People & Blogs
Could this be a solution for humans in a world with more AI? #TEDTalks
Several crises are set to define the next century — but journalist Aaron Bastani believes we have the technological ability to meet our biggest challenges and create unprecedented levels of prosperity for all. He shows how we could get there by ditching capitalism as the world’s economic operating system and adopting “universal basic services,” where…
@garycarlisle7810
December 14, 2025 at 2:03 pm
You BS.
@technolus5742
December 14, 2025 at 2:30 pm
He’s serious.
@technolus5742
December 14, 2025 at 2:48 pm
@thegodfather193 Worse is pretending problems away.
@thegodfather193
December 14, 2025 at 3:39 pm
@technolus5742 That’s even worse.Lol😂
@technolus5742
December 14, 2025 at 4:37 pm
@thegodfather193 Worse is insisting on the same thingsnand burrying our heads in the sand. Discussing ideas is definitely not the worse thing.
@abderahmanoubaha7957
December 14, 2025 at 3:01 pm
it’s all dandy till AI advances enough to make most of the workforce obsolete within a generation
mass unemployment, anyone?
forget about progressive taxation, who would work in the first place to consume products and pay taxes at all ?
companies and governments would go completely bankrupt when the AI bubble will burst
it would make 1929 look like a blip
@zodayn
December 15, 2025 at 3:54 am
Well if AI replaces the workforce it really isn’t a bubble is it? Also lots of work is physical and can’t be done by AI. And finally if such an AI revolution were to happen that would only make a universal supply of basic service easier. If nobody needs to work to produce it there is no need to pay for it.
@abderahmanoubaha7957
December 15, 2025 at 2:09 pm
@zodayn
1/that assumes that the economic system would abolish financial capitalism along with the AI revolution
if capitalism hangs on, it will turn into a burst and a huge one to boot
3/how many available physical jobs are there again? certainly not enough for half the current workforce at modern wages
also advanced AI + megafactories + advanced tesla bot like workers and boom even menial jobs are automated
3/again, that assumes a global coordinated transition into abolishing money itself
we’re already struggling to keep climate change somewhat in check,
you really think the global elite who’s power and prestige is based on monetary gain directly or indirectly would actually coordinate the explicit and swift abolition of the very source of their power??
@zodayn
December 15, 2025 at 4:53 pm
@abderahmanoubaha7957To be clear that “if” carries a lot of weight. I think AI has much less future potential than companies make it seem. For example KPMG did an experiment to see if AI can run a self sustaining business selling AI generated stock images and as hypothesized it failed massively. As for job replacement. I don’t remember the exact study but there was research on categories of work and vulnerability to AI which also included work that required human connection, and work that includes risk assessment and decision making. That last category is really key in the difference between current AI and general intelligence. AI now mostly relies on a prompt or at least a dataset it has been trained on and some measures it knows it should act on and how to act. A lot of jobs that isn’t very physical still requires human intelligence to decide when and how to act. Those jobs can be aided but not replaced by current AI. And general intelligence is still very much sci-fi. As for robots. Robotics has been applied for much longer and recently hasn’t seen any major advancements in commercial use. The teslabot is really just a marketing ploy to attract investors. Humanoid robots wouldn’t really be efficient anyway and mechanical arms and such have been in use in factories for decades, plus those factories still have a lot of regular workers. Also the energy and climate transition is demanding a lot of physical jobs that dont currently exist and work in healthcare, the least vulnerable sector to AI or robots is expected to rise a lot. So what concerns me the most about AI is how much pension funds and other public banks have their portfolio oriented on the digital service industry. It’s not unusual to see Microsoft and Google as their largest investment. Still any well managed fund wouldn’t invest more than a few percent of their portfolio on a single sector. And still they have other asset classes like stage bonds. So I don’t think the burst of the AI bubble will be as bad as the mortgage crisis when a larger part of investment capital dropped across an entire asset class. To be clear that was a huge bubble, this one is just big.
@EllisD1249
December 14, 2025 at 3:13 pm
Dudes talking about socialism as if he invented it.
