Until I read this I was more or less pro-UBI but this article makes some excellent points.
UBI essentially assumes that everyone is a rational actor and that they will not succumb to spending the basic income on non-productive things (drugs, alcohol, gambling, excessively expensive consumables, etc). This is demonstrably false, especially if individuals don't have a day job. On an individual level it's easy to say that people should be responsible for their own wellbeing. But as a matter of public policy, it's just plain bad policy.
It's also hard to see how that money would /not/ be extracted in the form of higher prices across the board.
And the main point of the article is a very good one: what happens to all the now-unskilled labour?
After a quick look at the code (I'm probably missing subtleties):
The "state" array stores the state of the cells in the life simulation in the lowest bit of each int in the array. The rest of the bits are used to store the count of the current generation for that cell.
Each thread can then examine cells independently and determine whether there's enough information in the cell's neighbours (taking generations into account) to update the cell's state (and increment the generation).
The trick is that even though the threads could be reading and writing the same cells at the same time, they will only ever write the same thing and so it doesn't matter.
The holographic principle proposes a much more complex relationship between the 3 dimensional (plus 1 time dimension) universe we experience and a 2 dimensional (plus 1 time dimension) model that could provide insights into many interesting areas of physics including QFT, Cosmology, Black Holes, etc.
These are all excellent points and we should definitely be pursuing all available avenues. I don't think this is and either/or proposition - we should look into anything that can help.
Things like genome therapy are unfortunately a long way off so we need to look for antibiotics in the meantime.
UBI essentially assumes that everyone is a rational actor and that they will not succumb to spending the basic income on non-productive things (drugs, alcohol, gambling, excessively expensive consumables, etc). This is demonstrably false, especially if individuals don't have a day job. On an individual level it's easy to say that people should be responsible for their own wellbeing. But as a matter of public policy, it's just plain bad policy.
It's also hard to see how that money would /not/ be extracted in the form of higher prices across the board.
And the main point of the article is a very good one: what happens to all the now-unskilled labour?