[ExI] My review of Eliezer Yudkowsky's new book (UBI)

[John Clark]

On Sun, Oct 5, 2025 at 10:57 AM Tara Maya via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

*> UBI will fail*
>

*If you're right about that then the human race is doomed.  I have no idea
what you do to make a living but whatever it is in the next year or two a
machine will be able to do it much MUCH better than you can. Without UBI
what is going to keep you from starving to death? *

*> for the same reason as communism. *
>
*1.) People don’t value what is given, *
>

*That's OK, UBI should be like air, something you don't value or even think
about unless you are unable to get any.  *

*> 2.) The people who control the dole will eventually come to see
> themselves as overlords*
>

*Eventually that will be true but eventually it will not be people that
control the dole, it will be AI. *

*> 3.) Decades of global charity and failed welfare programs have made it
> clear: Poverty is not created by lack of money*
>

*The very definition of poverty is a lack of money, and even without
AI, technology has already demonstrated it is extremely good at generating
wealth. Today there are 8.2 billion people on earth and in 1990 there were
5.3 billion, but** the number of people living in extreme poverty,
operationally defined as making under $2.15 a day in inflation adjusted
dollars, fell from 2.3 billion in 1990 to 831 million in 2025. And without
the setback caused by Covid** the improvement would've been even more
dramatic. *

*John K Clark*
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