IBM chief executive Ginni Rometty says “there is not one more important [topic] for all of us” than the potential of technology to create inequality by concentrating huge wealth in the hands of a few.
This is quoted to forecast the world without the UBI. But maybe this explains, in a strange manner, why Musk supports the UBI.
I mean that, the idea among the rich on the UBI is perhaps to rip people off job opportunities and concentrate money to them. The UBI would be a handy excuse for getting people off work. If that happens, we replace $30k, say, annual salary with $10k UBI.
I know I’m a paranoid, but we should be careful if the rich welcome something.
Another thing to notice here is that Musk’s world view is consistently “rich gets richer” and, naturally, his premise on the UBI is the same: the rich will take away the jobs thanks to AIs. The ordinary will be on the UBI instead. We’re gonna fuck you, and you don’t fly away.
If he really cared about the ordinary, he’d not treat joblessness as inevitability in his argument. Because it’s him who has the power to make the ordinary richer, and he doesn’t engage on that at all. No way. No way he actually cares about the ordinary in his UBI argument.
