Tech CEOs Call for a Universal Basic Income. But What are the Alternatives? (yahoo.com)
- Reference: 0183346058
- News link: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/26/05/23/055224/tech-ceos-call-for-a-universal-basic-income-but-what-are-the-alternatives
- Source link: https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/ai-leaders-see-mass-job-loss-coming-they-want-governments-help-solving-it-124114646.html
> Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has called for similar public-relief measures, including, potentially, universal basic income, or UBI. Eventually "our current economic setup will no longer make sense," he wrote in a blog post, adding that "there will be a need for a broader societal conversation about how the economy should be organized."
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> Though OpenAI CEO Sam Altman once championed universal basic income, he has since embraced a new structure where the public has "collective ownership" of aspects of AI, [2]according to Business Insider . "I think any version of the future that I can get really excited about means that everybody's got to participate in the upside," he said in a recent podcast interview. In April, OpenAI laid out a set of policy proposals aiming to address the coming upheaval, referencing the transition to the industrial age and the New Deal as points of comparison for what's on the horizon...
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> But some experts question whether tech billionaires, who spent decades resisting regulation, unions and higher taxes, would support the kind of massive redistribution such programs would require. "The only way to pay for UBI is to massively tax those enormously rich people who own the UBI machines," said Jesse Rothstein, a professor of public policy and economics at the University of California at Berkeley who served as chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor. "It's a nice surprise to hear Elon Musk advocating for that...." Rothstein co-authored a study in 2019 that estimated granting a small income to the entire country would cost a massive amount — nearly double the total spending of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. To issue payments of $12,000 a year to U.S. adults, for example, "would require nearly doubling federal tax revenues," according to the paper...
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> Economists appear to broadly support other solutions beyond redistribution, such as job retraining. A working paper published this spring by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago showed economists support more narrowly tailored solutions to the economic disruption. In late April, Meta appeared to embrace that path, announcing "a multi-year initiative that provides free, rapid training to turn thousands of Americans with no prior experience into high-paid fiber technicians" for projects including data centers.
Key quotes from the article:
Elon Musk said in an X post that "Universal HIGH INCOME via checks issued by the Federal government is the best way to deal with unemployment caused by AI."
"I think it's a marketing tactic" responded Scott Santens, a universal basic income advocate and is CEO of the nonprofit Income to Support All Foundation. He argued to the Washington Post that Musk's comment is "trying to thread this needle of, 'I want to solve this stuff that will potentially put a lot of people out of work.' And how do you avoid people getting really [angry] at that? Okay, well, you're still going to get money, everything will be great it's just you won't have to work anymore...."
The article also cites a [3]recent commentary from Jay W. Richards, a senior research fellow and VP of social and domestic policy at the Heritage Foundation. "The new AI prophets of doom suffer from a failure of imagination. They simply cannot envision what work the future will bring, so they conclude it will bring none,"
[1] https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/ai-leaders-see-mass-job-loss-coming-they-want-governments-help-solving-it-124114646.html
[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/sam-altman-ubi-universal-basic-income-view-changes-2026-4
[3] https://www.heritage.org/markets-and-finance/commentary/why-universal-basic-income-still-bad-idea
It's a scary future (Score:2)
We are in an economic system based on ownership, with an ever-shrinking group of people owning an ever-growing percentage of things and making everyone else rent from them.
As labor is replaced by AI and robots, more and more people will exist who are not needed in this economic model, and while there's no need for a few people to own everything... they're not going to give it up.
UBI is a stop-gap. It still leaves a small hereditary capital class in control, because they will be the ones in charge of who ge
Re: It's a scary future (Score:3)
If feels like that, I agree. But if you actually look at the history, we will be fine in the long run. Look at the history of wealth in the US. Musk, Zuckerberg, Altman and that crowd are currently riding high, but in the US, extreme wealth almost never transfers past the second generation. Its quite different in Europe, where the wealthiest families have had the same surname for centuries. Musks wealth will certainly transfer to his kids (85 of them), but if they dont have the same mojo, most of it will qu
Re: (Score:2)
> Musks wealth will certainly transfer to his kids (85 of them)
I assume that's a projected figure, but I suppose it could be that high already. Haven't really been paying attention.
Re: It's a scary future (Score:2)
Extreme wealth transfers to immortal corporate entities frequently enough. 100 years from now there will still be a Meta and Alphabet. Or a company that acquired them both.
The Fine Details (Score:3)
AI CEOs love grandstanding about universal basic income to ‘offset’ the jobs their tech is vaporizing, but they’re conveniently silent on where the actual dollars come from once the human tax base is gone. Print more money? Good luck with that hyperinflation party. Tax the AI instead? Sure—except now every instance gets valued and levied exactly like an employed human, turning your silicon savior into a fiscal equivalent of the worker it replaced. Congrats, geniuses: you’ve just made AI ‘cost’ as much as it ‘saves.’ Who’s really getting UBI’d here—the displaced coders or the trillion-dollar models?
