Throwing Another Log on the AI Bonfire!
So, the hot topic of the moment is AI (Artificial Intelligence), and using AI to create art and web content in general; what does it mean? Should it be allowed? Should it be allowed, on Hive? Should it be clearly marked as what it is? What value does it have? Is AI going to render humans irrelevant in the creation of content?
Before we Start — TL;DR:
- AI is already embedded in our daily lives.
- Does AI affect the "utility value" of something?
- Is AI really the issue?
- Or is it actually Truth in Labeling we care about?
- Deception is a bigger and more toxic issue than AI
OK, Onwards!
We find ourselves asking a lot of seemingly relevant questions while perhaps skipping over some of the relatively obvious but at the same time overlooked questions.
For most people, I expect any kind of final verdict an AI is still out with the jury. And yet? We already frequently interact with AI and one form or another.
Heck, let me stick my neck out here, and admit that this post was created "partially using AI."
WHAT????
I say that, because whereas everything in this post was definitely the result of my own original thoughts, HOWEVER, the words as you see them on this page are partly the result of speech-to-text technology… and isn't that just another form of AI? Let's consider:
The voice recognition software gradually becomes more adept at recognizing my voice, my word choice patterns, and the odd expressions I use, as a result of which there are fewer and fewer typos I have to fix at the end. So, technically speaking, I used AI to create this post. There's machine learning involved, here.
Yes, I know, that's not exactly what we're talking about here.
I'm just starting off this diatribe with that little "admission" to point out that the lines are typically more blurred than we think.
Let Me Offer You Another Example:
Not so long ago, @cosmictriage created her own deck of tarot cards. For lack of a better term, I would characterize the project has ”AI assisted:”
She started with some sketches and photographs of her own creation, used Night Café to give them a dreamlike quality using AI according to a very specific rule set specified by her, and then spent hours and hours tweaking that result into what she finally wanted, digitally — but essentially ”by hand.”
Again, the lines are blurred.
Was AI involved? Definitely! But the AI was a tool, much as a PhotoShop "brush" is simply a tool for a graphic artist.
What Are We REALLY Debating?
As I contemplate the AI debate, I find that the most fundamental question that comes to my mind is "what is your intention?" What are we doing? What is it we want the end result to be?
It all brings to mind discussions we had back on ”Hive 1.0” in which we were debating whether the repository of information that was being distributed and accumulated through our blogs was contributing to the ”Internet of information” or the ”Internet of PEOPLE.”
Again: What is your intention?
It's a question that's perhaps very difficult to answer in a global sense because it ultimately boils down to the interest of the individual. And even that can be a moving target.
What exactly is it that AI does? What does it provide? What does it add or subtract?
If my intention is to find instructions on how to replace a certain engine part on my 1997 Nissan, I would definitely like to be assisted by AI which is able to collect an aggregation of information about replacing that particular part on the 1997 Nissan. In that instance I'm looking for information. The human factor is somewhat secondary.
HOWEVER, AI can't describe the feeling of watching your kid play soccer. AI can't describe what it's like to hold and pet an adorable kitten. AI can't describe the texture of a rock you're sitting on at the beach. AI doesn't know what it feels like to make the first sale for your new business. AI can't describe the flavor of a perfect cup of cocoa.
Some might protest this particular line of thinking since AI has access to ALL information, but let's consider the essentail fact is that what AI does is gather aggregate of external experiences and present a plausible summary of what any one of those feelings might be. However none of those examples would be described through direct experience.
It's Personal!
And so, we come back to our personal intentions and preference. Speaking only for myself, the primary reason I blog is for the human content rather than the informational content. I care more about people's stories and *experiences than about numbers on a page.
@edicted eloquently presented a perspective of humans from the self-serving capitalistic angle, positing (among many other things) that we ultimately just care about what we want, at the best possible "price." Either AI adds value, or it doesn't.
