Ask HN: Are free robots a good solution to the wealth gap with AI?
TLDR; a half baked idea to programmatically shrink the wealth gap with AGI, a little luck, and robot credits<p>Sam Altman is considering what to do with the trillions OpenAI is about to profit. Those trillions are coming, and some of his ideas include just giving the money to everyone. He has been experimenting with the UBI concept (universal basic income, have a heartbeat? get a paycheck.) with results of large scale experiments said to be out later this year - a sense of expectations for positive results seems to exist. In other news, the acquisition of a robotics company has sparked the predictions that AGI in human form might be available this christmas season (I drank some of the kool aide)<p>We could see something like buying a car, but a robot instead - monthly payments, similar range of cost&#x2F;quality&#x2F;branding&#x2F;customization&#x2F;registration&#x2F;commercialization&#x2F;insurance&#x2F;abuse&#x2F;murders&#x2F;accidents&#x2F;miracles as we do with people having access to buying a motor vehicle today.<p>The reason to buy a robot would be obvious, you could do something perfect, or longer, or stronger, or multiple times at once.<p>The value of a robot is easily calculated, like a car. A 3 year old model with the burger flipper upgrade costs $60k and earns $15&#x2F;hr 24&#x2F;7 plus it costs $100&#x2F;mnth to run for electric and maintenance so you earn back the cost of $60k in $60k&#x2F;(24 hours * 30 months * $15 hourly rate - $100 monthly maintenance), or 5.5 months until it pays for itself. maybe they will cost more. maybe they dont run 24&#x2F;7. maybe they are slower then humans so they only earn $5&#x2F;hr. maybe the government caps the amount you can earn per hour as a robot. maybe everything works out nicely and we can all do a ton more work then ever before and try all the ideas and create so much value that life is full of wonderful colorful unicorns and cotton candy<p>so, maybe instead of donating money, AGI funds free robots.<p>initially there wouldnt be many, but that would be ok because we could create a system of sharing, with credits.<p>different quality or demand of available robots could be settled by credits. they would have value, you could sell them. you could share them, amongst a family you might expect to be more productive with the shared credits gaining more time or quality access.<p>initial robot sales could be restricted for the next 20 years to any enterprise - they could only use robots available from public pools but they have to buy the credits from us.<p>The pool of robots could be initially funded by OpenAI, and then other companies can add their robots to the pool for competitive profit, credits will be used in a free market style to encourage improvement etc.<p>federal tooling for citizen credit systems and robot registry market places required<p>The market would be neat, robots in odd or difficult locations can adjust their price to be appealing for someone to retrieve them, likewise there can be incentives to return to a specific zone, or charged for the robot to walk back (or call itself an uber) back to a specific docking zone...<p>OpenAI might not be the beneficiary of the AGI windfall, who knows which company is bringing out the win next week at this point, regardless, manufacturing AI could be taxed essentially<p>These ideas combined and add either a low income multiplier, or heavy tax on corporate use of robots, or other ideas and you can adjust credits  with some sort of programmatic distribution of credits UBI fashioned, to ease the transition and raise everyone out of poverty. as more robots become available, and with better ways to measure and monitor the credit multipliers (or whatever mechanism), introduce tiers, limits, programmatically raise the poverty line, and anyone who wants to save&#x2F;work harder is welcome to buy as many robots as they want so while its possible to look at this as a layer of abstraction on top of welfare, or a pivot to UBI that requires a product that doesnt exist (yet)...well, what could go wrong?