Re: (Score:3)
Company scrip. You'll swear fealty to a Tech Bro, and in return you'll get scrip you can spend on whatever their empire produces. They will control what is available and how much of it you can have.
They want to be gods on Earth.
Eventually, they're going to realize they don't need 8 billion people consuming energy and resources when they can sustain their lifestyle with a few thousand people and a few billion robots, and then things get very sad for a while.
Re: (Score:2)
Does Musk or Altman really need trillions of $$? How long would that last if you took the top $990 billion and used it to fund UBI? Maybe all the money stored in offshore banks could be used to help fund it.
If something like UBI isn't figured out, there won't be a point to the economy... AI takes over all jobs, AI-controlled factory makes widget, AI-controlled truck delivers widgets to store, nobody can afford widget anymore, what's the point of factory making widget? AI outfits can't make money, the own
Re: (Score:2)
We have recently been acutely aware that billionaires do not think or care about the welfare of ordinary people. So why would they want UBI for them? I can assure you, it's not out of kindness.
Sure, they *SAY* that they care, but we already know that they do not.
My response to their request for UBI would be to ask how many workers they expect to lose to AI, and ask what the average salary is of those workers. Then, add 25% (because, you know, billionaire CEOs are also liars), Multiply, and then tax the co
Bad For Us (Score:2)
If billionaires want something for us, it is most certainly bad for us. The whole notion of a universal income is the stupidest idea in the entire history of stupid ideas. If you think you are a replaceable cog in our current economic system, you haven't given any thought to how much more replaceable you are when your income is dictated by Government.
The AI bubble will deflate (or suddenly pop) at some point, and we will be close to where we were when this whole insanity began. The technology won't go away
Re: (Score:3)
You can tell the one they quoted in the summary is full of crap because he's concocted this new phrase "universal HIGH INCOME" (his capitals). Dude sounds like your average scammer with guaranteed returns who's going to make you rich. It also shows how completely out-of-touch he is. People want a roof over their heads, a sensible vehicle, clean edible food, a decent school for their kids. The one who cares about "HIGH INCOME" is the tech bro.
What's attractive about UBI is that it preserves as much as possib
Re: (Score:3)
The whole notion of a universal income is the stupidest idea in the entire history of stupid ideas.
It is not. The main arguments "against" it are ones based on misunderstanding of what it is. Viz:
when your income is dictated by Government.
My man, what do you think UBI actually IS?
The only way the government dictates your income under UBI is if you have none, which is exactly how it is now.
With UBI you get a fixed income from the government regardless of any other income you may or may not make. The idea is
Re: (Score:2)
Look at car factories... did they go back to employing more people after the robot arms/automation failed?
The AI crap isn't going to go away... they'll keep refining it until it's perfect.
Economic Crash (Score:2, Interesting)
The entire economy is currently in a crashed state. Money printing went out of control, home compute is becoming unaffordable, no one wants any of these AI data centers, none of your OpenAI/Anthropic subscriptions even remotely cover the runtime cost of compute, much less the sunk cost of the infrastructure. It's all been run into the ground and we're all going through the motions like everything is fine. There was a term coined for continuing on in a collapse during the Soviet era: Hypernormalization.
We
Re: (Score:3)
> Universal basic income only makes sense if there is zero resource scarcity.
This isn't true. All you need is a lot more people than there is work for them to do for it to make sense. We're well past that, and very far into make work for the sake of employment. That's waste, i.e. inefficiency, and therefore worse than UBI because it requires resource consumption to maintain.
> Universal Basic Income creates a permanent class tied to government gibs. It will be nothing like Star Trek and a whole lot more like The Expanse.
This is quite possibly true. If we don't learn to work together and control our government rather than having it controlling us, then UBI won't really make things better. It will only change how we are oppressed.
Re: (Score:2)
> The entire economy is currently in a crashed state.
Errr no, quite the opposite. It is in a bubble pre-crashed. Tell me did you line up for food stamps yesterday? Economic crashes come with wide spread hardships. Yeah fuel prices are high, but beyond that we haven't experienced a crash yet. Aside from a few tech job losses, unemployment is fine, purchasing power is down, but it's only moved a small portion of the population into poverty.
You clearly haven't seen a proper economic crash yet if you think you're in one right now. *checks S&P500* Yep everyone
Yep, "marketing tactic" it is. (Score:2)
Assholes like Musk will never be willing to pay more taxes for something like this. People like him can never get enough. Hence he and others try to keep people quiet with "you will be cared for" until it becomes impossible to hide that this is a lie, but it will be too late to really do anything.
Re: (Score:2)
Exactly... if the super-rich won't fund something like UBI, the majority of people die off, and without any births, humanity goes extinct.
They don't have to be willing to be taxed more (or pay taxes for the first time), just send some heavy hitters and take his vaults of cash.
