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California police stumped after trying to ticket driverless car for illegal U-turn
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2025
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You know, we should re-assess many assumptions in light of emerging technologies. Even the conceptual value of labour is becoming more and more obsolete as AI and automation comes. We need a new Marx in relation to data as leverage to demand social equity, as in advocate for universal basic income/utility. Tech barons stole our data to train AI and automation, it's only right we bear fruit from our personal information.
Be careful what you wish for. UBI assumes a small group in power will, while having all the resources in their hands, fairly distribute them to everyone and never use them as a bargaining chip to force our compliance with whatever actions they're trying to take.
The whole UBI idea seems like a trap for the general public to accept the notion that it inevitable that a small oligarchic group must have all the resources consolidated to them, to stop us from working towards a true egalitarian economy.
There is no time I am aware of in history where a large group in power distributed vast resources to the community without being compelled to do so by threat of force.
Well if my choices are
A) live in a tyrannical oligarchy where a few powerful people hold all the power and don’t value me at all
Or
B) live in a tyrannical oligarchy where a few powerful people hold all the power and don’t value me at all but I have money for food…
Man that’s a tough choice. I’ll go with B
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma
I don't think there is any reason to think that those are the choices we will actually end up with. Those are just the choices being presented. I believe there are are other choices available that don't involve me having to trust a band of thieves that have done nothing but show me they can't be trusted at every opportunity, but they don't want to present those choices because they would result in them having a lower concentration of wealth and power.
For example, in the USA where I am from, we once had a hybrid capitalist model with a graduated taxation system that essentially limited the maximum individual wealth by taxing all earnings over a certain amount at near 100%, making it functionally impossible to accumulate much more wealth than that. This resulted in wealthy individuals and businesses reinvesting their excess profits in themselves, their people, and their communities because they would not get to keep those profits anyway. That then created one of the most robust economies and largest per-capita middle classes in the planet's history.
This is something that we already know for a fact will work because we have already tested it, and it is but one of probably thousands of possible economic models not being presented to the public.
Reimplementing that system or many of the other ones that don't involve giving the thieves all the money and trusting them to divvy it up fairly are less likely to go wrong. We then need to make sure they are more resistant to being dismantled than previous systems were, so they don't get destroyed like those were.
And that worked extremely well exclusively for white men in that great society you mentioned. It leaves out “lessers” living in that society. The ones who struggled to scrape by because their homes were redlined and valueless and they just took down your neighborhood to build another toll road.
The fact is that perfect time was only perfect for those in the chosen class. Boo.
I think we can do better than that.
Go read “the power broker” good book.
The people that were societally oppressed in the USA during the middle class boom were in their bad situation due to other societal ills, not the taxation structure.
I'm not saying that the entirety of US policy was good then. Clearly there were many societal ills, including widespread gender and racial discrimination in housing and hiring, terrible literacy rates and targeted violence against ethnic minorities in the rural south that persist to this day, and religious bigotry was widely accepted. The economic structure, though, successfully allowed for personal wealth while limiting it, and created an undeniably huge middle class. The fact that many citizens didn't get to participate in it was due to those other non-economic social problems freezing them out.
Also, mid-20th century USA is a single example of a system that was brought up to illustrate the point that there were more than the false dichotomy of choices presented. Surely there are way more ideas out there than status quo or status quo + UBI.
UBI has no precedent for working, and I, some rando online, have already identified a potentially disastrous problem that undermines it that I've never heard any convincing solutions for.
I love gaming out problems and solutions, but it is important not to fall in love with our ideas. Getting upset when holes are poked in them or ignoring these weaknesses aren't going to prevent our opponents from exploiting them. If a plan has intractable problems, there is no shame in making new plans that may avoid those problems.
That sounds concerning, but how is it different from regular taxes to collect & distribute the funds?
I mean, besides the obvious push from them to reduce taxes to 0% as they already do in the States.
Taxes are redistribution of the capital of the general populace of the governed area. UBI is different in that it proposes a special tax only on the capital class where wealth is concentrated, which is then used to supplement the incomes of the general populace, with the most future-utopian thinkers envisioning UBI replacing income and work entirely some day in a super-automated future.
The point of great concern to me is that people bought in to the idea will not resist the ownership class' attempts to consolidate resources and capital into fewer and fewer hands, because they believe those are stepping stones on the path to UBI. Then, when the capital class has got all the resources and control all the production, what force on Earth can make sure they follow through on the redistribution?
That last question is rhetorical. If someone's got all the money, food, and weapons, there is no such force on Earth.
Edit to add another note: Observe how the capital class already actively seeks to avoid taxation at every turn, and are typically successful. I believe a government to successfully implement UBI, it would have to be somehow completely free of corruption from moneyed lobbying.
Not sure it's even possible to achieve being "completely free of corruption from moneyed lobbying", but at least getting to a system where the legislature or whoever has the power and the will (if not absolute mandate) to continually evaluate the situation and combat corruption (sanctioning, suspending, or expelling violators; penalizing lobbyists who don't follow the rules; amending the rules as needed to keep ahead of the problems).
There's just not enough real consequences for any of these people failing to live up to the standards we should expect of them.
It's an understandable concern but IMO if people are made aware of the value of their personal information being used to advance information age, like people learned the value of their labour during the Industrial age, then we can leverage to demand UBI. We need to be compensated for eventually losing jobs to robots, and using our information that trained the AI doing the jobs they would replace us with.
And even if it's not compensation by UBI, there is universal basic services in which people are provided housing and utilities unconditionally. Carbon dividend could also be a source of income to fund UBI or UBS until we achieve net zero greenhouse emissions.