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

[spike at rainier66.com]

From: John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> 
Sent: Sunday, 5 October, 2025 11:07 AM
To: ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
Cc: spike at rainier66.com
Subject: Re: [ExI] My review of Eliezer Yudkowsky's new book (UBI)

 

On Sun, Oct 5, 2025 at 1:35 PM spike jones via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org <mailto:extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> > wrote:

 

>it was in Jan 2019 when a government person told us when the Singularity would happen: twelve years. 

 

Sounds like a pretty smart government person.  

 

> Over half that time has passed, so we now have less than six years until the end of the world, and we STILL don't know how we are going to pay for it. 

 

>..I can tell you exactly how to get the money to pay for UBI, borrow it…

 

No need, we just use the word just.  Example: Just pay for it.

 

The problem with just borrowing it is the risk that the Singularity doesn’t actually happen and fails to cause the end of the world.  Then we must just pay back the funds we just borrowed.

 

>…Borrow it even if the interest rate is extraordinarily high because, thanks to the singularity, a dollar today is far FAR more valuable than a promise for a dollar in 6 years…

 

Sure but what about the risk that the world doesn’t actually end in six years, as it has failed to do in the past six?  Who pays for that risk?  What if… the future generations we borrowed from can’t just pay for the interest?  

 

What if that generation is us, and we realize the world didn’t end and now we are left with the bill from the 1990s, when the government just borrowed from us, borrowed the Social Security fund, only to discover… the grim reality of population demographics.  There aren’t enough of us, even with our unimaginable wealth (mysteriously imaginable when we get here.)

 

>…In 6 years the person you borrowed the money from probably won't even care if you pay them back or not because the amount is too trivially small to worry about.    John K Clark

 

So we hear.  But that is a scenario, not the only possible one.  The person we “borrowed” from doesn’t necessarily have a say in “lending” us their money.  They might see that risk in a different way, and prefer to invest in a different way, one far more profitable to the investor: big risk means big profit.

 

spike

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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