I often talk about the need to preserve the right to work for the masses. Many people rebut this with the idea that work is coerced for the masses and that it should not be. These are actually essentially unrelated issues. Wanting to not coerce people into working is not at all incompatible with my position. In theory, they both advocate greater choice.

Unfortunately, in practice, people who are pro UBI are often taking a position that is highly likely to deny people choice rather than grant them greater choice. When Elon Musk and Sam Altman talk about creating a UBI, they talk about the need for it due to the expectation that robots will displace people and there will be widespread, permanent unemployment. The articles with interviews from them then tell glowing, affectionate stories of how UBI can supplement your current low wage job and make your life better. They never actually write about the scenario being proposed: A world in which large numbers of people have no hope of getting paid work.

This scares me because people like Sam Altman and Elon Musk are job creators. And their vision of the future is "We eliminate your jobs, cut you a check for a pittance and call it even, then wash our hands of your pathetic future. Not our problem. You have your UBI." In the last Industrial Revolution when automation was threatening to eliminate jobs, we created the 40 hour work week to redistribute work more evenly and raise quality of life for the masses. We need the next step in the evolution of work here.

I find it frustrating that this seems to be so hard to get across to people. But, earlier today, I left a comment elsewhere on HN* in which I noted that some quadriplegics can work and that I was mentioning this because new quadriplegics are often suicidal, feeling like life is over. Maybe think of it in those terms. For many people, UBI in a world with drastically fewer jobs would be like a tragic accident cutting you off from the ability to work. People seem able to understand how horrifying it is to be quadriplegic and feel completely useless. Why can't you understand how horrifying that would be if you are "the wrong kind of employee" and your job has been eliminated and now you are being handed some check for less money than you made previously and basically being told "Fuck you. You are useless and don't deserve a job."

UBI and preserving the right to work are not necessarily antithetical. The problem is that most people who talk about UBI don't see that preserving the right to work is not going to just happen. It needs to be made to happen. And when job creators like Sam Altman are all "meh, you have your ubi, you don't need access to paid work" you are talking about a horrifying dystopian future which will almost certainly end in bloody revolution. Large numbers of unemployed people who have no hope of getting a job, time on their hands and just enough money to keep themselves fed but no hope of ever returning to a middle class lifestyle would make for a scary army.

I would be suicidal in that situation. But quite a lot of people would be homicidal, in part because it would be legitimate to feel this had been done to them. This is really not a scenario we need to create in the world.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14606810