I neither agree nor disagree strongly, but I find myself wanting characterize the underlying idea that we're ultimately each driven by ”whatever it takes,” to have and maintain our personal sense of reality. Much of human experience will show us that it's an approach that leads to a giant free-for-all that quickly decays into little more than chaos… and we end up with a situation where nobody wins.
AI... a Return to the Land of Bid Bots?
I've seen a few people talk about AI in the same context as the issue we had with bid bots in the past.
In a sense I'm in alignment with that because it closes in on an important issue: perhaps what we're really looking at isn't so much to do with effort or money or who's trying to beat the system… as it is to do with the unpleasant swampland between various forms of deception and openly transparent honesty.
Consider, for example, that when something shows up at the top of your Twitter or Facebook feed much of the time your initial interest and curiosity that it could be something really interesting is substantially tempered by the fact that there is a small note next to it that says ”promoted content.”
I have no issue with promoted content, and I also had little issue with bid bots, BUT I take considerable issue with the basic reality that promoted content that is not labeled as such essentially amounts to a deception.
"Truth in Labeling"
When the whole bid bot debate originally broke out, and people were up in arms over the fact that some elements of the community were effectively "buying their way into the trending feed" the parallel that always came to mind was that of an author who publishes a book and then creates the false illusion that it's a Best Seller by going to every bookstore they can find and buying 100 copies of their own book.
It's basically a deception.
Publishing blog content created by an AI chatbot and not letting people know that it was created by an AI chatbot is also a form of deception. That's where we get into the whole issue of whether something borders on the edge of becoming a scam.
Before you protest too loudly... consider whether you'd really buy that t-bone steak if it were actually synthesized from cricket protein in a factory, but not labeled as such?
”But does it add VALUE?”
And so we uncork another of the much discussed pet topics of Hivelandia: Value and Quality Content.
Personally, I am not — and generally haven't been — a big fan of the concept of ”quality content.”
For starters, it is very subjective... but moreover, I can't help but think back to my college days (40 years ago - yikes) and creative writing courses in which fairly wise creative writing professors with lifelong authoring and publishing experience would point out that if you go to your local bookstore, less than 2% of what is on the shelves actually constitutes ”literature quality” writing.
Everything else is basically Pulp. But it's popular pulp; it's the pulp people want to read; it's the pulp people actually pick up and take to the cash register and then lay on the beach during their vacation and read.
”Does it add VALUE?” has always been a far more relevant question for me.
So does AI add value?
The Sourcing Requirement...
Again, isn't that a highly individualized and subjective question?
Which brings me full circle back to what I brought up earlier: perhaps this isn't so much an issue of "AI" or "not AI," as it is an issue of ”truth in labeling.” In most cases, I don't give a flip how you came about your content, but I want to know where you came about it: out of your brain, or our of a machine.
Is this your personal experience? Or is it your research project? Or did you actually have nothing to do with the creation of it?
We're expected to credit, label and source images/illustrations, so why would the content, itself, be subject to any different requirements?
If you wanna get technical about it, let's consider digital ownership.
Who owns the content? If you didn't write it — let's say AI did — then it's not really your content, is it? Then if it's not really your content, then perhaps I don't particularly want to give you my vote unless I know that you're going share that money with the AI... yes, I know that's technically speaking impossible but I'm making a point... because otherwise you're practicing a deception and that is perhaps the central issue here.
It's not just "Proof of Brain," but "Proof of WHO'S Brain." Or brains, artificial or otherwise.
Why do I keep bringing deception and transparency into the discussion?
Communities that try to run on — or even tolerate — deception as a way of life tend to have a way of collapsing on themselves. We see that whether it revolves around politics, or something much smaller like a local community organization, or even something as really super local as a marriage or partnership.
Lying is bad, m'kay?
Thanks for stopping by, and have a great remainder of your week!
Comments, feedback and other interaction is invited and welcomed! Because — after all — SOCIAL content is about interacting, right? Leave a comment — share your experiences — be part of the conversation! I do my best to answer comments, even if it sometimes takes a few days!
