The need for Buddhist Economics?

This article (and the brilliant tagline) are spot on.

One thing that I find troubling from the current AI/job destruction debate is the assumption that jobs will continue to be destroyed at the rate that humans can identify and retrain for the new ones. Given Kurzweil and Diamandis’ obsession with the new exponential rate of change that is sweeping through industry and society, I can’t see how this can be accepted without greater examination. They clearly know this, seeing as they and many tech billionaires are champions of the Universal Basic Income (UBI) concept.

The rise of AI also highlights how our current capitalist framework omits the importance of human quality of life from its calculations. It treats jobs as an inconvenience, whereas any Buddhist could tell you that “right living” is essential for the development of human character.

If we continue discounting the value of a fulfilling job from a happy human life, it will be so much easier to allow jobs to be replaced faster than they can be created. We would then risk falling into a future whereby a handful of billionaires control vast swathes of the economy via AI and robots. Imagine the majority of humanity sitting around on UBI being waited on (and influenced/monitored by) said tech. Absolutely terrifying.

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