. ...it is not a project of debugging a program. It's a project of raising a child, a psychologically healthy child -- yes, with parents, and preferably with siblings and so on outwards; a child who will realize that every h. sap. is one of his/her cousins.

   That's not the way we think about lab rats, or rabbits. (Although, in a sense, they are.)

Afghanistan & The Drake Equation

I spent last weekend in NYC at the singularity summit, listening to very bright geeks of various kinds talking about recent/near-future changes in technology, in the rate of change of technology, in the funding and organization of technology, and thus how everything may soon (unknown but likely-small number of decades, say) become very very much better/worse. (See listing here.)And a few speakers, notably cosmologist Max Tegmark, talked about the Drake Equation and how the fact that we haven't heard from other civilizations, even though we now know that extrasolar planets are common, means there's a roadblock somewhere: either the evolution of life and intelligence is unusual, or there's something up ahead of us that civilizations tend not to survive, like maybe the Singularity itself. (I think he's oversimplifying; I'd call the roadblock theory highly probable but it's not the only explanation for silence.) Then I came back to Hamilton in time to walk up the hill to listen to journalist Kim Barker talk about Afghanistan and how the "good war" went bad...how she filled a notebook, some years back, with interviews and background with seventeen people and as of this year, they're all dead, and the Obama announcement that we are definitely out by a particular date means that counter-insurgency can't work. (Copies of her Taliban Shuffle book were stacked up in the back of the hall, but the last time I bought signed books at a Project Afghanistan lecture the author was killed soon after and well, I dunno, I didn't feel like doing that; so I downloaded the Kindle version and started reading it on my phone, while waiting for the lecture to start. Maybe I should have asked her to sign my phone.)

For me, there really is an existential threat in here. I can only repeat what I wrote almost five years ago:

The situation is bad. Still, I don't think we're in trouble yet. Trouble is when we have half a million or so dead Americans and a tens of millions dead around the world. Big trouble is lots, lots worse than that. You don't think it can happen? You think terrorism is an overhyped nuisance? Well, I sort of agree: it can't happen now, at least I don't think so, and terrorism now is in some ways an overhyped nuisance. I'm talking about a timeframe that probably doesn't start for ten years, and might not start for thirty. But it will start. In the thirty-one years since I started working on my PhuD in computer science, Moore's Law has increased computer bang-for-the-buck by a factor of approximately one million: 20 doublings. People haven't changed. In the next thirty years, technology will go on getting more so, and up to a point (past which I have no predictions) people will go on not changing. That's the problem.

And Gaddafi was killed this week; probably a good thing, just as Hussein's death was probably a good thing, but not exactly a guarantee that tomorrow in Libya will be a better day than yesterday. I'm glad that Obama has continued Bush's Big Bang of disrupting dictators, glad that our investment in drone technology is paying off, really worried about his promise to get out, really really worried that (apart from such promises) we're in Bush's third term in the bad ways as well as the good ways -- in particular, attacking troops and citizens of a foreign country without Congressional authorization and pretending that it's not legally a "war", apparently on the ground that he's not putting troops on the ground. Yeah, right. And it also won't be a war when vastly improved drone tech spreads to many countries including Pakistan, North Korea, Iran, etc., up to the point when some descendant of Sunrise I in the air or perhaps Spray in the water ( Underwater Robot Makes History...Spray has a range of 6,000 kilometers, or about 3,500 miles, which means it could potentially cross the Atlantic Ocean and other ocean basins...) pays us a return visit, with payload upgraded far beyond what Pakistan's nukes can now do.

Near the start of the Singularity Summit, PayPal founder/billionaire Peter Thiel was worrying about the slowdown in innovation in the "developed" countries, about the way that so much of our (very real, really excellent despite current difficulties) global improvement statistics simply reflect copying of our tech into China and India and others. And I was thinking that this is worse than he thinks it is, because it's not just about economics: it's about the fact that the (moderately) liberal democracies have a technological edge which we need them to keep. And maybe they will, maybe they won't. Thiel believes regulation is holding us back, that a lot of what we now depend on is stuff which we wouldn't be legally able to develop now if we hadn't already developed it -- well, I believe that too. Will we keep the edge we need? Maybe.

