- Some tech leaders have advocated for universal basic income to combat the automation of jobs by AI.
- Silicon Valley luminaries such as Elon Musk and Sam Altman have long supported the idea.
- Experts say UBI and fair use of AI data will be crucial to mitigating economic inequality.
The tech industry has big plans for an AI utopia, and as models become more advanced, some tech leaders are calling for a sort of universal basic income.
UBI is a project that prominent Silicon Valley leaders, including Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, have been working on for years, but the shift to UBI has become increasingly urgent as AI companies race toward artificial general intelligence.
UBI typically refers to regular cash payments to every adult in the population, regardless of wealth or employment status, and without restrictions. How to spend money.
Matthew Johnson, a public policy professor at Northumbria University, told Business Insider that there has always been a connection between technology and UBI.
“This technology is popular because they realize that many people will lose stable jobs as a result of the technological developments they are pursuing,” he said. “There is clearly a business incentive to fire those employees and replace them with technology that doesn't cost them a salary.”
Making AI work for everyone
Many people developing AI believe that a basic income system could help mitigate the negative impact of AI on workers.
People like Musk have been supporting the concept since at least 2016.
In an interview at the VivaTech conference in Paris in May, he said a “beneficial scenario” for AI developments would see everyone lose their jobs, but “everyone would have high incomes.”
These concerns have also been expressed by some of AI's early founders, the so-called “AI godfathers”, including Geoffrey Hinton, who recently told BBC Newsnight that governments need to offer a basic income to address the impact of AI on inequality.
Sam Altman, who runs one of the leading companies in the race towards AGI, has also been a long-time proponent of UBI. Recently, the OpenAI CEO also floated the idea of so-called “universal basic computing.”
Johnson said tech industry leaders are essentially trying to fix the real-world impact of the technological developments they're investing in.
He added that part of the push for a UBI stems from “concern about the broader societal impacts of their own activities” and worries that their companies might not be able to survive if society faces widespread unemployment.
Avoiding a dystopian future
Scott Santens, a leading advocate of universal basic income, told BI that he first became interested in the concept from a technology perspective.
While studying the future of work and the impact of technology on the labor market, Santens became interested in finding ways to use technology to benefit everyone.
“My question was, rather than some dystopian future where there's a rich few and a lot of poor, what is a realistic way to make technology work for all of us? That idea got me interested in basic income,” he said.
“We've been affected by automation since at least the 1970s,” Santens says. “When computerization started, wages didn't increase in the same way that productivity did.”
For prominent tech figures, supporting the concept of basic income also has a PR component, he said.
“It's a total lie to say that technology has no impact on employment at all,” Santens said, meaning leaders need to offer solutions that compensate for the potential decline in demand for human labor.
Altman, for example, has poured money into basic income research: He raised $60 million for one of the largest basic income experiments, $14 million of which was his own money.
In the experiment, low-income participants were given $1,000 a month, no strings attached, for three years. The study found that recipients spent most of their extra money on basic necessities like rent, transportation, and food. They also stayed in the labor force, although they worked fewer hours on average, and were more cautious about job hunting than the control group.
Slice of pie
When it comes to AI, there is another argument for benefit sharing.
An AI model is only as good as the data used to train it, and this has proven to be a thorny issue for companies like OpenAI.
Altman's company and others have been embroiled in a number of legal battles over the right to use copyrighted content free of charge for training data for large-scale language models (LLMs). (OpenAI has a deal with Axel Springer that allows ChatGPT to summarize and answer user queries based on curated content from other media outlets, such as BI and Politico.)
Whether legal or not, most AI models are likely trained on content collected from the internet, some of which belongs to the creators and companies.
“We created the data for AI, so we should all benefit from it,” Santens said.
Shared LLM
Altman proposes the idea of sharing the computing power of large-scale language models as another form of basic income.
“Anyone can get some of the computing power of GPT-7,” he said on the “All-In” podcast in May. “Anyone can use it, anyone can resell it, anyone can donate it to somebody for cancer research.”
The idea is that as AI becomes more advanced and integrated into more aspects of our lives, owning units of future large-scale language models could become more valuable than money.
Anna Yerizarova, project leader at the Future of Life Institute, said tech companies are in talks about sharing access to AI models.
“A lot of the discussion so far has been about access to computing and access to the models themselves, so this is a great start,” she said.
“But if we do have AI technologies that can really replace human knowledge labor on a large scale, we're going to have to think about new approaches to ensure that the economic benefits are really evenly distributed.”
