The Harsh Truth Of Universal Basic Income

Whilst everyone has been talking about Universal Basic Income, there has been a recent statement by Sam Altman that kind of gives us an insight to what actually might happen with society introducing Universal Basic Compute, a way for us to, I guess you could say, get a certain resource allocated to us instead of money, because money might not matter in a post AGI world. And just take a look at this.

Now that we see some of the ways that AI is developing, I wonder if there's better things to do than the traditional conceptualization of ubi. I wonder if the future looks something more like Universal Basic Compute than Universal Basic Income. And everybody gets a slice of GPT7's compute and they can use it, they can resell it, they can donate it to somebody to use for cancer research, but what you get is not dollars, but this productivity slice. Yeah, you own like part of the productivity.

Now this is a very, very fascinating concept because it delves into exactly what is going to happen in the post AGI world. One of the things that may occur is that money might not actually have value. And that's why Universal Basic Income, the concept that is being described now, might not actually work. Because if money isn't as valuable as it used to be, then what is going to be valuable? And that might be, I guess you could say, a percentage of a really, really intelligent AI system that can do a lot more things than money can. So basically this is under the guise that COMPUTE might actually be the most valuable resource in the world. Some people are arguing that based on the current trajectory of our society and where people think the singularity might happen, and that COMPUTE is going to be the thing that we value the most in the future and we're all going to be living and be parting be a part of this hopefully. So, I mean, it's going to be interesting to see if things do occur. But this might be the most valuable resource considering the fact that everything else is cheap and readily available. And I didn't get this at first, but I'm going to explain it to you guys so you guys can understand exactly how this works and of course the ramifications of this. So you have to think about it like this. If AGI could automate if not all forms of labor, both intellectual and manual, this basically could lead society to a society where work as we know it is no longer necessary for survival and for accessing goods and services. And in this scenario, the traditional role of money as the medium of exchange for labor and services becomes obsolete. And this is where COMPUTE comes in. I mean, Think about it like this. You're in a society, you know, you work right now for a job or you do something and in exchange for your value that you provide to the company or to the business or whatever it is that you do, you get paid in money, which you can exchange for more goods and services. Now, in the world where you don't need to work and nobody does work because all of the robots pretty much do everything, what do we exchange for value? I mean, is it just more of the robot time to use for entertainment, to use for whatever we want to do? But I think it's a very interesting concept because it gets us thinking about what we could be buying, what we could be doing, considering the fact that money is going to play a very strange role in a post AGI world. And this is not to be clear, just something that Sam Altman has said in an interview. This is something that's on like an official OpenAI document if you are going to be investing with them. In fact, I'm going to show you guys it right now because it's going to show you how important this is. So you can see here, okay? Important Investing in OpenAI Global LLC is a high risk investment. Investors could lose their capital contribution and not see a return. It would be wise to view any investment in Open AI LLC in the spirit of a donation with the understanding that it may be difficult to know what role money will play in a post AGI world. I repeat, it may be difficult to know what role money will play in a post AGI world. So of course they're stating that, you know, money might not matter, okay? If we have abundant resources and the automation of labor, money is going to play a very, very interesting role. I mean, think about it like this, with this example, okay? Right now we actually do kind of live in an abundant place, okay? Food is readily abundant. I mean, we waste, okay? I don't say we, I don't waste food, but I mean, you know, we waste, okay, as a collective 1.3 billion tons per year, okay? Which is approximately worth $1 trillion, okay? So one third of food produced is, is wasted globally, okay? But imagine we had super intelligent AI that could manage and optimize the use of resources so efficiently that scarcity, which is the fundamental reason for the existence of money, is significantly reduced or eliminated, okay? With the advanced technologies, the production of goods and services could be all automated and made extremely efficient, leading to a situation where basic needs and many prior luxuries are just easily accessible and available. Now, one of the examples that I can use to illustrate this is of course, healthcare. So imagine we had an open source multimodal model that can predict health issues with 99% accuracy and can run on any device. This is going to bring down health costs drastically. I mean, this would be something that's pretty crazy. So if we had an AI system that could monitor your health science through a wearable device like a really cheap one, you know, if you're feeling unwell, you can describe your symptoms to the AI assistant. It can instantly predict it or just track it. It can use its vast, vast medical knowledge to instantly know exactly what you have. Because it's been, you know, looking at your health for the last 30 days, now, 90 days, whatever. So it completely understands what environments you've been in, what you probably got. And it can easily, you know, if you need a physical examination, book an appointment nearby with a clinic and it's all synced up with those doctors to ensure that you get the right treatment at the right time and nothing is completely wasted. So I mean, think about a life like that where you could easily get advice as well. If you need something, it just simply says you need to go to the chemist to get this for whatever infection that might come, or just simply stop doing this and it's going to prevent health issues. I mean, it's really, really fascinating to see how society is going to change once we do get this intelligence explosion. And it drinks drastically drinks the cost of goods and services down. Which even means that when you think about it, we're not going to be even able to pay people a decent wage for these anymore because the goods and services are just going to be so cheap that businesses probably won't even be able to, I guess you could say, provide these services anymore because there's just going to be so much in existence. And Sam Altman recently did talk about how society is going to change with regards to these changes.

