@shammi
Shammi Mohamed
@shammi · 1:02

Universal basic income

Universal basic income, or UBI for short, or the freedom dividend, as Andrew Yang calls it, what are your thoughts? Personally, I think it's it is the only economic way forward in the future where automation and AI take over more and more jobs with every day and not replace them

Your thoughts?

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@bowie
Bowie Rowan
@bowie · 2:55

First-gen students, mental health, & young entrepreneurs

I love this conversation because it's such a complex topic, so I'm really curious to hear people's responses. For me. Personally, I'm 100% for universal basic income, despite it's potentially being imperfect and there being a lot of interconnected issues here that would need to be addressed to move forward with UBI. But overall, I think it would be incredibly beneficial for more people than not
7
@sudha
Sudha Varadarajan
@sudha · 4:59

Adding a data point to think about

And what ended up happening was labor stopped showing up at farms because they didn't want to have to do the tough work of planting and sowing and harvesting. And what not when they could just get their daily wage from the government, do nothing, get food for almost free for themselves and the rest of their family and they didn't have to do the work. So what ended up happening was and then I'm not sure if you know this, but it's not just in Tamil NAD
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@bowie
Bowie Rowan
@bowie · 4:52

Importance of context & holding employers accountable

That being said, though, it makes me wonder about again, like I said, the context of, well, if your quality of life is already pretty good in Finland, even if you are unemployed or low on work, that obviously is going to have a significant impact. Or if the work that you are doing isn't intense manual labor, that is really challenging physically and potentially mentally
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@shammi
Shammi Mohamed
@shammi · 4:29

It needs to be UNIVERSAL and other points

Thanks a lot for your comments, Rachel and Sudha, they were very insightful. I had a few points to add. First, one of the things that we need to understand about about UVI is its universal basic income and the universal in that is very important. And it's one of the reasons why I could get behind Andrew Yang's ideas because he was able to formulate this much better than all the proposals I've heard before. The universal bit is very important that everybody gets it
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@sudha
Sudha Varadarajan
@sudha · 2:46

Are the assumptions valid?

The way I look at it is when you give this 1000, you're making a fundamental assumption that the economic output of the economy does not change and you're just increasing purchasing power. And I believe that is a flawed assumption. If the economic output were to change, as in the example that I pointed out and the economic output drops, then prices will go up
4
@shammi
Shammi Mohamed
@shammi · 4:46

It’s about unlocking progress to drive down prices..

Technology is improving day by day and we have gotten too used to technology and market forces will drive businesses to adopt automation and a lot of jobs are going to be misplaced right and not displaced. And when that happens happens, I think UBI is one of the only ways we can really survive that and really move on ahead
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@Howie
Howie Rubin
@Howie · 1:34
And my question is, are we prepared to compete? Are we really investing in things like five G technology? I read about Huawei, and I wonder everybody gets or the President gets upset about Huawei and we're afraid of spying. My question is, why are they building out the best technology? And number two, if you're going to build a five G network, the only options are Huawei or Ericsson or Nokia. Where's the United States in that
2
@David
David Gilmour
@David · 2:18
Getting there is much trickier and lots of the discussions I've been in around UBI devolve into discussions and how difficult it is to mix some component of UBI with the incentives and systems that we have in place today to take care of the poor, to supplement low wages and so forth. So I just think it's useful to separate those two problems into about the path forward
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@Swell
Swell Team
@Swell · 0:15

Welcome to Swell!

@shammi
Shammi Mohamed
@shammi · 3:07
I forgot where I read this, but I was very fascinated by that whole idea because, yes, I see it as a very plausible future in the next 20 years. Right. But then every time I started talking about UVI, I ran into a lot of hurdles with people trying to buy in. And the biggest counter argument was, how do we get there? Right
2
@David
David Gilmour
@David · 1:26
Shawnee, thanks so much for that reply. And I agree with you that's the right frame. Look at it. And I certainly don't want to oversimplify the problem of how we get there from here. Just one cautionary thought on your point about search and email is that, yes, those things are free, and it's wonderful. But we have a side effect of that is that a huge amount of control over the rules of engagement
5
@bowie
Bowie Rowan
@bowie · 1:46

another question

I've been thinking about this conversation so much, and I just wanted to pose an additional question after hearing more of everyone's thoughts, which I suppose is about ethics. And a question that I see running through this conversation is ultimately about how do we take care of one another with increasing automation and the impact on jobs?
@arish
Arish Ali
@arish · 0:17

https://twitter.com/jack/status/1281282107956813825?s=21

I just saw this tweet about Jack Dorsey, $283,000,000 to Mayor Michael Tubbs of Stockton, who, along with eleven other mayors, is piloting a UBI program. I thought it might be interesting to the conversation, so I'm adding it as a link here
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@shammi
Shammi Mohamed
@shammi · 4:23

Silicon Valley leaders.. some of them see UBI s as the way forward

Hey, Irish, thanks for posting that link. I find it very intriguing and interesting that a small sect of leaders in Silicon Valley are wholeheartedly embracing UBI. And in my opinion, opinion, that is the right thing to do. And maybe the way I look at it is they're seeing the writing on the wall as to what the economic and social fallout will be. Of all the advances coming out of technology in general, with regards to whether it's automation or AI
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@Mtwadamela
Mtwadamela Ijogo
@Mtwadamela · 0:46
Well, this is definitely the AI revolution that we are experiencing. And it's just my own opinion. But they're just prepping us with all of this stay at home and the coronavirus pandemic and all of that. It's just prepping us for automation when automation takes over, because once automation takes over. And I've said this before on a previous swell, once automation takesover, people, 99% of us are going to be out of work anyway
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@Shaz
Shaz
@Shaz · 2:45

https://youtu.be/Y81BlyTUwNg. #howtomaintainbasicincome? #stopusingmoney?

And this idea can apply across multiple fields. How would we ensure that they do not get more income than the others? So this is the first part, and the second part is if we are going to maintain UBI, why not just scratch the idea of money itself? Everybody gets $1,000. Like taking from somebody else's example. You might as well not be giving anybody any money. So what if money didn't exist at all? So how would that work?
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@Mtwadamela
Mtwadamela Ijogo
@Mtwadamela · 1:54

#automationtakeover

More and more of you're seeing those catch words more and more and more. And eventually it will get around to being a totally cashless. And they'll use the coronavirus will be used as a reason as it's being used now, because if you're handing me money that has the virus on it, then you're going to transmit the virus. So people are starting to say, hey, I don't want your cash. I don't want your money
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@shammi
Shammi Mohamed
@shammi · 4:25

@shaz

My preference would be definitely to go with a different currency, one that is not easily manipulated, something like a cryptocurrency that does not have a central authority actually controlling the currency. Then again, that's another topic. We can talk about cryptocurrencies elsewhere, but in general, your question is, do we still need money? Why do we even need money? I think we will need some form of currency. Definitely because UBI is not supposed to replace money
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