Still, I have here an actual physical copy of Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined and it does suggest that maybe my statement above that "People haven't changed" is oversimplified. Even with WWI and WWII, and the Nazi and communist slaughter+starvation of scores of millions, people in the 20th century were several times less likely to die violently (that's counting starvation-by-government as violent death, as it should) than the people whose bones tell us about life and death thousands of years back, or the hunter-gatherer societies we've studied more recently. (See Will Wilkinson's commentary, which I pretty much trust.) Of course Neolithic violence was not an existential risk; the 20th century brought us lower means but higher standard deviations, so to speak. We needed Petrov to be there, doing his job; that did not apply to any previous century. If things are getting better, maybe we can survive without future Petrovs, or maybe there will always be one around when we need him (or her).

Or then again, maybe not.

Footnote: I said above that the "roadblock theory" wasn't, I think, the only explanation for interstellar silence in a galaxy of many planets. Clearly one possibility is that species with enough "aggressiveness" to proceed to interstellar activity have enough real aggressiveness to destroy themselves. I'll list four others; I'm sure there are many. First, most attractive in a way, would be a moral dynamics sort of explanation: the species which develop morally (to the point of non-interference with primitives like us) are exactly the ones which don't wipe themselves out. Next would be a physics explanation: expansionist species discover physics which we haven't found yet, physics which lets them create bubble universes that it's easy to expand into so they never bother with the actual galaxy. Next would be a simulation-version of that: expansionist species wind up discovering that they can simulate the universes they want, and upload themselves into the simulations...same thing. And finally, for now, would be the now-familiar notion that we are in a simulation -- there are no other species not because we're bound for destruction but because we're the one being simulated. (And as I was typing this, my daughter came to say she'd finally finished the Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke; we're probably in one of his universes. Should that be a reassuring thought? "Cancel Programme GENESIS"..."Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out."..."The crusade will reach the vicinity of Earth about the year 2050." So it goes.)

Notes on Afghanistan

Back in February, Tim Hetherington came to Colgate and talked about his career photographing war and about how things aren't working out in Afghanistan. Then last week he was killed in Libya, and I'm left looking at this signed copy of Infidel. He was a good guy. Today Candace Rondeaux came to Colgate and talked about her career as journalist/analyst, and about how things aren't working out in Afghanistan. It's a drug-cartel war, it's a civil war, it's a religious war, and it's a war in which we're supporting the thoroughly corrupt side which many citizens decide they just can't deal with. (Of course we're also supporting the other side via drug money and oil money.) She did offer a specific, concrete suggestion: she suggested that many of the Afghan officials most responsible for corruption hold dual passports which could be pulled by their other countries. Hmm....

Bob Kraynak asked her to comment on possible silver linings, both in the short-term "decimation" of Al-Qaeda and in the long-term change in regional culture so that in several countries now we're seeing possible democratization and in a generation or so we might see a lot of it. Rondeaux does not believe A-Q has been decimated (Bob's term, here) because Taliban forces seem frequently to be guided by A-Q advisors; she admits the possibility that in a generation, or two generations, we may think the whole thing was worthwhile, but it's only a possibility if we "face reality" and stay in, but not in the way we're doing now; it's only a possibility if we take nation-building seriously.

Well, if decimated still means killing one in ten, I think it's likely that Al-Qaeda's leadership has been decimated, for what that's worth -- and I think our situation would be a lot worse if that decimation hadn't happened. I suspect that the TSA has done little or nothing to prevent terrorist attacks since 9/11, but it's not that the bad guys thought they'd done enough. They're far from gone, but they've been hurt; just as important, their friends in the Taliban got hurt. In the short run, I do think that's a silver lining on some very stormy clouds.

Democratization is more problematic; the long run is more problematic. As I've said many times, I think we're likely to be in really bad trouble somewhere in the ten-to-thirty-year time frame because a variety of technological destructive possibilities "improve" in Moore's Law style but human destructive tendencies change slowly if at all. We can withdraw from Afghanistan, and fewer Americans will be killed for a year or five thereafter, but some of the nuts we'd be leaving as we bolt are already nuclear. Things will get worse; three thousand dying at once is not guaranteed to stay maximal, or even to seem like a bad day. 9/11 may yet be recognized as the wake-up call for which we groped around, banging around the alarm clock, before finally hitting the snooze button -- for just a little too long. There are times when I agree that the reason we don't hear radio communications from the stars is simply that no intelligent species survive their inevitable development of really bad technology. "Intelligent?" Well, you (probably) know what I mean.

