Attention Economy


Tuesday, March 15, 2016

Basic Income and Economic Inequality Debate

Yale Economist and Nobel Laureate Robert Shiller - How Wage Insurance Could Ease Economic Inequality

Debate on Basic Income
Finland’s Universal Basic Income Plan – an interesting economic experiment:

A Plan in Case Robots Take the Jobs: Give Everyone a Paycheck
“But for the sake of argument, imagine that within two or three decades we’ll have morphed into the Robotic States of America.
In Robot America, most manual laborers will have been replaced by herculean bots. Truck drivers, cabbies, delivery workers and airline pilots will have been superseded by vehicles that do it all. Doctors, lawyers, business executives and even technology columnists for The New York Times will have seen their ranks thinned by charming, attractive, all-knowing algorithms.
How will society function after humanity has been made redundant? Technologists and economists have been grappling with this fear for decades, but in the last few years, one idea has gained widespread interest — including from some of the very technologists who are now building the bot-ruled future.
Their plan is known as “universal basic income,” or U.B.I., and it goes like this: As the jobs dry up because of the spread of artificial intelligence, why not just give everyone a paycheck?”