Ben Gilbert: prediction

Transcript context

…Then you have, I don’t know how many Uber drivers there are. If you add up Uber and Lyft and taxi drivers, that’s another huge amount of people. All of a sudden you’re going to have a superior customer experience through self-driving technology that’s going to come onboard in the next few years. I think everybody in some form or fashion is going to have to come to grips with the implications of what this means. Yeah. That’s pretty interesting. Well, this segues nicely into one of mine and I think I was going to talk about three things that I think will happen in 2017 and three things that I think will begin to happen but are really 2018, 2019 and 2020 themes. But this totally gets into one of mine which is autonomous vehicles start to make people more serious about universal basic income. I was having this discussion with a friend recently where let’s start with this hypothetical world that is we can basically produce in a very sci-fi way our basic means of living for free. We create technology that is efficient enough that let’s say that we can have farms that have all autonomous equipment that are powered by solar rays of renewable free energy and can deliver all these ingredients to people basically free of charge. So we have clean water, clean food entirely for free and maybe it's even possible that transportation is there too. Then there’s things like shelter, other basic things that you need to live that aren’t free but we’re going to start trending toward this world where we could provide those things for everyone. But the thing that will happen much sooner than that is that we’ll be able to provide these things with very little jobs. If you look at like the Industrial Revolution, the argument that everyone always makes is well, technology eliminates jobs but it also creates new jobs. I think in this era of autonomous vehicles, autonomous machines and leveraging machine learning, the difference is that you don’t create as many jobs as you eliminate. That might be okay in the extreme long run where we do have a societal structure in place that we take care of everyone that doesn’t have a job because like nobody needs to work. Let’s imagine a world where everybody gets to live without working and then we need some ways to distribute that wealth out to people. We also need something for people to do when they’re not working.…

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