link to original reddit post by /u/Anenome5
First of all, let this be the death of people calling Musk in any way a libertarian figure.
Second of all, here is the robot concept, which is literally just a render in a slideshow with no actual hardware shown at all, just Musk they'll be able to complete it next year some time.
https://electrek.co/2021/08/19/tesla-bot-humanoid-robot/
Here is a synopsis video of the event in just a couple minutes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VsbgCPOW1HQ
Musk then goes on to say that the economy is at root about labor (ugh), and that one day manual labor will be an optional thing. Now on that last score he's right, because robotics will eventually be able to do all manual labor jobs, but that does not mean that all work in the economy is manual labor. And it sure as hell does not mean that we need UBI.
He thinks these robots (likely vaporware for several years) will be able to do things like use a wrench to change a tire, or go to the store and buy X groceries (would you tell a $100k robot to go to the store alone).
What's more, the economy is already highly mechanized. We all don't do repetitive manufacturing work, only high variable work in factories where humans excel and robots do not. But Musk assumes that AI will soon become powerful enough to change that.
And let's say he's right about that. If you're a business owner, do you hire a human being for say $3000 that month, or do you outlay $100k for a machine that can maybe do it as well as a human being but probably not.
Machines aren't going into people's homes on day one, they are trickling down from the top. If you have a robot, you want it to help do the most valuable work in the economy. That's why we have machines that help with brain surgery, and expert AI systems that help doctors perform diagnoses.
As for UBI, it's nothing more than a welfare scheme and completely incompatible with a democracy. Obviously such a program would be VERY politically popular, the masses never vote away free money, they will instead vote for billions and billions more:
The problem is that the program must be financed somehow. Let us assume for simplicity that there are 250 million adult Americans and that each of them would receive $1,000 monthly (as presidential candidate Andrew Yang proposes). So we get a total cost of $250 billion monthly and $3 trillion annually. It would amount to about 14 percent of US GDP, or 42 percent of total government spending, or 73 percent of the federal outlays. For comparison, this is more than the total expenditure on health care, defense, and education. And yet we are talking about “just” $12,000 annually (or 19 percent of the median household salary, or 36 percent of the median personal income). Good luck with such an expensive program!
https://mises.org/wire/hidden-costs-universal-basic-income
No one doubts that robots, software, and automation eliminate some need for human labor where adopted. But the automation doomers' scenario assumes that when jobs are eliminated by automation in one place, that number of jobs are permanently gone. For this to be true, there would have to be no compensating growth in the need for labor elsewhere.
These two arguments turn out to be related through Say’s law. This is the name we give to the observation that when a producer supplies a good, their action constitutes a demand for a different noncompeting good.
The UBI advocates are correct that some jobs are replaced when capital goods do the work that was done by labor. Robots are a capital good. If the same amount of output can be produced by a mix of more robots and fewer people, an industry will not offer as much employment as before. Does it follow that when one industry uses fewer workers there is no need for their services anywhere else?
https://mises.org/wire/guaranteed-basic-income-solution-robots-taking-our-jobs