Tesla CEO Elon Musk has made no secret of his fantasies about a robot-powered future. He predicted that within the next few decades, the spread of AI and automation will make jobs optional. The need to save for retirement disappears because money ceases to be important. Rather, Musk sees a world in which there are more robots than humans, providing health care and other services to their organic counterparts.
“With robotics and AI, this is truly a path to abundance for everyone,” he said at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, earlier this month. “People often talk about solving global poverty, or essentially, how do we get everyone to have a very high standard of living? I think the only way to achieve this is with AI and robotics.”
Building on OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s proposal for a universal basic income, Musk proposed a universal high income that would normally be given to individuals by governments without conditions.
He has said little else about what this universal income vision will look like, but as AI gains traction in the workplace, other world leaders are also beginning to see it as a viable option to address how automation is disrupting the workforce.
Sir Jason Stockwood, UK Investment Secretary, said: financial times This week, the government announced it was considering introducing a universal basic income as a way to support workers in industries at risk of being displaced by AI. Stockwood, who was appointed to the House of Lords in September 2025, is a long-time technology investor and former CEO of insurance broker Simply Business.
“We’re definitely going to have to think very carefully about how to soft-land industries that are disappearing – some kind of UBI, some kind of lifelong learning mechanism so that people can retrain,” he said.
As well as calling for the reskilling of workers displaced by AI, Stockwood has previously floated the idea of taxing tech companies to fund universal basic income payments.
“While I think about the productivity gains and wealth that AI will create, we also need to think about the more pernicious short-term danger that it will only embed inequality and make a small, ultra-wealthy elite even richer because they control capital and technology,” he explained.
AI changes labor
Predictions about the future of work in a rapidly growing world of automation vary widely. While some CEOs think AI will add new jobs, others are considering a complete overhaul of work as we know it. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned in a blog post published last week that AI will have an “unusually distressing” impact on the labor market.
“AI does not replace specific human jobs, but rather human labor in general,” he wrote.
Massive layoffs are already occurring in the technology world. Amazon confirmed Wednesday that the company is cutting 16,000 jobs, with an additional 14,000 in October 2025, but the company previously said the cuts were not about AI. Morgan Stanley said in a report earlier this week that AI-related job cuts have hit the UK hardest, with net employment falling by 8% over the past 12 months.
Will Universal Basic Income really work?
Universal basic income is not unheard of; there are 163 social welfare pilot programs in place in the United States alone (including 41 active programs), according to the Stanford University Basic Income Institute. Mr. Altman has his own curiosity about the effectiveness of payments, and helped fund a series of experiments on basic universal income from an open research project that began in 2020.
The results of these pilots suggest that providing a series of consistent payments to individuals (usually low-income earners) increases spending on basic needs and spending on other things, and participants continue to have jobs.
Ioana Marinescu, an economist and associate professor of public policy at the University of Pennsylvania, said universal basic income could be a practical solution to addressing job losses due to AI, especially given the uncertainty about how many people will lose their jobs to AI and for how long.
Many people who are currently unemployed rely on unemployment insurance benefits, which are conditional on individuals having a track record of previous employment, he said. These benefits are not guaranteed for people who have been out of work for long periods of time or do not have a long list of previous jobs, especially Gen Z, who may be particularly vulnerable to job automation. Marinescu said an unconditional series of payments from a universal basic income would therefore be an effective safety net for the unemployed. luck.
Marinescu said one positive side effect of taxing tech companies and other companies that benefit from AI is that it will delay the adoption of AI in the workplace. This would reduce the chance of mass layoffs and forced evictions, and give workers more opportunities to find work elsewhere.
But there are risks to rolling out a universal basic income policy, Marinescu suggested. Low-income earners, many of whom are mired in debt and other poverty traps, are able to increase their spending only slightly more than higher-income earners when given these payments. Moreover, as tech billionaires get wealthier, perhaps even universal basic income proponents like Altman and Musk may become less interested in parting with their ballooning wealth.
“Essentially, I’m worried that the people who are benefiting from AI will say after the fact, ‘Well, why do we have to pay for all these people’s problems?'” Marinescu said. “But at this point, we still don’t know exactly who will win and who will lose.”