So what can we do? As usual, I'm left looking over what I said before, thinking that it still looks reasonable -- but maybe it's too late. I would certainly

• cut bad-guy funding
  • in the short term, by calling a halt to the drug war -- opium should be moderately taxed and treated like nicotine, not pushing immense profit into the hands of those who hate us;
  • in the longer term, by initiatives like intrinsically blow-up proof nuclear reactors to reduce world-wide oil usage. (I'm not even thinking about carbon.)
• improve good-guy funding
  • directly, via free trade, and
  • indirectly, by pushing transparent interactions...my basic message, repeated millions of times at immense expense even in the midst of our own economic troubles, would still be close to what I said before:

    here is your RFID/bar code/photo/fingerprint/biometric ID, linked to a bank account which already has a couple of bucks in it, and here is your personal cell phone....

    (and everything has a URL)
  And there would still be a somewhat-internationalized Barnett-style SysAdmin force behind that, as before...

But of course it's not going to happen, and I don't see why any more practical plan is likely to happen either. Some nights are less cheerful than others.

clarification: A random reader might well think it's insane to think of free trade as direct support for good guys--direct support is arms and material for them what's shooting at bad guys. No, those who shoot at bad guys may be our allies, probably some good guys and some -- well, Stalin was an ally in WWII. Aid for them is necessary, but it's not the same as aid for good guys. The good guys mostly just want to live their lives with family, friends, neighbors and perhaps letting others live their lives too, sometimes even helping. Support for them is mainly lowered transaction cost for doing business, which I loosely call "free trade".

A Plan for Victory: Part I (Problem Statement)

When people on the web talk about plans for victory, lately, they mostly seem to mean victory in Iraq -- that's the War, for them. Not for me; I'm concerned with the Long War. This post is mostly a response to Tom Barnett's second book, Blueprint for Action, a book which I think is very interesting, very insightful, but less than completely convincing. Rather than a review or a direct commentary, I'm just putting my own mistakes on record. Here's the way I see it.

We're not in trouble yet. 3000 dead American civilians; 3000 dead American soldiers; maybe half a million or so dead Iraqis (maybe many more, maybe many less, but a lot.) Armed Liberal points out the Jerusalem Post report that

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees reported this month that at least 914,000 Iraqis have left their homes....

The situation is bad. Still, I don't think we're in trouble yet. Trouble is when we have half a million or so dead Americans and a tens of millions dead around the world. Big trouble is lots, lots worse than that. You don't think it can happen? You think terrorism is an overhyped nuisance? Well, I sort of agree: it can't happen now, at least I don't think so, and terrorism now is in some ways an overhyped nuisance. I'm talking about a timeframe that probably doesn't start for ten years, and might not start for thirty. But it will start. In the thirty-one years since I started working on my PhuD in computer science, Moore's Law has increased computer bang-for-the-buck by a factor of approximately one million: 20 doublings. People haven't changed. In the next thirty years, technology will go on getting more so, and up to a point (past which I have no predictions) people will go on not changing. That's the problem.

Defense Tech: Tomorrow's Insta-Weapons says of CNC and of course more general FabLab developments that

In the CNC world, proliferation becomes a matter of design, software, and materials, rather than finished systems. What happens when North Korea or Iran starts selling missiles as digital files rather than on ships which can be intercepted? When private designers and companies create designs which anyone can produce? Two words: Watch out.

Of course I'm not just concerned with designer bombs or missiles, even the nuclear kind; we also have designer diseases coming down the pipeline. I assume that you'd have trouble getting smallpox replicated by DNA 2.0 Inc., which advertises

DNA 2.0 Inc. is a leading provider for synthetic biology. With our gene synthesis process you can get synthetic DNA that conforms exactly to your needs, quickly and cost effectively.

Well, I hope they'd be reluctant. But in fact I'm expecting that somewhere early in that ten-to-thirty year period it will be possible for a Kim or a Khameini to generate fun crossbreeds of smallpox and influenza with very high mortality rates (and enough variation in the crossbreeds to make it unlikely that any single vaccine, or even any dozen vaccines, will do much good). Later on in the development, we'll see privately owned prototyping/fabrication labs which can generate robots far beyond the levels discussed by Defense Tech: Attack Of The Genius Robot Cockroach Swarm:

are we really ready for killer robots yet? “There is a reluctance to entrust lethal missions to autonomous robots,” says Thaler. “However, the bad guys may not share the same reservations. The escalation is inevitable."

My own imaginings have less to do with killer robots; killer robots have to work against opposition, under high-stress conditions that can't easily be simulated or tested out in secret. Killer robots will come gradually from testing out developments like Samsung's $200K machine-gun sentrybots. The most effective secret developments will be systems whose high-tech components have to do with production rather than combat, so they can be debugged without bangs. There will be swarms of robot miner-fish, for example, collecting uranium ore from undersea sites, and then other swarms which build nuclear and thermonuclear bombs -- 1950s technology. We're moving that way already: Winds of Change reports on "Fibonacci's Nukes" as The Road to Atomic Perdition:

In Britain's The Times Online, Richard Beeston reports that 4-6 Arab states announced that they were embarking on programs to master atomic technology...

Well, maybe we'll have killer robots too, created by robot fablabs, but here I'm concentrating on things which we know can be done because they have been done already; I'm just saying they'll be done more cheaply, by small groups, hiding in what Tom Barnett calls the "Gap": countries like Afghanistan and Iraq, Burma and North Korea, and so on and on and on. The Gap is a big hiding place. Barnett's Gap is basically defined in terms of disconnectedness (and recent military events) which more or less automatically makes it a big hiding place. My view of the Gap is slightly fuzzier -- I see corruption, authoritarianism, and kleptocracy as providing Gapacity even where we have not lately been shooting people. So I'm a bit more worried about Russia and China (and the US, for that matter) than Barnett is. Still, I'm much less worried about Russia and China than about Iran. Barnett wants to deal with Iran, saying essentially that Iran should

abandon terrorism and their support for terrorist groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah, shut down the nuclear-weapons program, and then the West will treat Iran as a strategic partner in the region.

Unfortunately that's not a quote from Barnett; it's a quote from the conservative Captain's Quarters blog, which continues with

That's hardly a policy shift -- it's the carrot we've been offering Iran for years.

Barnett knows that, but I don't see that he really deals with it; [update he wants to accept Iran's inevitable nuclearization, which I see as accepting an inevitable nuclear arms race within the Middle East to be followed by inevitable nuclear, umm, incidents.] His interpretation seems to be that the Iranian government is basically rational, and can be dealt with by improved connectivity in itself. I believe that he's overestimating the rationality of the human animal -- himself and me definitely included. Barnett notes the triumph of South Vietnam:

North Viet Nam has won the war, and Saigon the peace ! ... Our stuff simply sells.

Yes, that's true, if you remember that a non-nuclear North Vietnam needed a couple of million boat people and hundreds of thousands (millions?) dead in order to finally close the deal. Iran in the immediate future will have far greater (nuclear) destructive power, far greater (oil) wealth to spread its destruction, and an arguably far more destructive ideology, one that glorifies death rather than wealth. Closing the deal with Iran will not be impossible (I hope), just proportionately more expensive. Our stuff simply sells -- but some who are exposed to Western culture, well-educated within that culture, simply feel alienated by it. Call them sales-resistant, because they've been sold on something else. As Tawfik Hamid points out,

There are millions of passive supporters of terror who may be poor and needy but most of those who do the killing are wealthy, privileged, educated and free.

And yet -- we're still not in trouble, yet. [upd And the solution is definitely connectivity.] I'm not that far from Barnett.

I consider big trouble, cataclysmically big trouble, to be essentially inevitable -- unless the Gap is gone. If the Gap is gone, if the Core includes the whole world, then the problem reduces to a nuisance where we clarify the relationship between liberty and privacy, and we lose some privacy so that groups of bad guys get caught before they do bad things. Technology can do that, with help from the law. (Maybe I mean the law can do that, with help from technology? Something like that.) This will not create a utopia: civil libertarians will fuss, and they'll be right to. There will be lots of nuisances, including people killing people. Overall, however, it will be survivable. That will be victory. That victory is what we need a plan for. The Gap has to go, being replaced with free minds and free markets. (No, I'm not a libertarian.)

We don't need all countries to be democratic, although we might get that. We do need governments which are moderately transparent, moderately consensual, moderately willing to back off from private lives and even property. If we get them we're sort of okay; we can move on towards some version of a Singularity. If we don't get them, I expect big trouble in less than thirty years, less than the next millionfold improvement in computer power. Maybe a lot less than thirty years. Hmmm -- I'm fifty-four, my grandparents all died in their eighties. My youngest child is ten.

Update: I see I was quoting the more aggressive version of Moore's Law: 18-month doubling. I should have used the 24-month, which is a mere 32,000-fold increase in 30 years. So far as I can tell, this makes no difference to anything else I was saying.

Update2: The pieces of the "plan" are at IIa-Basics, IIb-Sinews of War, and IIb(ii)

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