April 25, 2018
A NYT article on Finland’s plan to end its experiment with a basic income for its citizens, noted its attraction, including to some rich people in Silicon Valley:
“In much of the world, the concept of basic income retains appeal as a potential way to more justly spread the bounty of global capitalism while cushioning workers against the threat of robots and artificial intelligence taking their jobs.”
There would be less need to be concerned about spreading the bounty if the government did not give out patent and copyright monopolies. These monopolies make robots and artificial intelligence expensive and allow people to collect billions of dollars in rents.
In the absence of these monopolies, the products of new technology would be cheap. We would all be able to get a robot for a few hundred dollars (the materials and energy required to assemble a robot would almost certainly not be expensive) that would mow our lawns, clean our houses, do our laundry, cook our dinner, and do all sorts of other things for us.
Robots can only make some of us poor and unemployed and others very rich because of a government policy that gives some people ownership of the technology. The inequality is the result of the policy, not the technology.
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