AI can mean leisure – with UHI

November 2023

**Look into my eyes…you will subscribe to X Premium** | *Detail of book cover photo: Art Streiber/August* | *Book:* **Elon Musk** */ Simon & Schuster, 2023*

Note: Social credit as referred to here is nothing to do with the Big-Brother Chinese social credit system

At a 2023 UK conference on artificial intelligence, visiting US multi-billionaire Elon Musk – owner of Tesla and X – put forward a good idea: universal high income. But it’s not original.

100 years ago the UK Social Credit movement said (in effect – there was some complex economic and religious theory) that technology could mean leisure if the state paid a ‘dividend’ to all.

The dividend wouldn’t have been a handout. It’s owed to the people for the underpaid contribution made by them and their ancestors to the current wealth. (That debt still hasn’t been paid.)

Back then, it never happened (apart from some half-baked Canadian experiments), and the movement all-but fizzled out.

However, the movement survived – as the UK Social Credit Secretariat. Also, currently trending, there’s a related but highly diluted version: universal basic income (UBI).

At the 2023 AI conference, Musk said artificial intelligence means no one will need to work, but only if they get a universal high income – a universal basic income would be insufficient.

Unusually for Musk, this makes sense: a state-provided universal high income (UHI) could replace wages, thereby allowing civilisation to continue without wage-slavery.

And there’s no need to hang it on the futuristic threat of mass job-losses caused by AI. We can do it right now.

But how can a UHI be funded? At, say, £20,000 a year for all adults, it’ll cost the UK over £1tn a year – which obviously can’t be tax-funded.

A UHI can only be funded by the state issuing money as social credit – meaning money issued as credit for the good of society – rather than banks issuing money as profit-making debt.

States currently – historically – outsource their legal responsibility for issuing money: they delegate it to banks. Almost all money is issued by banks as debt – and is then lent to the state! It’s legalised bank robbery: robbery by the banks.

But states can reclaim their responsibility for issuing money and end the environment-destroying debt economy by issuing all money as social credit.

Such social credit will replace income tax and state borrowing. It can fund a UHI and all social spending: green energy, transport, water, health, care, housing, justice, education, infrastructure, defence, etc.

All debt, personal and business, can be forgiven – it’s a new start.

£2tn a year should do it for the UK. The Bank of England can finally make itself useful and stop kowtowing to neoliberal ‘market forces’.

The £200bn or so a year currently invested in UK businesses can be given interest-free to monitored business accounts on receipt of sound business plans including green, social and inclusive considerations.

The UK stock market will reform to facilitate this. Savings accounts and pension funds can contribute to investment by trading in the reformed stock market and sharing the profits of successful companies.

However, the ‘growth’, consumerism and built-in obsolescence needed to service debt will no longer drive business policy.

Privatised utility shareholders can be paid off and utilities run as non-profits.

The unconditional UHI will replace benefits and the state pension. People will, of course, be free to take whatever work is available or to run businesses – for extra money or for personal fulfillment.

There’ll be no hyperinflation: the social credit money issued wil be spent into the economy in a virtuous cycle.

There there’s the pleasure of telling the international money market, the World Bank and the IMF to go fuck themselves. A nation’s social credit money will be intrinsically acceptable for international trading purposes.

One loss will be bankers’ bonuses. What a shame. (Deprived of their scam, banks will have to find a more useful – if less lucrative – role.)

(See also my post Robots could mean leisure.)

Please feel free to comment. (I answer all comments.)

Coronavirus: Soothfairy speaks

*Image: Praxis Photography / Getty Images / Flickr RF*

This coronavirus – what does it think it is? Coming over to us humans from bats, or pangolins, whatever, killing off our vulnerable old people, making us all stay in, destroying our socio-economic system and that. I mean, what’s it all about? You know? Bollocks!

Mind you, as a global threat it’s shown up market forces and the nation state as inadequate. So, if we end up with voluntary one-world government that can end poverty and war, give us a universal state income, and replace the environment-destroying debt economy with social credit, might not be so bad. Apart from the killing and destruction. Which is bad, obviously. Means and ends and all that.