Translation (Score:2)
> he has since embraced a new structure where the public has "collective ownership" of aspects of AI,
What he means is that he's "borrowed" too much money from VCs, and now he hopes the government will give him money.
UBI doesn't work (Score:3)
You can't just give people money. Pay attention to the people who are telling you to do UBI. None of these people are your friends and they are limitlessly greedy and all want to be trillionaires they're not just going to give you free money. You should be already suspecting some of the thing based on the kind of people who keep talking about UBI.. The problem isn't complicated. If I give you money but I own all the businesses where you have to shop I can just raise my prices until I get all that money right back. Then I can cut all the other government services and all the other regulations and then tell voters that your intense poverty and inability to feed and clothe yourself is your own damn fault because we gave you UBI. Now if there was competition that would lower prices but there is none because while you are distracted by Ubi as a possible solution they were busy taking over the courts and eliminating all antitrust law enforcement. So any attempt to compete with their businesses just gets crushed exactly the way it was in the 1900s before we had antitrust law. Google chesterton's fence.
The only way out of this is to have a society that lets people who are effectively useless due to automation have food and shelter and healthcare and transportation and entertainment and it all has to be at least pretty nice. No you can't just shove them all into ghettos like we do with Palestine.
The problem is that doesn't feel fair or right. Why does your ass have to get up at 6:00 in the morning and drag your ass into work. It's especially bad because the people who are going to get to stay home and play Xbox get to do that specifically because they are unskilled, stupid and useless.
And no we can't just make them all plumbers. Even if we somehow started building infrastructure again via the government like we used to we just don't need that many fucking plumbers or electricians or whatever. At best if we transformed our electrical grid and our transportation's Network we might buy 10 or 20 years before the automation wave devours us.
So realistically this is what's going to happen. You're going to keep voting for right wing candidates until we are a fascist world because it's unfair that you have to go to work and somebody else doesn't. Sooner or later you're going to have a huge population of the dispossessed and they're going to put a religious lunatic in charge of the nuclear arsenals which will be fully functional and maintained because we will have poured a bunch of money into doing that as part of a big nationalistic push like fascist Nations do.
And then the religious lunatics in charge of the theocracy that your votes created are going to launch nukes with the full expectation that a combination of their golden dome and their God will protect them. It will not. And then that's it no more human race.
This is the answer to the Fermi paradox. Species cannot overcome the feeling of unfairness and we develop nuclear weapons before we get over that.
I'm open to alternatives but I do not see a way around this fundamental Gap in human cognition.
Re: (Score:2)
Once AI takes all the jobs, we're all unskilled because unless you got your foot in the door when AI started, you're screwed.
As for the nukes, we'll put an AI in charge of them (WarGames).
Voting for right-wing candidates only is what caused all this? We've been heading ever increasingly fast towards this regardless of who was the Butt In Chair. Also, we don't vote the President or Vice President in... that's the Electoral College that takes care of that chore.
I do fail to see what theology has to do with
Not needed (Score:2)
The AI human drones continue to overestimate how AI is going to affect jobs. They will not be firing more than 5% and they will be generating more than that number of jobs in hardware production. Just ask Dell about how many chips they are selling to the AI people.
Humans brains are expensive (approximately 1/2 a million to raise to 18 years old) but the equivalent in chips costs multiple millions.
We are cheaper than the machines.
Re: (Score:2)
I agree, but the problem is the decision makers have already fired far more than that on the hopes of AI making them money .... and to pay for the AI spending ... and future intended AI spending.
All without evidence of any of it paying off.
Once they've wrecked the companies they won't be in a position to hire anyone back.
Great idea in theory (Score:2)
In practice, the details are tricky and details matter.
We need to stop implementing policy open-loop, based on guesses of what the outcome will be.
We need a more accurate economic model that predicts the real world effects of policy changes.
Along with that, we need a procedure in place to measure the effects of policy changes and adjust as necessary.
UBI is the wrong answer. (Score:2)
It's simple and self serving, the correct historical answer is to redistribute a shrinking amount of work over the entire workforce, ie a shorter workweek. UBI will create permanent poverty level while maximizing billionaire income.
[1]https://www.scry.llc/2025/01/2... [scry.llc]
Many of these tech CEOs are more ruthless than intelligent. See workweek history here...
[2]https://www.scry.llc/2024/12/2... [scry.llc]
[1] https://www.scry.llc/2025/01/27/equilibrium/
[2] https://www.scry.llc/2024/12/27/work-week/
lower full time to 32-35 hours an week and add an (Score:2)
lower full time to 32-35 hours an week and add an X2 or more OT level.
Other options: gift, exchange, planned economies (Score:2)
As I wrote about in 2010: [1]https://pdfernhout.net/beyond-... [pdfernhout.net]
"This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a
[1] https://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
How is that different than what President Slush Fund is doing for his band of traitors?