H LV <[email protected]> wrote:
> The idea of a basic income is much older. > Here is a history of the idea of basic income and how it has evolved > alongside the emergence of the welfare state. > http://basicincome.org/basic-income/history/ > > The idea is old, but the modern version based on robotic labor replacing human labor is fairly recent. It has been mentioned from time to time in the last 100 years, but it began to attract more attention and more supporters in the early years of the 21st century, as it became clear that progress in computer and robotics was accelerating. This acceleration came as a surprise to many people (including me, I should confess) because artificial intelligence seemed stuck in a rut for several decades. I thought that self-driving automobiles would take 20 more years to develop. Arthur C. Clarke, who was one of the best futurists who ever lived, described a robot-based economy in which people did not need to work many times, notably in his novel "Childhood's End" (1953) and "Profiles of the Future" (1963). That's where I got the idea. I discussed it with him several times, so I know somewhat more about his views on this than most people do. (Not to suggest his views were necessarily right, or more advanced than, say, Martin Ford's. Ford knows more about computer technology than Clarke did.) - Jed