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Created at 2023-03-07 23:39 PST
0763/2018
Lying is bad.
I don't know if I am still gonna be here if all I see on the feed is AI generated mush. I might as well open any of the AI generators myself and write what I want to know, without the need of scrolling through dozens of similar posts.
It is a tool. And a very handy one. And I have seen people use it to improve their posts without pretending they wrote the text. It was part of the post, it added value to it. Fine by me.
But I have also seen those that put a nice long text generated by AI and hoping to be rewarded for it and then acting up when confronted about it.
If someone tries to pass the whole text that took 1 minute to generate as their own and hope to get payed for it, then it is a slap in a curators and any other user face that does produce something of their own.
I like that :)
Lying is bad.
Lying about it (by omission) was a substantial part of what made bid bots a problem. If the presence of a "PROMOTED CONTENT" label had immediately appeared on any post with a bid bot vote, a significant element of the bid bot issue would have been addressed.
AI is a very handy tool, although my only real interaction with it is related to image processing.
AI for text is little more than a 2023 version of the "article spinners" that were already in use 15 years ago. Google spent a ridiculous amount of effort and money on creating algorithms that could recognize spun content and relegate it to Page 637 of search results. And so, it became less attractive in an environment where revenue was generated by the number of eyeballs on any given web page.
I believe it's important to find some kind of solution for Hive, simply because real content creators shrugging and declaring "why do I even BOTHER?" could become very problematic.
I actually did play with a little (the text one) to see what it does. Never before used any AI or correcting/spinning tools. It is quite impressive. Though I read that it can be misleading when it comes to factual information. People should keep that in mind.
Exactly that. I guess it is up to us not to give it too much attention on Hive. Even though there will always be those that will try to catch some free tokens with it.
https://leofinance.io/threads/@tengolotodo.leo/re-leothreads-2ksvnugwk
The rewards earned on this comment will go directly to the people ( tengolotodo.leo ) sharing the post on LeoThreads,LikeTu,dBuzz.
Great to see another log being put on the AI bonfire!
I actually had a discussion on AI and HW last night on Talk Time with Tengo.
AI has been around since the 50s and it is in our lives and has been for years already.
To me the issue is that Chat GPT is now freely available to the masses.
You had some great points in this post. It is about deception, hell yeah I did love your cricket steak so to speak!
Deception is akin to fraud, I read a post the other day that was great, and it was tips from ChatGPT about our Hive game dCity. Of course, it was cited as ChatGPT but the post was pretty much mostly AI text and was way below the HW 50% original content requirement. But a high rep author posted it and that is fine.
I guess to me the problem is not AI .. but how HW and others are reacting and being heavy-handed to some users and not others.
My wife being an outsider was laughing, saying why is Hive which is advanced technology (blockchain etc) gettingtheir knickers in a twist and trying to ban AI which is another advanced technology.
It is here to stay and we need to adapt. Yes the farmers and scammers will use it and they should be punished, but others who use AI to assist or created those wonderful tarot cards hmm that is fine in my book if cited appropriately!
Animals make great stories, and perhaps you can write some more of what the talking horses say!
It gets great engagement on your posts and is fun. What is also fun is using Threads
Threads are a great way to increase engagement, grow your network, meet new people and generally HAVE FUN while microblogging on Hive.
I have shared this post there, you can see it here. You can also share your posts on Threads, and you can also earn $leo by Threading as well as $hive.
Silver Bloggers have endorsed threads and we have a stack of Leo Power ready to curate threads from silver bloggers, just make a thread and use the #silverbloggers tag
Here’s a link to the community announcement about our involvement with threads
Thank you for posting in Silver Bloggers and giving us some great food for though on AI and Hive me 😁
Hi Tengo, appreciate the thoughtful comment... I really need to get more onboard with Threads; I've typically gone pretty "light" on anything related to LeoFinance because so little of my content is related to Finance/Investing; but what I have read from Khal recently suggests Threads is a more across-the-board gig.