I still expect, although I don't know what. And this is over a long period of time. This is not like next year or, you know, the year after that kind of thing, but over a long period of time. I still expect that there will be some change required to the social contract. Given how powerful we expect this technology to be. I'm not a believer that there won't be any jobs. I think we always find new things to do. But I do think like the whole structure of society itself will be up for some degree of debate and reconfiguration.

And that reconfiguration will be led by the Large language model companies.

No, no, no. Just the way the whole economy works and what we like, what society decides we want to do. And this has been happening for a long time. As the world gets richer, social safety nets are a great example of this. I expect we will decide we want to do more there.

So maybe it might be a situation where you get some universal basic income and some universal basic compute. But I think it's really interesting to see how people are starting to finally have that conversation where we're starting to realize that, look, the social contracts that currently exist are about to change. We're about to, I guess you could say, embark on this new journey to, to a new society where things are going to be remarkably different to how they have been before. And there were always periods of change. If we look back when the industrial revolution began and of course if we look back at periods when farmers, quote unquote, lost their jobs and there was this giant transition to many people within society no longer having a job in agriculture, I think we're about to see a similar situation where many people that worked in offices previously aren't going to be doing that in the far or near future. Now some of people's thoughts have been very interesting. Some people have said, I'd rather have the universal income. No way. You'd much rather have some compute power which is conveniently controlled by Sam Altman. What could possibly go wrong by making one comparation the de facto controller of everyone's ability to survive? This is something that I didn't consider. It's a very, very important point because if you do have one company that is controlling the compute, it does kind of make them, I guess you could say, the most powerful company in the world, if that's the most valuable resource in the world, you know. So that is of course something very interesting to develop because I would say that, you know, we couldn't have one company supplying the entire world's compute because that would have some very, very severe ramifications in terms of the power dynamics. Then of course we have. Can I eat it? Will it keep the rain off? This is just, you know, a funny comment that I thought I'd include. And of course we do have, I guess you could say, the other problems with this, which are, you know, the infrastructure. How on earth are you going to, you know, make it so that everyone could actually access this universal basic compute? Of course if there's asi, I think that sci fi stuff is probably going to happen. So this problem could be easily solved. But currently I Don't, you know, think about this. Like, I'm not sure how we would even begin to solve this problem. Like ensuring equitable access and preventing monopolization by a few companies is going to be crucial to ensure a fair future. And of course, the democratization of AI access, I mean, Universal Basic Compute could actually allow individuals and small businesses to leverage powerful systems that otherwise would be out of their reach. I mean, when you think about it, compute is going to be very, very limited. I mean, there's only going to be limited access to these advanced AI, AI systems because they do require so much power. And the problem is that the companies that own them, you know, they're probably going to set a pretty, pretty high price. I mean, if there truly was an ASI system, people would be paying, you know, hand over fist any amount to be able to use it. And it would arguably be, you know, the most valuable resource. So I think, you know, in order to let everyone have access to that, maybe Universal Basic Computer might have some credence there. And of course there is of course the value where you could sell your compute for maybe money or whatever it is we're trading for value at that time. So I mean, this entire conversation of Universal Basic Compute on how we're going to move in the future, it's a very interesting one. But I think what this kind of tells us is that we need to be very, very smart in terms of how we're moving with our investments, in terms of how we're setting up our lives. Because one thing that's guaranteed, okay, is change. One thing that is we, we know is going to happen is that there is going to be change. And we always want to make sure that we are in the best position. That's why I've made this video for the post AGI community. Probably going to be posted on YouTube at some time. So I'm definitely going to be preparing myself, okay. And doing some strategic things to make sure that whether it's Universal Basic Compute, whether it's Universal Basic income, that the next wave of technology that happens by AI. I'm not someone who's struggling to get, you know, Universal Basic Compute or just completely dictated by whatever government subsidy kind of system exists at the time. But let me know what your plans are for this because I think if we are moving to a resource economy, it's going to open up very, very interesting conversations on where the value is truly going to be placed in the future.