Computer pioneer Alan Turing’s remarks in 1950 on the question, “Can machines think?” were misquoted, misinterpreted and morphed into the so-called “Turing Test”. The modern version says if you can’t tell the difference between communicating with a machine and a human, the machine is intelligent. What Turing actually said was that by the year 2000 people would be using words like “thinking” and “intelligent” to describe computers, because interacting with them would be so similar to interacting with people. Computer scientists do not sit down and say alrighty, let’s put this new software to the Turing Test - by Grabthar’s Hammer, it passed! We’ve achieved Artificial Intelligence!
Because they’re saying that people are afraid of AI taking their job, as if the majority of people enjoy their jobs? People don’t want to be without an income. As if our benevolent oligarchs will suddenly give us even the smallest chance of getting some kind of basic income?
The enshittification of employment isn’t necessary. And having a role in how your society functions is necessary for any kind of democratic control of the economy. You can’t just be a consumer, on the outside looking in.
Automating away drudgery is generally good for an economy. Automating away control is what sucks.
The structures of basic income are already in place. We have social security. We have pensions. We have annuities. The struggle is in if and how we continue to fund them.
Since Reagan, the answer to funding basic income schemes has been to displace the cost from higher income earners to younger workers. Now that we’ve drained that well, there’s definitely a push to simply dissolve these systems entirely.
But it’s hardly a given, any more than the Reagan Era was some historical inevitability. Americans can change course if enough of them can unify around an opposition.