Elon Musk, Sam Altman and others are pushing for UBI. Will 'Freedom Dividends' Replace Paychecks?
Industry leaders such as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and AI “godfather” Geoffrey Hinton have warned that AI could eliminate jobs – and consequently widen the gap between rich and poor. They, along with other tech leaders, support an unconditional basic income (UBI) as a remedy.
In recent years, the concept of states implementing a UBI has gone from a niche topic in tech circles to mainstream public debate, thanks in part to former US presidential candidate Andrew Yang, who in 2020 made UBI the centerpiece of his agenda.
Yang campaigned around the so-called freedom dividends.
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This is how he determined monthly payments of PLN 1,000. hole. for all American adults, without any conditions. The idea was met with skepticism, and Yang's candidacy quickly fizzled out. Following the success of the pandemic stimulus checks, and now with the rise of AI, this idea has gained renewed interest.
Guaranteed Basic Income, which is similar to UBI but targeted at specific groups of people for a set period of time, has been tested more than 100 times across the country. The United States has basic income programs in 16 states and Washington (DC) that provide cash to residents — with no strings attached.
However, the movement towards basic income programs is not without its critics. Some argue that they may discourage beneficiaries from working or even encourage irresponsible spending. Others point out that the costs of such programs could lead to tax increases or cuts to local government budgets.
For now, however, AI leaders believe it is the best option to mitigate the negative economic impacts this technology may bring. Here's what some of the most important figures in the AI world are saying about UBI.
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Sam Altman
Altman has long been a vocal supporter of an unconditional basic income.
The results of his UBI study were published in July. The project, launched in 2019, was carried out by the nonprofit research laboratory OpenResearch, and OpenAI allocated $60 million to it. — 14 million of which came from Altman's private funds.
As part of the study, 3,000 people received payments. residents of cities, suburbs and rural areas in Texas and Illinois whose annual income did not exceed $28,000. hole. One third of the participants received PLN 1,000. hole. per month for three years, while the rest received $50. monthly.
The study showed that people receiving PLN 1,000 hole. they increased their overall spending by an average of $310 per month, with most of that money spent on food, rent and transportation.
“We see significant reductions in stress, mental health problems, and food insecurity in the first year, but these effects disappear in the second and third years of the program,” the report said, adding: “Cash alone cannot solve problems such as chronic diseases, lack of childcare or high housing costs.”
However, this is not Altman's only UBI-related venture. He is also the co-founder of the futuristic cryptocurrency startup Worldcoin, which aims to build the world's largest encrypted identity network by scanning people's irises with a device the size of a baseball. According to the founders, one of the potential functions of this technology could be to create an infrastructure for UBI payments.
As OpenAI develops increasingly powerful underlying models, Altman also suggested that rationing computing power among individuals could be more economically efficient than handing out cash. He floated the idea of ”universal basic computing power,” in which people would be given a “chunk” of the computing resources of a company's large language models to use however they wanted.
Elon Musk
Musk is a strong supporter of UBI.
The world's richest man claimed that an unconditional basic income could give people more freedom with their time and money and that AI would increase the amount of UBI they would receive.
Musk imagines a near future in which AI and robots provide universal prosperity, keep people out of work, and even make money irrelevant.
“There will be no poverty in the future, so there will be no need to save money,” Musk wrote on the X platform in December.
In January, on the “Moonshots with Peter Diamandis” podcast, Musk promoted the idea of something like a universal high income.
“A good future is one where everyone can have everything they want,” Musk said. This would mean “better health care than anyone has today, available to all within five years.”
He also added: – There will be no shortage of goods and services. You will be able to learn everything about everything for free.
Vinod Khosla
Khosla believes that advances in AI will lead to job losses by automating most human work, and UBI will become a necessary safety net.
“As AI reduces the need for human labor, UBI may become crucial, and governments will play an essential role in regulating the impact of AI and ensuring a fair distribution of wealth,” Khosla wrote in September 2024 on the website of his company Khosla Ventures.
Unlike the Internet or cell phones, which supported workers, AI, he wrote, “augments and multiplies the human brain in the same way that steam and electric engines amplified muscle power.” In other words, it suggests that in the age of AI, people will be too slow and too expensive to participate meaningfully in the labor market.
Dario Amodei
Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, said UBI is the bare minimum that can be done to mitigate the effects of AI.
“Civilization has already successfully undergone great economic changes: from gathering to agriculture, from agriculture to feudalism, and from feudalism to industrialism. I suspect something new and weirder will be needed – something that no one can clearly imagine today. “It could be as simple as a high unconditional basic income for all, although I think that will only be a small part of the solution,” he wrote in an October 2024 essay on his blog.
According to Amodei, AI will change the world so fundamentally that we will have to think about more comprehensive ways to fight inequality.
Andrew Yang
Even before AI took the world by storm, Yang — an entrepreneur and lobbyist — was a supporter of an unconditional basic income. He supported the payment of PLN 2,000. hole. monthly to all Americans for the duration of the pandemic.
In an interview with Business Insider in June 2020, several months after the end of his presidential campaign, Yang said he was “confident that unconditional basic income is the future of our country.”
Geoffrey Hinton
Hinton, the “godfather” of AI, expressed concerns about the consequences of the development of artificial intelligence.
He spoke about his fears of job losses caused by AI and advised the UK government to adopt an unconditional basic income as a solution.
Demis Hassabis
Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis also supports the idea of universal high income.
In July, during the SXSW conference in London, he said that AI will generate enormous wealth and that we will have to come up with ways to distribute it.
“We may need something like a universal high income or some other way of sharing all the additional productivity that AI will bring to the economy,” he said.
The above text is a translation from American edition of Business Insider