But this isn’t a case of means and ends, is it. The deaths aren’t a way to get to utopia. The utopian idea comes from the deaths but isn’t caused by them. (The deaths are a way for nature to maintain its inhuman ecosystem. We’ve had plenty of warning.)

So this modern idea of utopia isn’t caused by the sudden mass deaths. It’s caused by the usual complicated pattern of thoughts and events. This virus is probably the catalyst (O-level chemistry, failed). The reaction is taking place. The result won’t be known till the post-virus dust has settled.

So would “they”, the Illuminati or whatever, the union of the super-rich, allow an end to neoliberal global capitalism as we know and hate it?

Not willingly, of course, but they might be forced to acknowledge a tidal turn of events and find another way to keep their loot; or they might try to co-opt New Utopia and bend it to the will of their ruling cabal; or – with a bit of luck – they might retreat in a sulk and rot away behind their security fences.

In the new utopia, in 50 years’ time, United Earth, having repaired the damage done by their greed, will round up the remaining cohort along with their warlord accomplices, convict them of their crimes and exile them to the Moon.

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Occupy your mind

Thoughts after getting sacked from a temporary job at the Leicester, UK, HSBC call centre

Couldn’t hack it, got the sack. Monday morning won’t be back. Need to go to work – nowhere to go. (And oh, that magic feeling, nowhere to go…)

It upset me. It was a crap job, so I didn’t mind losing it, but getting fired was a bitter blow to my fragile male ego. Getting fired from a crap job!

(The reasons they gave didn’t ring true. I suspect age discrimination, illegal in the UK. So, yes, I did something about it.)

I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I thought: better find something to occupy my mind – and I did: the strangeness of the phrase, ‘occupy your mind’, got me thinking.

**Zombie Jacko promotes Occupy** | *Graffito and photo: Ezra Li Eismont*

The Occupy movement uses it as a clever slogan: Occupy your mind – think responsibly. But in everyday usage it’s not an instruction to occupy your own mind; you already do, obviously. It’s short for ‘Find something to…’

That’s a strange shortening, suggesting mental indolence addressed with military zeal. Stop that daydreaming! Wake up and (find something to) occupy your mind!

Why do you need to find something to occupy your mind? What’s wrong with your mind being occupied only by you?

Perhaps what’s wrong – apart from the tendency of the mind to brood disproportionately on the painful details of recent setbacks – is the risk that you’ll turn into the animal in you. The advice to keep your mind occupied or even preoccupied and to find a suitable occupation is meant to save you from your lower self.

Spookily anticipating the Occupy movement slogan, 16th-century Roman Catholic utopian philosopher Thomas Moore said, ‘Occupy your minds with good thoughts or the enemy will fill them with bad ones’. By ‘the enemy’, Moore meant, of course, the Devil who, as any fule kno, makes work for idle hands – and minds.

In our enlightened post-Darwin times we can take a less Moore-ish and more diplomatic approach to ‘the enemy’. We’ve got a lot of bad and baddish animal stuff going on – down there. Monsters from the id, if you like.

If you can face that stuff and give it a non-judgemental nod of acknowledgement from time to time, the bad stuff will behave itself, and you can live above it. (And – which is more – you’ll be an adult, my child.)

In which case, of course, we no longer need a mental occupant to distract us from our animal urges. They’ll be under humane control. More or less.

But we like being distracted; and now we’ve got a habit: media addiction. Let’s watch a movie…

I mean, we still need distraction from the things we have to cope with day-to-day using part of our minds:

Find shelter, pay for it, keep it clean
Get food, pay for it, prepare it, cook it
Ablute, wash, groom, exercise
Choose clothes, buy them
Choose clothes, wear them
Wash clothes, dry and fold them
Iron and put away
Have children: have no life
Go to work, get sacked…

For Om’s sake – give us a break.

We need mental distraction, entertainment, stimulation, a funny cat, anything. Hollywood, Bollywood, Nollywood, Netflix, YouTube, er, Tumblr, whatever, we need it. We deserve it. Bring it on. It can occupy our minds rent-free.

The field of mind occupancy studies got a boost recently when the research centre for neuromapping at the University of Salamanca in Spain announced the publication of a paper, Neuromapping patterns of mind occupancy by Carles Escera and Alfredo Quiñones-Hinojosa.

The paper includes in an appendix the following illustrative poem by Cadenza Prize winner Hugo Brucciani.

occupancy and occupation
by hugo brucciani

occupancy of the mind by
a lodger who is welcomed by
the mind’s landlord
rent-free. it could be
reading a book
watching a movie

takes most of you
out of yourself
to a resting place

enough of you
is left behind in the mind
as a pilot to enjoy it
judge it, control it
end it, if necessary

after the end
when the occupant’s gone
you come
back to yourself

the process of rejoining
can be delayed as
the pilot reflects on
echoes of
a different world

meanwhile the landlord
above it all in the attic
watches on
the bastard

‘occupant’ sounds ok
find place to live
pay rent – harmless but
‘occupation’ sounds
heavy, man

find an occupation
right, I think there’s one
in Palestine is there?
Syria? Sudan?
what am I supposed to
do about it?

oh, you mean a job
right. yes, you’re right
job

find a good job
thats. right. so
it’s a good job I’ve got
genes for work ethic
and obediance, then

so my mind’s meant
for an occupation
designed by the
landlord’s architect
the bastard

we can fight back
join the underground
resist the occupation
evict the occupying forces
take vacant posession

we know what we feel
we can live above
our work ethic and
the other
bad memories in
the basement

we don’t need no
occupation
we could live well on
a state income
paid by
social credit
owed to
us all

because yes
the world owes us
living

Then
we can work when
we want

good riddance to
the occupation of
our minds

the landlord and
his architect can
suck it up, live and learn

the occasional
occupant’s ok though
there’s a good movie on
at nine *

* This is possibly a reference to the increasingly archaic practice of watching scheduled TV broadcasts.

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Robots could mean leisure

Guardian letters: November 2015, June 2016, July 2016, June 2017, July 2017 and June 2109 (Chris Hughes).

Rolling post begun February 2016, last updated June 2019

According to a 2015 newspaper report, Bank of America Merrill Lynch forecast the increasing use of robotics, and warned that this would exacerbate social inequity. Perhaps they were really more worried about unrest than inequity.

The Social Credit movement addressed this issue 100 years ago, saying that increased automation should mean increased leisure. However, this would need a radical reform of the banking system, so that a national dividend income can be paid to all.

This income, paid regardless of whether and how much people work, would be linked to national productivity and should be enough to live comfortably. The income wouldn’t be a gift. It’s money owed in lieu of the underpayed contribution by many generations to the current general wealth.

*Original illustration: Elizabeth Webbe from The Little Mailman of Bayberry Lane by Ian Munn*

Redistribution by taking the wealth of the super-rich might be a Good Thing, but it isn’t needed to fund this. If governments fulfil their responsibility to control the money supply, they can end the debt economy and pay the income by issuing, yes, social credit (which can also fund infrastructure projects and social services such as health and education).

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Postscript

Amazingly, the world has caught up with me. I thought the idea was languishing in the archives of Social Credit, and that the UK Green Party’s sickly citizens’ income had been strangled at birth by its mean anti-scrounger nannies, but, hallelujah, it’s been reborn (in the 1980s – who knew?) as the currently trending idea UBI (Universal – or Unconditional – Basic Income).

I think there’s a problem with ‘basic‘. The income should be more than basic – it should be comfortable. But it’s good that the, er, basic idea has a new lease of life.

There’s a Social Credit response to UBI. They say the income should be basic – plus a share of the economy’s productivity. (However, my understanding is that the Social Credit national dividend doesn’t actually guarantee a basic income, but is entirely dependent on the performance of the economy.)

For UBI see, for example:
🔸Campaign groups Basic Income UK and BIEN (Basic Income Earth Network). BIEN has a good history of UBI (although its section on Social Credit doesn’t explain that SC’s national dividend is funded by government-issued credit, not by taxation).
🔸An informative Guardian article

Some relevant books:
🔸Inventing the Future, by Nick Srnicek (pronounced ‘Sirnichek’, I think) and Alex Williams
🔸Utopia for Realists, by Rutger Bregman
🔸The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class by Guy Standing
🔸Real Freedom for All: What (if anything) can justify capitalism by Philippe Van Parijs

Some related ideas:
🔸Accelerationism
🔸helicopter money
🔸people’s quantitative easing.

June 2016 – still trending:
An excellent Guardian article by Philip Oltermann reports a poll finding: 68% of people across Europe would vote for UBI. Also, Switzerland is about to vote on a proposed unconditional national basic income of £1,750 a month. That’s more like it. But another poll shows 60% of the Swiss against it. The problem is, UBI advocates don’t seem to understand the funding solution (control the money supply), and witter about funding it by tax, which obviously puts people off.

Missing the point – the watered-down version trudges on

An interesting but flawed report on UBI by economists Howard Reed and Stewart Lansley published by leftish campaign group Compass is to get a high-profile launch by Labour shadow chancellor John McDonnell. The report proposes an income of £70 a week funded by tax increases. Readers will search in vain for ‘money supply’ or ‘social credit’.

I asked the report’s authors about this. Stewart Lansley said they considered including funding options, but decided that anything radical would detract from the their central idea – that UBI would be feasible within existing institutional arrangements. Hmm. There’s a danger that the new UBI baby is being strangled – as was the Greens’ citizens’ income – by Nanny Normal. With something like this, you have to – as the Guardian says (see below) – dream big.

UBI proponents need to understand that their dismal basic income isn’t enough – and that a universal income big enough to replace wages (Universal Big Income?) can only be sustainably funded by the government issuing social credit. To be fair, there are different approaches in the UBI movement. For instance, BIEN co-founder Guy Standing argues for a social dividend funded by income from publicly owned assets. Not as good as social credit – but better than basic income funded by tax.

Straw man burns – quite a week for UBI
🔸The Swiss, as predicted, turned down the generous but unfunded UBI proposal (77% against).
🔸The Grauniad weighed in with an editorial on UBI (it’s OK to dream big, but proceed with caution).
🔸Reporting on McDonnell’s launch of the Compass report, the Guardian said that Labour is considering the idea of a UBI.
🔸The Guardian had a Saturday sum-it-all-up above-the-fold letters section on UBI which included – ahem – one from me (Chris Hughes) about funding UBI.

Two out of five ain’t bad | The Guardian, Saturday 11 June 2016

Of the five printed letters, two were supportive of UBI. LSE economist Ian Gough (against – it’ll drain the energies of the left) said pithily of the Compass proposal, ‘Thus a powerful new tax engine will pull along a tiny cart (a partial and inadequate basic income). Why bother?‘ Quite.

Progressive alliance could implement UBI
The Brexit result of the UK referendum on whether to leave or stay in the EU surprised nearly all commentators and pollsters. (However, see my prophetic post, The east European elephant, about the danger of ignoring the views of poor whites – Guy Standing’s ‘precariat‘, perhaps.) In the post-referendum political turmoil, Labour MPs tried and failed to remove leftwing leader Jeremy Corbyn (elected in 2015 with huge support from Labour members). This brings the new progressive movement into focus. If Labour splits, there could be some interesting reorganisation. But as (anti-Corbyn) Labour veteran and former leader Neil Kinnock said recently, realignnent without proportional representation is fragmentation. There’d need to be (as someone else has probably said) a pre-election progressive pact with one item on the agenda: enact PR, then hold a second general election. It’d be a happy coincidence of party self-interest (sustainable survival) and political principle (improving democracy). That way, the political landscape can open up; new political eco-systems can develop; existing institutional arrangements can be changed; and the government can control the money supply and fund a Universal Big Income. Bingo! (UBIngo!)

Update: January 2017

Labour didn’t split. However, it’s lost so much support, it might need an alliance. But it probably won’t be a progressive one. Oh well.

Meanwhile, Finland has launched a two-year experimental scheme to pay the unemployed an unconditional £475 a month. It’s basic, but it’s not UBI. But it’s the first unconditional state income for the unemployed in Europe. Which is something. Better than nothing.

Since then, nothing much, I’d say…

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