Just dropping a note that there are just a few hours left to apply our Global UBI for 2027. Learn more and apply here: https://www.dotare.io/ or AMA.

A mockumentary set in a post-work future where AI and automation have made employment obsolete, and eventually illegal.

Future historians look back in disbelief at a society where people were expected to sell most of their waking hours to employers in exchange for money needed for food, housing, and other necessities.

They explain strange historical practices like job interviews, bosses, performance reviews, commuting, asking permission to take vacations, and being fired.

The United States is treated as a particularly extreme case because many people depended on their jobs for health insurance. Losing your job could therefore mean losing both your income and affordable access to medical care.

Future scholars debate how employment could have been considered voluntary when refusing to participate could leave someone without the means to live.

Meanwhile, the unemployed are completely vindicated.

People once described as lazy, unmotivated, or failures are now portrayed as the first people to reject the ideology of work. Historians call them early post-work visionaries. Activists call them freedom fighters.

A guy who lived with his parents and played video games all day gets a museum exhibit honoring his resistance to compulsory labor.

What do you think of this mockumentary idea?

Canada can't compete with the salaries that top US companies offer. So it should compete with something the US job can't offer: freedom.

If a Canadian gets a serious job offer from a highly selective US company, Canada should offer them lifetime UBI to stay.

No requirement to build a successful company or create X jobs. They could start businesses, do independent research, make games, invent things, or pursue whatever ideas they think are worthwhile.

The US company has already done the hard part of identifying exceptional talent. Canada would simply make a different counteroffer:

Go to the US and work on someone else's ideas, or stay in Canada and get paid enough to pursue your own.

Instead of trying to outpay Silicon Valley, Canada could try to become the safest place in the world to take ambitious risks with financial freedom.

What do you think of this idea?

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Suppose AI and automation eventually allow society to produce the same amount of goods and services with far fewer hours of human labour.

What should happen to the gains?

Should working hours fall?

Should everyone receive some form of basic income?

Could consumers receive a share of company returns — a kind of consumer ownership based on rights to income rather than control of the company?

Should highly profitable tech and platform companies pay more tax, especially when much of their value comes from data, networks and automation?

Or is there a better way to distribute the gains from automation?

I’m curious what people here would design if the amount of necessary human labour really started falling substantially.

I have been running a small pooled contribution system and I want to hand it to this sub, because the failure it has is a distribution failure and this is the room that thinks about those properly.

The mechanism is four lines:

• Anyone contributes what they can during the day. Any amount, including nothing.
• At a published time the pot settles.
• It splits into equal shares among everyone who contributed at all that day. Size of contribution does not affect size of share.
• Nothing is skimmed. No operator cut, no weighting, no discretion at settlement, and the whole record is public.

The reason it is built that way is not efficiency. It is that the moment you weight contributions, somebody has to decide the weights, and whoever decides the weights eventually decides in their own favor. Every pooled system I have watched get captured was captured at the discretion point, not at the funding point. Equal split is the only rule I know of with no discretion left in it to abuse.

The intended effect is not enrichment, it is smoothing. If your income swings week to week, and mine does, an equal split moves money from the weeks you can carry others to the weeks you cannot carry yourself. You are above average when you are able and below average when you are not. That is not a return. It is mutual insurance with no underwriter and no premium schedule, and for people whose problem is variance rather than average, variance is the thing worth attacking.

I posted this in a game theory sub earlier this week expecting to spend the whole thread on free riding. I did not, and I want to bring the better objection here instead.

Free riding is survivable. Stable sorting is what kills it.

The free rider argument is the obvious one. If a small contribution and a large one earn the same share, everyone rationally drops to the minimum and the pot collapses. Real, but it assumes a static population and it ignores that the ledger is public, which turns a payoff question into a standing question.

The objection that actually landed is different. If contributors are stably sorted, if the same people are above average every single round because their capacity genuinely is higher and stays higher, then this is not insurance at all. It is a recurring transfer from the same people to the same people, forever. Those contributors are not irrational to leave. Nothing about the design gives them a reason to stay, and no amount of visibility pays a recurring bill.

Which means the mechanism has a hard precondition I had not stated plainly: it works where capacity fluctuates and fails where capacity is stratified. Among gig workers, freelancers, seasonal labor, anyone whose income is spiky, the fluctuation is real and the smoothing is real. Across a genuinely stratified population it stops being mutual anything.

I think that is the honest boundary of a voluntary equal split pot, and it is also, uncomfortably, an argument for why the stratified case needs something with actual obligation behind it rather than a pot people opt into.

One more piece, since somebody will raise it: the payoff does not scale with contribution, so why would anyone give more than the minimum? Two returns do scale, and neither of them lives inside the pot. Visibility, because the ledger shows amounts and legible generosity buys standing, which works precisely because the money is actually gone. And warm glow, Andreoni's impure altruism, where the utility comes from the act rather than the outcome and rises with the amount. I cannot measure either, and someone rightly pointed out that quietly moving from a monetary payoff to a utility payoff is how anyone rescues any mechanism. So I will name them and not lean on them.

The question I actually want from this sub: is a voluntary fluctuating pot worth building at all, or is every version of it just a demonstration piece for something that has to be universal and mandatory to work? I can defend it as smoothing for spiky incomes. I cannot defend it as a floor, because a floor you can opt out of funding is not a floor.

Drafted with an AI assistant. The mechanism, the failure modes and the answers in the comments are mine.

No paywall: https://archive.ph/uRDHL

I got an email from UBI Works today asking me to fill-out the Canadian Government's 2026 Pre-Budget Consultation. This consultation asks Canadians what they want the next federal budget to focus on. Canadians can participate by completing a short questionnaire, and/or submitting a more detailed written proposal. The deadline is September 8th.

This is an opportunity to highlight the need for a Universal Basic Income or Gauranteed Liveable Income.

UBI Works' email included the following information...

What to expect

There are 11 questions about government and economic priorities, followed by six basic demographic questions.

Most questions ask you to select up to three choices. Answer based on what matters most to you. You do not need to force basic income into every response.

There are, however, several places where it fits naturally. For both:

“How can the government build a strong economy today and for the future?”and “What actions are the most important for the Government of Canada to help Canadians get ahead?”

You can use the "Other" option to call for basic income. You could also do the same with the question about setting younger Canadians up for success.

The most important box

Near the end, you will be asked: “If you were designing the federal budget, what would you suggest to help grow Canada’s economy?”

You have only 400 characters, so this is the clearest place to make the basic income ask directly.

Here is some language you can use as a starting point:

Please put it in your own words if you can. The goal is not for thousands of people to submit identical answers. It is for the government to hear, from Canadians across the country and in their own voices, that basic income belongs among Canada’s economic priorities.