The Left-Wing Policy That AI Evangelists Suddenly Love
The robots are coming for our jobs—again. Last month, The New York Times profiled an AI startup called Mechanize, Inc., whose founders were brutally honest about its goals: to automate the entire workforce within the next 30 years. But one of them, Tamay Besiroglu, tried to assuage those who might fear such a future. As tech reporter Kevin Roose wrote, “Mr. Besiroglu said he believed that A.I. would eventually create ‘radical abundance’ and wealth that could be redistributed to laid-off workers, in the form of a universal basic income that would allow them to maintain a high living standard.”
Besiroglu’s assurances about a universal basic income—a policy whereby the government gives everyone in society an equal amount of money—seemed cavalier at best, an easy way to dismiss worries that AI will put millions of people out of work. So I reached out to Besiroglu for comment. He agreed to provide comments, but once I sent him questions, he responded: “I’m sorry, but I’m too busy to engage at this point.”
No matter. He’s hardly the first denizen of Silicon Valley to suggest UBI as a balm for the decimation of the workforce. “I’ve been intrigued by the idea for a while,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote in a 2016 blog post announcing that he would help fund a UBI study (it was conducted in Illinois and Texas and it ended last year). “I’m fairly confident that at some point in the future, as technology continues to eliminate traditional jobs and massive new wealth gets created, we’re going to see some version of this at a national scale.”
Altman’s arch-nemesis has also weighed in on this “necessary” policy idea over the years. Predicting that “there will come a point where no job is needed” because “AI will be able to do everything,” Elon Musk last year said society will have something even better than UBI: “We won’t have universal basic income. We’ll have universal high income. In some sense, it’ll be somewhat of a leveler, an equalizer.”
UBI existed long before AI’s proponents decided to champion it; hundreds of trials have yielded positive results. But the notion that an AI revolution will magically usher in this left-favored policy is relatively new—and utterly misguided. Even if AI creates an age of abundance, as Musk has predicted, there is no guarantee that this vast wealth would be distributed equally in the form of UBI or any other redistributionist policy. Governments must enact UBI, which means it requires widespread political buy-in.
A question, then, for Besiroglu and the rest of UBI’s proponents in the AI industry: Have you looked at what’s happening in Washington, lately?
Americans are already deeply suspicious that AI will have a positive, rather than negative, effect on their lives. They’re right to fear it: A rise in unemployment among new college graduates has been partly blamed on AI, and entry-level jobs may be disappearing in some industries like software engineering. Meanwhile, bosses are using the of AI to scare workers: Last month, Axios reported that managers at some tech companies were warning employees that their jobs could easily be replaced by AI, while also pressuring them to learn to use AI in the workplace.
Trying to motivate employees by fear almost never works, but the truth is that AI is already changing the labor market—and it’s too early to fully fathom how much it may transform not only the economy, but how we live our lives. Even still, for UBI to be a solution to widespread, AI-fueled unemployment would require a massive leap forward in the American welfare state.
So far, UBI has been limited to experiments and demonstration projects in the U.S. and abroad among targeted populations. The incomes usually max out at about $1,000 a month, which is not enough to replace work. “Basic” is right there in the name: UBI would create an income floor that people cannot drop below, but it is not often proposed as a way to replace entire household incomes indefinitely. When touting these programs, proponents usually point to how it helps recipients look for better jobs or go back to school. That is, UBI is a bridge to better work, not an employment replacement.
At the same time, it’s not just cash welfare reborn, because its aim is to have fewer strings attached and be easier to access. “It’s not a net that holds people and keeps them safe,” said Natalie Foster, president and founder of the Economic Security Project. “It is a trampoline where people can have a floor that they cannot fall through and then jump up and live the lives of agency and dignity and live on their own terms, which you can’t do if you’re working hand to mouth, or if you are in deep economic uncertainty, which is what the future holds without bold policy interventions.”
