Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: The UBI dystopia: a glimpse into the future via present-day abuses, published by Solenoid Entity on April 12, 2023 on LessWrong.

Disclaimer: This does risk being a little culture-war-adjacent. This is more political than I normally see on LessWrong, but the spirit of it is intended to be less "Smash Capitalism" or "Become Ungovernable" and more "look at these things that are happening in Australia."

Inspired by: Basic Income, Not Basic Jobs: Against Hijacking Utopia, SSC Gives A Graduation Speech.

Summary

Some bad things are happening today to people who depend on the government for money. This suggests that similar bad things could happen in the future if more people depend on the government for money.

If you're an advocate for UBI, or it's a linchpin in your plan for how we'll live well post-AI, it's important to consider two connected worries carefully:

Creating the scheme as truly universal (and keeping it that way) may be politically untenable in a democracy.

In many likely worlds, some people will depend on this non-universal UBI for survival, leaving them vulnerable to coercive control and arbitrary punishment by the government (lawfully), government officials (unlawfully), even corrupt bureaucrats.

Worries along the lines of "UBI could make us all serfs" and various techno-futuristic dystopian visions are already common enough. There's also a growing part of journalism/civil society/activism concerned with an industry that "farms the unemployed" — billing the government for services it ostensibly provides to poor people, while in fact spending their time on coercive control and a moralistic form of discipline. A "digital poorhouse" per Virginia Eubanks.

I think the average LW reader has also probably heard worries about Government Issued Digital Currency (GIDC), which is certainly part of the concern here. Others have expressed worry about payment processors and banks being politically manipulated.

But I think many people here are less familiar with arguments about problems within the social welfare system that already exist today. These problems are suggestive to me that, absent a change in the culture of these institutions, a UBI might lead to serious abuses.

After listing some reasons it might be hard to actually make an actual universal policy, or 'make it an inalienable human right', etc., I then briefly survey some of the abuses of welfare recipients that have recently occurred in Australia, due to the ability of the government, public servants, and employees of private companies to 'turn off the tap' on their money.

Two main problems

1. You probably can't make it universal, and you probably can't keep it that way.

The most compact way to pump this intuition is to imagine a caricature of a political debate, where a outrage-stoking populist politician is tearing shreds off a nervously stammering, principled, liberal, establishment centrist candidate.

Are you seriously proposing to give access to our hard earned tax dollars to migrants? Refugees? Oh, you're not? How can we trust you on this? So you'll demand government-issued photo-ID and proof of citizenship for people signing up? Ok, what about convicted terrorists? What about people (accused of) traveling abroad to join terrorist organizations (accused by members of the government or security agencies without a trial)? What about 'terrorist sympathizers?'We won't be giving it to convicted felons, though, right? Oh we ARE? But not while they're in prison, right? And obviously child sex offenders are barred from the UBI for life, right?What about people who refuse to get vaccinated or vaccinate their children? What about people who take part in unpopular protests?What about draft-dodgers? Taxpayers would be paying for them to sit on their behinds while everyone else who gets conscripted does their duty a...