#84 - Scott Santens | Money for Nothing? The Truth About Universal / Unconditional Basic Income (UBI)
Summary: Scott Santens is a writer and advocate of basic income for all; Citizen of Earth and New Orleans; Bachelor of Science in Psychology; Moderator of the /r/BasicIncome community on Reddit; Founder of the BIG Patreon Creator Pledge, and overall a great Human 2.0! <br><br>Check out Scott's auto-bio here: <br><br>ou may also know me as "2noame", or as "that basic income guy from the Atlantic article talking about fish", or "that guy on Huffington Post warning about the effects of self-driving trucks in an America without a basic income already in place", or that speaker who presented about the need for basic income at the first World Summit on Technological Unemployment, or that guy who talked about basic income with Nick Hanauer at Brookings. Basically, if you're spent any amount of time looking into the idea of an unconditional basic income, there's a good chance you've read something I've written.<br><br>I'm a writer and now increasingly an activist spending as much time and resources I have working to spread awareness for the idea of a unconditional basic income (UBI) - one whose time has come here in the 21st century where technology is now forcing our hand. Without an income platform set just above the poverty level as a bare minimum, I believe poverty and inequality will continue to grow, the middle classes will continue to shrink, and the livelihoods of all but the top fifth of society will continue to slip away. But it doesn't have to be that way. We're better than that. We can turn all of this on its head, and instead of things continuing to get worse, we can make things better than they've ever been. We can reduce risk and so propel innovation and creativity to new heights. We can reduce fears of unemployment and purposely eliminate low-skill jobs better performed by machines, freeing us to intrinsically do all the work that drives us. We can stop wasting so many resources on fighting the fires of our lives, and instead prevent them from ever lighting in the first place. We need only make the choice. The path is ours to take.<br><br>Starting in 2013, my most popular article I'd written about basic income became was "Why Should We Support the Idea of an Unconditional Basic Income?" It made Medium's Top 100 in June 2014, but it was surpassed by my article, "Self-Driving Trucks Are Going to Hit Us Like a Human-Driven Truck," in 2015 which was republished across multiple media outlets and has likely altogether garnered over 1 million views. In 2016, my article, "Deep Learning is Going to Teach Us All the Lesson of Our Lives: Jobs are for Machines," garnered over half a million views on Medium and was published in the Sunday edition of the Boston Globe. In 2017, my most read article was "The Real Story of Automation Beginning with One Simple Chart." When not writing articles related to basic income, I am further researching the idea, and reading and writing comments as a moderator of the basic income community on Reddit - (/r/BasicIncome), where I've helped grow the community from the less than 2,000 subscribers it had when I joined, to over 50,000 today. I do what I can there to help make it a central place for discussion and learning in hopes of gradually gaining momentum for the social movement it will require to eventually be realized. I also run multiple social media accounts in support of basic income: @BasicIncome, Basic Income on Facebook, @rBasicIncome, rBasicIncome on Facebook, and help with the social media outreach of the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN), the U.S. Basic Income Guarantee Network (USBIG), and now Manna. One of my larger projects in 2014 was helping to organize a week-long series of Q&As; on Reddit (there known as AMAs) for International Basic Income Week with prominent proponents of basic income from all over the world. I repeated this in 2015 with another series of AMAs.<br><br>Since joining Patreon, I have started my own blog focused on answering frequently asked basic...