Anyway... yes, I agree that AI is pretty much inevitable, and I am not against AI as a technology, I'm against the deception the invariably goes with those who use it to try to "milk the system."
I'm all about community and the HUMAN Internet... which is what got me interested in blogging, in the first place. In fact, most of my earliest online experiences (1995-96) revolved around the exploration of Human identity in a virtual space. With a couple of friends, we were exploring how virtual communities were changing how people identified the self. We were actually researching for a book on this very thing, but we scrapped it after Sherry Turkle at MIT published "Life on the Screen."
Point being, I worry about the ways AI might de-humanize the Hive experience, if it's merely being used in service of those who are trying to maximize/harvest rewards. This community is so much more than just a "magical cash dispenser!
As you know, I'm a big fan of Silver Bloggers; I'm so glad it came along and filled the void left by the gradual demise of the old Power House Creatives community!
I think you hit the nail on the head, deception. That for me is the central issue. Use AI if you wish but declare it.
And when deceivers do not declare it, but deceive?
There has long been bot posts making people money on Hive, since before it was Hive.
AI will not be a problem if Hive is not merely a financial mechanism, because fraud is a financial technique. Hive is fundamentally a human society, and we have substituted financial value for human values of far more import to people, because that was easier.
Hive needs to be better now, because the environment has become more rigorous. We need to enable Hive to reward more fundamental human values than mere money, because if we don't AI will make Hive worthless to people, like bidbots almost did.
I don't know! Perhaps we become experts at recognising AI-produced content just as we did the 'spun' articles that were all the rage a few years ago.
Agreed, but if you remove the financial element it kills the Hive idea stone dead or turns it into something else entirely., but I have no solution to offer.
If everyone just stopped blindly upvoting and rewarding content by rather actually reading first what they're going to upvote to truly figure out if the content which was "curated" was effortlessly crafted or not by an AI or any other "smart" tool, I bet AI generated content wouldn't be a problem at all for anyone.
Because quite frankly, no one reads shit here or no one wants to read shit before upvoting. };)
Good point. Agreed. And I do!
Yes, a very valid point.
I remember back on "Hive 1.0" there was a significant movement trying to emphasize the community as being part of "The Internet of PEOPLE" rather than "The Internet of INFORMATION." I have supported that notion since I started blogging, in 1998. As you undoubtedly know, a "blog" is a "web log" and was originally about people sharing the stories of their lives.
To be honest, I don't blame Hive for ending up largely as a financial mechanism. That's a systemic issue for the entire Cryptosphere... the original ideals of creating a trustless global decentralized financial system was largely usurped by conventional Wall Street greed and thoughts of "Wen Moon and wen Lambo?" Hive is pretty much just its own microcosm within that paradigm...
Not saying that to let anyone off the hook; just observing the greater environment.
So yes, we need to do better.
I see a risk of conflation and equivocation here. On one hand, we have AI used as a tool to enhance human action, like text-to-speech editing, advanced language translation, and image manipulation; and on the other hand, people ask the computer to make something using a few text prompts. Both involve AI, but one is using a tool, and the other is plagiarizing a robot for profit.
Which sort of points back to the whole honesty vs. deception issue... and with that, the sad reality that a significant percentage of humanity is given to "behaving badly" in the presence of financial rewards...
As you say, most of the stuff in the bookstores is pulp.
Almost everything at the grocery check out stand is pulp.
And the articles and sordid escapades we read in such are so generic, so cookie cutter, that an AI can be trained to write them.
"Men bad, women empowered" write that in 100s of ways, but all saying the same thing with the same buzzwords and the same tone, and you have Vogue magazine.
poor people talk about people (stars, hollywood)
more intelligent people talk about politics.
really intelligent people talk about things and solutions.
People® Magazine could be easily written by an AI, because it just the same thing over and over, just change the name of the actress.
Politics has also been reduced to memes and sound bites.
And i am pretty sure that AI is writing these.
