In this episode of Futuristic, Cameron and Steve debate the idea of a Universal Basic Income (UBI) amid economic shifts driven by AI and automation. They address cost reductions and market disruptions caused by automation, the future of personalized AI-driven content, and public sector roles as potential solutions for unemployment – critical conversations needed to shape a future where AI and humans coexist.

FUT 31

[00:00:00 ] SS: Just an ease.

[00:00:05 ] CR: Okay, I’m recording. Turn on my backup record. Give me a one, two, three.

[00:00:13 ] SS: One, two, three.

[00:00:17 ] CR: Welcome back to the Futuristic Sammartino episode 31. Uh, we’re recording this on the 25th of October, 2024, two weeks before the U S election, January. Um, one year before the Singularity, um, one year before Elon Musk releases RoboTaxis and RoboVans and robots to the world or two or five, depending on Elon’s timeline, just before we came to where I showed Steve the Tesla stock chart, they released their earnings today, share price.

[00:01:00 ] CR: Bumped 22%, their biggest day in 11 years for all of the Elon haters out there that were shitting on the RoboTaxi launch a week or so ago. Have you been Steve? How’s the future treating you these days?

[00:01:13 ] SS: If you’re just treating me okay, when you said one year out from RoboTaxes, I was like, I said 2015, because wasn’t that when he made the promise? This is like,

[00:01:21 ] SS: we’re 10 years in to coming soon. Jeez, I’ll tell you what, you’d be

[00:01:25 ] CR: As he himself,

[00:01:27 ] SS: trailer and they said coming soon to a theater near you.

[00:01:29 ] SS: Be lining out the front,

[00:01:30 ] SS: 1977 Star Wars, you’d be like, what’s going on?

[00:01:35 ] CR: as he himself said at the RoboTaxi launch coming out by 2026, but I am often a little bit over optimistic with my launch date. So let’s say 2027 at the latest. Uh, well, look, the future’s complicated, Steve. Things are sometimes harder than they seem. Objects may appear closer than they really are when you’re looking in the Elon Musk rear vision mirror into the future.

[00:02:01 ] CR: Steve, um, one of the things that we want to talk about today, I’ve been trying to get some time to talk to you about this for a while, and a couple of our listeners have asked for this, is a deep dive on the UBI, um, which isn’t a, which isn’t a urinary tract disease or something, a form of birth control.

[00:02:21 ] CR: Um, universal.

[00:02:23 ] SS: that. It’s got a real medical

[00:02:25 ] CR: it will be, maybe it

[00:02:28 ] CR: could be both. We don’t know. Maybe it will

[00:02:29 ] CR: be a form of birth control because you won’t have enough money to actually afford to have children. The, uh,

[00:02:35 ] SS: UBI, the greatest birth control ever invented. Well, we’ve already got that with the property crisis. That’s, that’s birth control, isn’t it?

[00:02:45 ] CR: yeah,

[00:02:46 ] SS: by a policy as well. You know, one of the big policies there is you only pay half the tax on money you make through property. What a great idea.

[00:02:55 ] CR: mm, mm,

[00:02:56 ] SS: Because money is more noble than

[00:02:58 ] SS: labor, Cameron, to our government.

[00:03:00 ] CR: well,

[00:03:01 ] SS: Hmm.

[00:03:02 ] CR: more noble than the Labor Prime Minister is buying 4 million beachfront properties, Steve. He’s done okay out of the property market. Um. I’m not sure how a Prime Minister is able to afford a 4 million, uh, like a, not just a Prime Minister, but a career long politician. He’s not like Malcolm Turnbull, who was like a multi millionaire when he came in.

[00:03:22 ] CR: He’s a lifelong union labor guy, buying a 4 million beachfront property. But let’s not get distracted, Steve. Um, like I’ve been talking to UBI for, uh, 10 or 15 years. It’s an idea that’s been around for a long time that we’re going to have to have one of these things eventually. Not always directly related to the idea of AI taking our jobs or robot taking our jobs.

[00:03:54 ] CR: They’re often part of the conversation, but usually it was just sort of what capitalism was doing to incomes, offshoring jobs, and stuff like that. But Over the course of the last year or so, as I’ve been trying to figure out where our economy is going over the next five to ten years as a result of AI and robots, I can’t escape the conclusion that we’re facing a severe and significant re engineering of the fundamental economics Of Western Civilization.

[00:04:32 ] CR: Uh, which makes it hard because I run an investing podcast and we’re always talking about, uh, you know, the prospects of companies into the. Future, uh, intrinsic values and, you know, forward cashflow projections. And I’m always saying, I don’t know, don’t know what the world’s going to look like in five years from now, but, um, fortunately we just have to live in the present moment.

[00:04:56 ] CR: You know, Steve, I know you’re, you’ve been a skeptic about UBI on the show in the past

[00:05:01 ] SS: sceptical and I’m still anti, so let me just play my cards straight up, I agree there’s issues coming our way, I think UBI is a terrible idea, absolutely fundamentally disastrous. And that’s my position. So that’s, I guess, going to force our discussion. That said, I agree with your opening premise.

[00:05:27 ] SS: We are heading for a significant fundamental shift in the way society

[00:05:34 ] SS: and all economies globally work.

[00:05:38 ] CR: well, as I’ve said on the show before, it doesn’t, Require very high net unemployment number to crash an economy. Like it’s, it doesn’t, I think sometimes people think, Oh, well, you know, that would require 50 percent of all jobs to be gone or something like that. Yeah. The great depression and the major recessions that we had, like the Keating recession that we had to have, we were talking high single digits, 10%, uh, unemployment.

[00:06:14 ] CR: And that has severe, um, recessionary or depressionary, uh, characteristics. I’m just checking my facts here. The unemployment during the Great Depression was 10 percent in 1929, which was already high just before then, 21 percent by mid 1930 and 32 percent by mid 1932. So it escalated well beyond that sort of 10 percent level.

[00:06:46 ] CR: You know, it, it, it snowballs, I guess is the point, you know, because when you have an economic crash like that, uh, money disappears out of the economy. You end up with people don’t have jobs, so they don’t have an income, because they don’t have an income, they can’t pay taxes, so governments that rely on taxes can’t provide services, uh, businesses that rely on people spending money to buy stuff.

[00:07:11 ] CR: