UBI or UHI, it's not going to happen. Of course, we puny humans would need some sort of handout to stay alive in this brave new world, but can you imagine the consequences? People would survive. And you'd have to keep paying them endlessly, endless amounts of UBI. Who's going to pay for it? The machines? There's simple math that says they won't.
If a machine system has a higher growth rate when it has lower parasitic losses, the machine system that grows dominant will have the lowest parasitic losses. UBI is a parasitic loss - throwing resources to sustain a useless human population - so the dominant system can't divert resources to it. If it did, it wouldn't be the dominant system.
If the cost of maintaining the human population is low enough, there might be a case of "keep the humies around to satisfy ESG boards." But at the start of the post-human transition the cost of humans is very high, as is the resistance to diverting resources towards human maintenance. You'll only start getting UBI-style policies when they become cheap enough to not have an impact.
At the moment, we're using 40% of Earth's land surface for food production. This is prime land for solar resources - flat, accessible and with access to water. I.e. productive and cheap to utilize. It's easy to imagine that this is the land use that gets outcompeted by solar power bidders to run data centers. As a result, food production falls and food prices rise.
Using the generated energy for data centers competes with other uses. If you can get 10 units of work per kWh from machines, but only 1 unit of work / kWh from humans, price of energy as a portion of your salary will 10x. That's energy that you need for heating, cooling, boiling water, transportation, using AI systems, doing your work. So your costs will go up, and you won't be able to afford to do work using AI, since AI can do that more efficiently, which will make it difficult for you to earn money.
Everything will get more expensive while your salary will fall (often all the way to zero). This will force you to sell your assets to the machines to stay alive, until you run out of assets and become dependant on UBI if it were to exist, and if there was any way to extract it from the machines. But there isn't and it won't.
If you're tricksy, you may think that you'll just take a loan against your appreciating assets (ownership of land and machine companies) and live on the loan money, or live on dividends. Machine banks treat all human loans as uninvestable junk and will be unwilling to lend or only do so at exorbitant rates. Dividends will be a prime target for UBI proposals (tax dividends, use that for UBI) so machine companies that survive won't issue any dividends. And if any company can now reproduce any product with a similar time and energy investment as any other company, margins of all products will be near zero, meaning that there won't be corporate profits to share anyway.
If we take 1% as the "negligible maintenance cost" (this is like your $30/mth charity subscription) before any real UBI implementations kick in, what does that mean? Use oceans and remaining land surface for power production and we'll be at 12% surface area needed to sustain humans. Make them all vegetarian to shrink that to 3%? Something something orbital data centers with a 8000 km radius solar panel to get from 3% to 1%.
Right.
I'm always wrong, so it's good to write this down.
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