But, when an AI gets into the stuff i want to talk about, it become real obvious.
Worse than a 5yo joining an adult conversation.
The AI doesn't have enough information to write anything, and there are too many side passages where you can tell an AI just copied from a bunch of different things, put it into a blender and press pureé.
Nothing there to sink your teeth into.
Where AI is used, that i really, really hate is responding to tweets and such.
Like a one track minded person, it just gives canned responses.
And this makes the average reader thinking that there are more of this type of person. I see more "A" than "B" so i'm inclining to go with "A". (because of our group mentality)
And these AI responses really make me sick.
You can tell they are AI by various means. Like, there really isn't a person there. Nothing personable. They are also very quick to respond. Sometimes its an actual troll, but usually there's some fun there.
I can't help but think that a substantial part of the issue can be traced back to a post-WWII notion that "automation" would be humanity's golden ticket to more leisure time.
Now, we haven't really managed to create more leisure time, but we have managed to create a society that largely equates "paradise" with not needing to DO anything, and not having to THINK about anything. Which — I think — is a pretty dangerous and deadly path.
We're all gradually getting dumber. Major newsmedia used to be written/presented with a 10th grade cognitive ability in mind; now it's a 4th grade ability... except the whole "politically correct" crowd are probably busy rallying to change what used to be 4th grade to now be regarded as 10th grade... lest anyone be thought "dumb."
Govern-cement school is designed to make people hate learning.
The "smart" phones are less useful than a Sinclair computer from the 80s.
You could learn to program on it and get it to do all kinds of things.
A smart phone is soooo dumb. It locks you out of all the useful features.
Scientists on TV say, "it is settled science"
Anyone saying that, and claiming to be a scientists should be tarred and feathered.
Because science is always evolving.
Cars in the 50s were things people could work on and change and modify.
Now they make cars that are so integrated, so fragile, you stick a screwdriver into your radio in the wrong place, and the car no longer starts.
Our world has been made to make people want to zone out. And so much regulation against doing anything real.
I note the disconnect in your discussion between basic principles, or fundamental values, and facility, or the appearance of substance. When I became enamored of the panoply of life as a child immersed in the Tongass, the largest temperate rainforest in the world, as I sought wider knowledge about terrestrial life than I could acquire through my perambulations on the island where I was raised, I discovered the rigors of cladistics, of empirical evidence, and of the nature of scientific knowledge delineated by replication of experiment and falsification.
My appreciation of the beauty of life was enhanced by the rigor of science, both of which emerged from evolutionary processes that carved away failures to meet standards resulting from physical constraints on reality. Living things that could not survive their environmental conditions didn't pass on their genes to subsequent generations, resulting in flowers, hummingbirds, and peacocks of breathtaking beauty surviving ruthless predation, natural catastrophes, and sexual selection. Scientific theory similarly was subjected to the hurly burly of prejudice, political fanaticism, and financial skulduggery, yet the ferment of free speech and empirical evidence ultimately prevailed to produce reliable and detailed understanding of the very fundamental principles the physical universe derived from.
These two sentences aren't the same. AI cannot feel anything. The sentence stating this is factually correct. However, AI certainly can describe anything, and everything, and if you task ChatGPT to describe the flavor of a perfect cup of cocoa, it will do a great job of it.
Humanity is alive, self-aware, grasping at metaphysical concepts and understanding of reality far beyond it's reach. Mammals, we're yet something far beyond animals, invested with cognition that is not the sum of our evolution, our bodies, or intent on mere facility. We rise to joy, and descend into despair. At our best we are holy, and at our worst evil. Mechanistic progress in arts and sciences results from an evolution of our understanding and inures ever greater felicity to society as we faithfully adhere to spiritual principles that value truth, beauty, and love.
When we do not, when we succumb to temptation and seek only profit, facility, or our aggrandizement, we foster chaos and create ruin, genocide, and barren waste.
