Big Tech gleefully describes wrecking entire industries as “disruption” and its head honchos love the idea of pushing government welfare. When you’re wiping out middle-class jobs and replacing them with Amazon warehouse work or Doordash gig driving, well it makes perfect sense to urge politicians to implement lots of welfare, not to mention free health care, and suicide kits to accompany people through their new dystopia.
Now that AI is booming, it’s time to revive another call for a total welfare state for the permanently unemployed.
The computer scientist regarded as the “godfather of artificial intelligence” says the government will have to establish a universal basic income to deal with the impact of AI on inequality.
Professor Geoffrey Hinton told BBC Newsnight that a benefits reform giving fixed amounts of cash to every citizen would be needed because he was “very worried about AI taking lots of mundane jobs”.
“I was consulted by people in Downing Street and I advised them that universal basic income was a good idea,” he said.
Yes, how better to attract more talented Pakistani suicide bombers than by adding more dole to the dole.
How do you pay for any of it? Why you just print more money and raise more taxes, just not on Google, Facebook or Microsoft because, let’s face it, they’re going to be in Ireland for tax purposes anyway.
The verdict is still out on whether AI will nuke a whole lot of jobs, but it will certainly nuke some. And the solution to that isn’t a bigger welfare state because even assuming the UK and the U.S. and everyone else had enough money to put the populace on welfare and then implement the leftist vision of fully automated luxury communism, that society would survive roughly twenty years before collapsing in misery and death.
Our societies are badly broken even without that because younger generations associate less, spend more time online and don’t know what they believe in anymore. Make the teenage and twenty-something years where they spend half their time posting on Instagram, TikTok or playing video games and no one will get out alive.
Welfare isn’t the solution to anything, it’s a societal suicide wish.