@ItzMrToni
December 14, 2025 at 3:36 pm
It’s a socialist perspective if you do your research
@thegodfather193
December 14, 2025 at 3:38 pm
The amount of bs in tedtalks nowadays. What a waste of time.
@gargoyleclayworks4661
December 15, 2025 at 7:33 am
My thought exactly. Today somebody presenting a childish idea he heard from some communist. Just extremely populist vague points with no logic and explanation. I’m so disappointed, that I had to write this comment
@anthonyfisher6051
December 16, 2025 at 11:01 am
How is this idea bullshit?
Care to elaborate a little bit more?
@anthonyfisher6051
December 16, 2025 at 11:05 am
@gargoyleclayworks4661
Meanwhile, countries implementing services similar to what this man is speaking about, are thriving and ranking much higher, if not at the top, of all metrics of quality of living, while America is near the bottom of these same lists.
Capitalism is a failed experiment that has resulted in the largest wealth disparity in modern history for this country.
Over $40 trillion has moved from the bottom 60% of America to the top 5% since 1980, nearly eliminating the middle class.
The rhetoric of “Free and fair market” is an illusion and is constantly spewed in defensive of capitalism, while we have corporate collaborate mergers and monopolies forming weekly, eliminating market competition and forcing consumers to pay higher and higher prices for less goods and services.
But tell me again, how putting people over profits is “communism”… while our country is literally imploding here in America at the hands of a corrupt, authoritarian crony capitalist regime.
🤣🤣🤣🤦🏻♂️👎🏼
@gargoyleclayworks4661
December 16, 2025 at 8:05 pm
@anthonyfisher6051I come from Poland and work in Germany and I can tell that the counries implementing solutions similar to those of the man speaking are not the reason that they are thriving. They are thriving and because of that they are able to risk it with projects like universal income. I am personally sceptical towards it, because something similar has functioned in many countries for a long time and it didn’t turn so great as many though. Just look at Germany’s Bürgergeld. Every citizen who doesn’t work gets a considerable amount of money and as it turns out there is a great number of for example homeless people who just take it, spend on alcohol and drugs, lose the meaning of life completely and live the worst version of life possible. They then repeat it every month until they die.
Of course not all make it this way, but there is a considerable amount of people who do. They have no motivation to look for work, to learn something, to do anything. And that is a very important point when it comes to risks connected with universa basicl income. It doesn’t have to be a dream, it could easily turn out to be a nightmare. Moreover it will very probably be disastrous for the country’s economy in the long run.
You write that capitalism is a failed experiment and I can agree that it has a lot of flaws. I myself am not particularly happy to beg my bank for a 30 year loan to affor to buy my own small house. I find it harmful to always try to buy more, produce more and pay as little as possible. Having said that I am happy that we don’t live under communism. This was a failed experiment time and time again; always ending up with a complete disaster. In soviet Russia it was famine and genocide, in Poland we were all as poor as it gets in Europe and in Germany you can even see the traces of communism because the country was divided and the part which was under the communist occupation is underdeveloped to this day. There isn’t any case in which it worked, and it won’t work because of the basic human nature. And if someone says that it wasn’t real communism, then look at China. Is real there? It’s every time something similar, and it’s every time a human disaster and as a person who comes from a country with such dark communist history, I can assure you that the way it always ends up is no coincidence.
@albertoginelsalvador2172
December 14, 2025 at 4:00 pm
☭ I’d take expropiation!
@latxtlnz
December 14, 2025 at 5:11 pm
Agree. Also include mental and dental in universal healthcare and driving lessons in the universal transport cause not everyone has their own parents to teach them to drive for free. But almost every job requires a valid drivers license.
So.
@rufusconnolly8489
December 14, 2025 at 5:22 pm
I’m not interested in leveraging government control to solve a climate “crisis” that doesn’t exist. Less socialism, and more societal accountability for me, thanks
@anthonyfisher6051
December 16, 2025 at 11:10 am
Tell us you’re science illiterate without telling us lol. 🤦🏻♂️
@BenTrem42
December 14, 2025 at 7:34 pm
I’m very tempted to jump up with “I agree”! 🙂
Very productive notion, could be.
p.s. meanwhile Trump et al want to displace government by implement gang controlled private bank accounts … though nothing like cash in hand.