These contrary results aren't the planned outcomes of our machinations, but arise from the permutations of our philosophical adherence to sound principles. Society, and the humanity that effect it, are sacred, a hopeful affect of life yearning for spiritual transcendence of mere physical existence. Prophets ubiquitously ordain we love one another, speak truly, rule justly, and act selflessly to implement society that will produce paradise, and a paradigm shift in which people will no longer suffer, hunger, hurt, and die. We hope for the human condition that is all history reveals to us to be inapplicable to our posterity after we transit a clinal boundary.
Toasters cannot love, cannot hate, cannot feel joy or suffer. None have prophesied toasters will be happy in the world to come. Translation services, TTS, the brushes in M$ Paint, are just devices, just like AI. Things do not partake in the fellowship of mankind, and have no business being interjected into our society. Hive is a society of people, not a wallet, a program, or a language model. We have no kinship with AI.
As a species evolved to be able to estimate whether we can drop a fleeing antelope with a rock flung at it's head so we can eat it, our mental faculties are utterly incapable of planning our implementation of paradise. We're lucky we can tie shoes.
Yet we observe that we are beginning the conquest of the heavens. We see the means of production of the blessings of civilization are the cutting edge of technological advance in every field of industry, are dispersing across the population today, and using them eliminates parasitic losses - and the parasites that have used our productive labor to field armies to rule us. We are transitioning to paradise as we speak, and the prophecies that our posterity will seize the stars of the heavens as footstools for their feet will come true.
So, relying on our intellectual capacity to enumerate all the possible permutations of allowing what seems easiest, most inexpensive, or facile, to produce 'value', is inadequate to our need as a society - unless it adheres to fundamental principles that underlie human society. The first principle, shorn of woo, any pretense of faith or spirituality, is that human society is comprised of people.
Toasters need not apply.
Any value that our tiny little brains might claim derive from letting AI craft our words will eventually become impediments, detractions, deprecations of our humanity that will ultimately become wounds in society we may not be able to heal. Once a dam begins to crack, the cracks spread, and leaks worsen the damage, until repair can become impossible.
I have long counseled that bots, automating social interaction, and substituting pecuniary interest for subjective curation are all contrary to the success of Hive, to no avail, and now we face the perhaps fatal infestation of AI authoring our posts.
If we can't limit society to human people, society will not survive. If we cannot limit Hive to human authors, it will quickly be overwhelmed with automated content, and no longer have utility to people. It will become an algorithm maximizing ROI that will eradicate the value Hive has to people, and the platform and token, without value, will become worthless.
Thanks!
First, thanks for the thoughtful comment.
As I briefly mentioned elsewhere, I was originally drawn to this whole circus because I was interested in the Internet of PEOPLE, 25 years back; fascinated by the concept that the technology enabled us to connected with humans all over the globe. To be perfectly blunt, I didn't give a shit about the technology and welcomed the day when people stopped gushing over "The Internet" and instead started focusing on what we can do with the Internet.
Blogging (aka "content creation") was always about human stories. I won't deny that it's convenient that I can look up how to install a new compressor in my fridge, but it's not why I am online. It's also not why I joined up with Hive's predecessor. You might recall that Dan Larimer's original vision was actually very human centric rather than technology centric.
Do I like the ideal of abundance and creative ways to enable wealth distribution? Absolutely! Sadly, I also recognize that a significant percentage of the population "behave badly" in the face of the potential for financial rewards. But it's not a Hive-centric issue, it's a human issue because we live under a "Scarcity paradigm" to associate their very humanity and sense of self-worth with the size of the pile of "stuff" they can amass. And so, something like Hive comes along, and immediately there will be those who will try to "game" a system that's already based on the gamification of "social."
Thanks to partially absentee parents, I spend much of my childhood living with my older aunt, surrounded by 30+ acres of private woods and meadows, where I befriended the natural world significantly more than my peers... which is why (for example) all my blog posts and articles remain illustrated purely with my own photos... again, my experience, not a generic image bank's. But that's a sidetrack; your description of your own upbringing brought it to mind.
