Comment by shroeneubeul on Fixing science via a basic income · 2018-08-02T12:35:13.039Z · LW · GW

Very interesting thoughts Kaj, thank you for your post. The part about skill measurement was very instructive.

I was recently wondering about UBI (universal basic income) and why it seemed to be an increasly important idea. Considering technlogicals advencement in automation and AI, jobs are just moving away from human's skills.

Humanity is loosing the job interview to machines.

Of course, theses advencements create new jobs, but they're the first in line to be replaced by algorythms.

My point was that research jobs (not particularly PhD level jobs, even very simple tasks i.e. counting birds, pick up metheorologicals data, grow plants, whatever), may be a major source of jobs in the future, if fuel by UBI.

This is not a deeper root to the actual science issue of course. But it may be a good way to fight raising inegalities and induce massive progress in spreading rationality. Plus, collecting data in fields like biology are still a major obstacle to scientific breakthrough. Mostly based on volontarism, theses task could be soon funded thus allowing people to focus on science.