There are conversations we need to have about UBI, separate from its potential as a salve for a labor apocalypse. At the same time, the development of AI requires a discussion about what the industry owes society for the damage it will cause. “AI’s worth is created by all of our all of our data, all of our experiences, so everyone should have an ownership stake in that,” said Michael Tubbs, the former mayor of Stockton, California who ran an AI project in his city—which TNR featured in 2020—and now works with an organization called Mayors for Guaranteed Income. “People who are going to be harmed have to have an ownership stake.”
Who works, how much they work, and how they’re compensated are political questions. Productivity gains over the past several decades have led to benefits for the very richest Americans, but many of us are working harder than ever without seeing gains. If we don’t tackle these issues in the right way, our future will be even more unequal than today, with the tech billionaires further enriched while the rest of us struggle to find new jobs and are encouraged to retrain or work harder. “I’m afraid inequality is likely to continue getting worse,” Dr. Stuart Russell, a professor of computer science at UC Berkeley. “Most of the gains are likely to go to the owners of the technology.” And AI may hit white-collar jobs as severely as blue-collar jobs were pummeled by past technological changes.
For decades, economists and futurists have promised that technology gains will lead to increased leisure—famously, the economist John Maynard Keynes thought his grandkids would work 15 hours a week—and it largely hasn’t come to pass. It’s broadly true that we work less per week than our predecessors, Russell said. “Having said that, we’re certainly not living a life of leisure: as productivity improves, we are consuming a lot more rather than working a lot less.”
“There have been, across generations, people in society who have thought that the future that they wanted to build for the rest of us—who didn’t get asked about the future that we wanted—was one without jobs,” said Dr. Alondra Nelson, a leading scholar who helped draft a Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights under President Joe Biden. “I think what is different about this moment is it has now been paired with the opportunity for people who are promoting that vision of the future...to also make a lot of money.”
Nelson pointed out that if the people developing AI fulfill part of their promises to investors about their products’ capabilities, they will probably sell their companies for untold billions of dollars—so their futures might very well be jobless.
There’s something revealing about the way AI techs speak about work, too, which Nelson finds naive. “It’s as if work is only a kind of burden,” she said. “I know that work fulfills a lot of other roles in our lives. Work is also about how we create community. It’s how we shape our identities, etc. And so to just hand people money … doesn’t solve the sort of question, or the issue of social cohesion and the social connection, the social identities that come with having work.”
That’s a question that few AI evangelists are answering, or even asking. It’s taken as a given that everyone desires a life of full-time leisure, and has passions they would pursue if money weren’t an object—just as it’s assumed that AI, by creating abundance and prosperity like we’ve never seen before, will benefit society as a whole (or even “save the world,” as Marc Andreesen declared).
“If we want better health, if we want better science, better applications in healthcare and climate science and education, none of these things just emerge magically out of an AI system,” Nelson said. Policymakers would need to ensure those outcomes—that is, by passing laws that regulate AI. That’s not in the offing these days. (In fact, the Senate’s version of the Republican budget bill had a provision preventing states from regulating AI for the next ten years, but it was struck in the eleventh hour.)
“Right now, the future of AI is really being shaped by a few powerful tech companies, the same companies that have concentrated their power and wealth since the internet boom, and through their sheer size and force, have been able to move forward with no regulation,” Foster said. “In addition to the social policy needed, it’s also [a question of] the policy needed to deal with these concentrated markets.”
History shows us that new technology tends to create new jobs, rather than simply replacing them with automation. The fight today needs to be about what kinds of jobs AI will create, who will have access to them, and what benefits they will provide to our society broadly. That conversation should include UBI, which may be even more vital if Republicans pass their budget bill, which includes drastic cuts to the safety net.
“I think we need to build the political will to get there, and we need to elect people who have a bold vision for the cost of living crisis, and hold them accountable to enacting that vision,” Foster said. “We have the blueprints for how to do it. We just need the political will.”