When automobiles became widely available, they may have argued that buggy whip manufacturers were at risk of permanent impoverishment, but few would have argued that the existence of cars posed an equal threat to the jobs of teachers, waitresses, or doctors. When the spinning jenny was introduced in the 1760s, they may have argued that it would cause unemployment in the textiles industry, but none of them would have claimed that the same machine would cause mass unemployment among butchers, lawyers, or pub landlords. In previous eras, even the most hysterical denouncers of labor-saving technology shared an unspoken understanding of the limited capabilities of the technologies they opposed. What marks the AI scaremongering argument as new and meaningfully different is its altered assumptions about the breadth of different jobs the new technology would be capable of usurping from human workers. This difference not only sets the new AI scaremongering argument apart as meaningfully different than the arguments that have gone before, but it also highlights a fundamental misunderstanding its proponents suffer from concerning the very nature of what a market economy is and what drives it. ![]() However, as familiar as the generally Luddite tone of this new argument for UBI may seem on its surface, it nevertheless does have one key difference from the more traditional arguments against labor-saving technology. ![]() What marks the AI argument as new is its assumptions about the breadth of different jobs the technology would be capable of usurping. Of course, the idea that advances in labor-saving technology will lead to catastrophic unemployment and declining living standards is hardly new, arguably dating back to ancient Greece or earlier, and economists (not to mention the facts of history) have been refuting the idea for nearly as long as economics has existed as a self-conscious science. This will result in robots/AI replacing humans in almost all jobs, making the vast majority of people permanently unemployed, and without Universal Basic Income, how will they (the people) be able to keep food on their tables? This argument runs roughly as follows: In the not too distant future, rapidly advancing technology will allow robots and artificial intelligence (AI) to perform many of the jobs now being done by humans and to do so more cheaply and efficiently than humans ever could. ![]() While many of these justifications have become quite familiar over the years of waxing and waning interest in UBI, it is interesting to note the recent surge of interest in one particular argument, which sounds more like something from a science fiction novel than an economics textbook. Thanks to the recent efforts of such figures as Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang and British Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, the issue of Universal Basic Income (UBI) has been back at the forefront of the public discussion on economic issues, along with the various arguments and justifications for introducing such a policy.
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