How about you give them a wife and kids to take care of at the same time. Life would feel pretty pointless if I was only working to support myself

I don't know how you've managed it but you've managed to invent toxic-domestication, The idea that someone's life can't be worth living unless they are working. I don't know maybe you're young but when you get to your 40s you begin to realise that actually what you really want out of life is just to be left alone, you really aren't craving notoriety. If you can just sit in the hobby room and build airfix models or whatever then go to the pub, for the next 40 years you'd be happy.

I really don't know why you're arguing about this because there have been actual experiments where people have been given UBI and pretty much everyone ends up just going and doing their own stuff. I've never heard of anyone complaining about being given free money.

Everyone defines themselves by their role

I don't and I bet many people don't as well. I define myself by what I know, who I know, what I believe, like and dislike, have done and can do. Roles can be assigned, but they only serve as oversimplifications of what's expected of people. The role of "mother" only means that a woman has one or more children. Whether said children are blood related, adopted, whether she's a "good" or "bad" mother, whether she's married, widow, single, etc etc, is up in the air.

Your second argument there doesn't need roles to be answered either, or do you think only specific roles can help people? Life isn't an RPG with clear-cut classes

You're so right, how can I find meaning without making somebody else's money for them? Woe is me...

It's not about making money, it's about contributing to society, supporting your family. Being useful

If we did UBI today, then yeah, I see people finding roles for themselves in society that aren't measured by dollars. I mean if we live in a world where AI has replaced not just coding jobs but has basically replaced all jobs. Cooking, cleaning, factories, farming, etc.

I dont see a point in such a world. What am I contributing? Not to my employer; what am I contributing to my family? What is my job if not to provide for my family?

It helps write emails and reviews and edits resumes. I have very little other use for it.

It is much more nefarious than that. It is disingenous and misleading, on purpose. These AI techbros are going to use whatever means it takes in order to spread their minddeleting slop.

hope you proofread those emails, least you send part of a romance novel that the AI hallucinated into being.

It also helps with tons of complex tasks in the sciences like finding new protein folding algorithms.

I think people would find new ways to struggle that they actually enjoy and would likely end up contributing. Imagine a couple of thousand people with their new modest but stress free budgets decide to join a yearly potato cannon contest, Sure its not going to invent anything new directly but you now have a bunch of people learning about ballistics and stoichiometry and high pressure engineering all egging eachother on to shoot that potato further. The competition gets more and more fierce and with the much lower stakes people start trying some more out there ideas, before you know it you have a modest but highly effective solution to reliably obtaining the correct gas mixture for something like a combined light gas gun.

And that's a deliberately silly example, you'd get a ton more art, people deciding to be athletes, coders, all sorts of hobies that can encourage healthy competition and often benefit society in surprising ways.

Art and Coding would be seen as quaint in a world where AI can produce more of it faster and better than a human ever hoped. You'd know in the back of your mind that what you are doing is pointless

Only because you're only reading the comment at face value. Humans existentially require roles. Sometimes that role is caregiver, sometimes it's parent, and sometimes it's fireman or garbage truck driver. If we live in a world where machines can do everything better than humans, what is the point of a human? If a robot does all the work around the house and cooks and cleans and I get a check for a few thousand every month, what am I contributing to my family? If I'm not a provider, what am I?

And you can say this is some kind of capitalist indoctrination but I sincerely believe this is biology. Men, especially, define themselves by their ability to contribute to their families or to society. Men are impacted more heavily by layoffs than women are, for example. When a man loses his job he's likely to fall into a depressive malaise of self pity and feelings of uselessness.

That right there is the problem with this discussion. They're not even remotely similar technologies.

The ones doing protein folding are specialised limited capability AI. They are absolutely useful and very good at their jobs, but they are not the kind of AI that the public are using.

The public are using large language models and Diffusion-Based image generators. Not the narrow AI that you're talking about.

Those can be sent to me.

AI is a superset of transformers which is then a superset of LLM’s. I think I’m making the same point as you, that in the broader sense “AI” can be useful.