Free basic income without having to work?
Will robots allow us to prevent them from taking over our jobs?
https://twitter.com/i/status/910556945710485504
This is only fine with #BasicIncome. pic.twitter.com/8qyyV6fYUp— Basic Income Images (@BasicIncomeIMG) September 20, 2017
Firstly: what's the definition of 'work'? Is work everything that's done in exchange for money? If that's the case, pensioners, children, refugees and a lot of disabled people shouldn't be getting any money. So, moving on.
Is 'work', everything that's done but not falls into the category 'spare time'? Than cut benefits from single stay at home mothers. No?
Perhaps Wikipedia can help us out:
Perhaps homework should count as work and thus be financially rewarded? No?
Riddle me this: people who used to work but don't anymore, should they get money 'for doing nothing?' But people who will never work (aka pensioners) do get benefits. Why should an exception be made for students who finished college but haven't found a job yet, people who are blind and therefore have a hard time finding a job, people who've fled from disaster, lost everything and everone and are recuperating in a new homeland, people who got fired and have become unemployed?
And what will you do after robots and/or algorithmes have come to take your job? Would you be fine with dying from hunger 'because people who don't work shouldn't get money for free'?
But your are indispensible, right? Think again.
'Yeah, but for every disappearing job, a new kind of job will surface! Right?
Maybe, maybe not. But perhaps we should prepare for a future of unemployment. For people.
Want to read (more of) my short stories? My author page: Terrence Weijnschenk at Amazon
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