@anthonyfisher6051
December 16, 2025 at 11:00 am
A.k.a corruption.
That is the name of the game with the Trump regime…
Corruption in order to enrich those empower.
There’s no debate, it’s clear and obvious now.
They don’t even try and hide it anymore. 😒👎🏼
@zodayn
December 15, 2025 at 3:57 am
Why I think universal basic income has the edge over universal basic service is the fact people can decide how to spent the money based on their needs. It’s the same why giving money to people in absolutely poverty works better than giving aid. They can decide what form the aid takes by spending it.
@tomgerken4675
December 15, 2025 at 1:18 pm
They don’t want you to decide. Free transportation means you get to go where and when they allow. Free education means you learn where and what they want you to learn. Free medical means physician assisted suicide if they don’t think your quality of life meets their expectations.
@cczarnyy
December 15, 2025 at 6:07 pm
How you’re gonna decide the amount of income for particular people? Like CEO of big company and junkyard worker?
@zodayn
December 15, 2025 at 7:16 pm
@cczarnyythere’s two ways of approaching this. The one is what UBI usually means which is a flat benefit to everyone, including the rich CEO. The downside is of course that a CEO doesn’t need a few hundred euro. On the other hand you can have a linear regression in the basic income. The downside of that is the need to have a system for doing an income check and to change the given amount or recollect what someone got too much. Plus it might disincentivize working more if your income check goes down. Either has their up and downs and it’s really just a matter of preference as is having a UBI at all.
@gargoyleclayworks4661
December 16, 2025 at 8:16 pm
@zodaynwell, it sounds like just having a job
@dddvision
December 15, 2025 at 8:44 am
Well, it is a better idea than UBI. But, “basic” needs to be carefully defined, because there is a danger of a slippery slope here.
@TesserId
December 15, 2025 at 9:16 am
In the hand of corporations, racing to achieve a controlling market share, AI will get better at reading minds to improve their exploitation of peoples’ private data and private thoughts.
@bh5317
December 15, 2025 at 10:37 am
Other people succeed just fine with all of those restrictions and more. Problem is not the access.The problem is the mentality. This Man is nothing more than a socialist. His ideas are designed to ruin our country..
@DavidHolladay-e2r
December 15, 2025 at 11:41 am
fine, but his proposal does not recognize actual human nature
@jayyyyy1m40
December 15, 2025 at 12:17 pm
Yes yes yes and yes. There is no excuse for privatizing every public service, enough of making the rich richer. Public education has no downsides for the average person and allows people to actually make a life for themselves instead of relying on illicit methods.
@vXIR0NMANXv
December 15, 2025 at 12:22 pm
This is good, but universal income is superior.
@PlasticBank
December 15, 2025 at 2:07 pm
A future built on care feels worth fighting for. People matter most.
@anthonyfisher6051
December 16, 2025 at 10:57 am
He is 1000% correct.
Many of these things are be basic human needs and SHOULD be met WITHOUT a factor of profit coming into the formula.
Unfortunately, capitalism (the illusion of a “free and fair market”) here in America has ruled supreme for over 40 years, making EVERYTHING in our lives a commodity to be profited from.
Other countries value their citizens more, and provide most of these services free at the point of need, paid for by the taxes the citizens are required to pay (taxes just like Americans are required to pay, except Americans get very little back in return).
It is corporate greed that has manufactured a narrative telling us that providing basic human needs for people is somehow “wrong”, “lazy” or a “handout”… or labeled as “communism” or “socialism”.
These very same corporate superpowers then benefit from government bailouts and subsidies PAID FOR BY TAXPAYER REVENUE!
Socialism for the corporations, just not for the individuals… the ultimate evil hypocrisy of American capitalism. 👎🏼😒
@TheJackheaton
December 16, 2025 at 3:45 pm
Elitist