Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1503-1505

Charles Darwin acknowledged that he was able to set sail on the HMS Beagle because, coming from a wealthy family, he had “ample leisure from not having to earn my own bread.” Rene Descartes was able to revolutionize Western philosophy and mathematics because, as he put it, he “had no feeling, thank God, that my circumstances obliged me to make science my profession so as to ease my financial condition.”

Countless other luminaries, from Adam Smith to Galileo, were similarly born into privileged lives that permitted them to indulge their scholarly pursuits without the distraction of making ends meet. “These were gentlemen of leisure,” Forget says in the interview. “I don’t think these individuals felt useless; I don’t think their contribution was negligible.” Even for those freed from the need to work for pay, we have a deep human instinct to contribute to society. Many of those who give up work are likely to replace it with something equally meaningful.

Of course, not every UBI recipient will invent life-changing technology or form a new theory of evolution. But economic security does liberate people from the daily grind, emboldening them to start businesses, take risks, and explore new innovations. Think of a basic income as seed money to facilitate the entrepreneurial spirit which helps the American economy thrive. If we had a UBI that allowed more people pursue their passions and curiosities, it could yield huge dividends for society. And even more importantly, this freedom would no longer be limited to those who are born into wealth.

Universal basic income wouldn’t make people lazy–it would change the nature of work
Joel Dodge
quartz
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 AlphaGo’s historic victory is a clear signal that we’ve gone from linear to parabolic. Advances in technology are now so visibly exponential in nature that we can expect to see a lot more milestones being crossed long before we would otherwise expect. These exponential advances, most notably in forms of artificial intelligence limited to specific tasks, we are entirely unprepared for as long as we continue to insist upon employment as our primary source of income.

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Any time now. That’s the new go-to response in the 21st century for any question involving something new machines can do better than humans, and we need to try to wrap our heads around it.

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We need to recognize what it means for exponential technological change to be entering the labor market space for nonroutine jobs for the first time ever. Machines that can learn mean nothing humans do as a job is uniquely safe anymore.

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...no need or less need for humans, and at lower costs than humans.

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The idea is to put machines to work for us, but empower ourselves to seek out the forms of remaining work we as humans find most valuable, by simply providing everyone a monthly paycheck independent of work. This paycheck would be granted to all citizens unconditionally, and its name is universal basic income.
Scott Santens
Deep Learning Is Going to Teach Us All the Lesson of Our Lives: Jobs Are for Machines
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Money should be as abundant as our creative capacity, not artificially scarce.
Douglas Rushkoff