I'm really glad bidbots did not end up destroying everything; I was definitely among the many who "almost quit," on account of their presence. But I didn't because I believed the core community here would persevere in ensuring that Hive 1.0 didn't just become an automated shit show. Now the system exploiters are exploring AI... because system exploiters are everywhere; I recently watched this same battle rage on an art related site/community I'm part of.
AI is a tool. The question is how we use it. A gun is also a tool. Do you use it to hunt rabbits and deer so you can eat, or to shoot your neighbor so you can take their stuff?
I suppose that leaves us with the ultimate task of how to change an overall mindset away from the whole "money for nothing" ideology... and that might be a tough nut to crack.
I like the way you end your reply, referring to the money for nothing ideal so many exploiters seek to perfect. It brings to mind that we get what we give in life, and money for nothing is worth exactly that.
I read an article today that Oregon (where I live) is contemplating initiating UBI, $1k/mth doled out with no strings attached. I thought about the repercussions of such income on peoples' lives. Will it set anyone free?
I don't think it will. I think it will do the opposite, and bind people in their leisure, rather than free them to achieve their dreams.
Unless their dreams are only what they attain while dozing off.
We often lament our difficulties, rage at the seeming senseless impediments that we must always overcome to attain anything, often enough only partially managing to keep the rent paid, or food on the table. But we gain so much from the struggle to overcome, develop in ways we could never have planned to, I have come to rejoice in hardships.
I have caught myself bursting out in laughter when the engine blows just as I am at the furthest distance from my home, on a mission of critical import the failure of hasn't even been contemplated because failure just wasn't an option. I have realized at my darkest hours that they are the good 'ol days I will look back on with nostalgia.
And I do.
If we are focused on people, we will look back with nostalgia at the challenges we overcome. If all we want is money, we'll languish flush, and forget there was ever any reason to struggle, sinking slowly into the darkness at the end of our lives.
We are the posterity of the survivors of the Younger Dryas, of the Toba eruption, the Black Plague, and every war and famine in history. Those catastrophes have taken many lives of wonderful people, leaving only our forebears to bring us into being. The struggles humanity faces make us people worthy of our miraculous lives, and I look forward to looking back on the coming strife with AI.
I am sure we will laugh about it one day, nostalgic for the glory days when we stood for society against the machines, after we have managed it.
I'm up the road in Washington, and the UBI discussion has gone around here, as well. I'm skeptical, but mostly in the context of the US collective value system, with respect to how we view money; our relationship with money and "stuff" as a defining aspect of our self-identity.
As my username might suggest, I was born, raised and largely grew up in Denmark so I've also experienced the workings of a capitalist social democracy, from within. The starting point over there is that people (culturally speaking) have a different relationship with money and what constitutes "enough."
For UBI to have any chance of working in the US, it can't just be doled out "no strings;" but it could perhaps help people if it were provided on a sort of "smart card" that could only be used to pay towards electric bills, phone, insurance, housing and possibly qualifying SNAP (food stamps) grocery items. I don't think people need money, they need a better *social safety net" when the proverbial excrement hits the whirling apparatus. When you don't live in constant financial fear, you're more capable of responding to what life offers, rather than reacting to it.
I've lived in the US full-time since 1985, and in my time here I have been homeless, lived in my car, AND had a six figure salary. Having a lot of money did not make me happy, but NOT having any definitely led to a constant state of anxiety. Had I stayed in Denmark, it's very unlikely I would ever have been homeless, and almost as unlikely that my IT job would have paid that much.
But I'm wandering a bit, here. The primary reason I doubt UBI would work in the US is that we've been "trained" to view the "ideal life" as having lots of money and doing nothing. Strangely far from the "work ethic" so often touted as a core American value.
I definitely enjoy the challenge of problem solving in life and finding creative solutions to those challenges. What I enjoy less is doing so against the pervasive backdrop of "if I FAIL I'm likely out in the street."