universal basic income
In plain wordsA regular cash payment from the government to every adult, with no conditions attached, sometimes proposed as a way to share wealth if AI takes over much paid work.
An income guarantee under which the state pays every individual, rather than every household, a regular cash sum, whether they are rich or poor, working or not, and asks nothing in return. In AI debates it is proposed as a response to technological unemploymenttechnological unemployment, n.: Joblessness caused by machines or software taking over work that people used to be paid for, faster than new kinds of work appear for them. and to the concentration of income from automation among the owners of capital and compute, sometimes funded by taxes on AI firms or a share of their profits. Critics question its cost at meaningful levels, its effects on work incentives and prices, and whether cash can replace the status, structure and bargaining power that employment provides. Pilots have been limited in scale or duration: Finland's 2017–2018 experiment found better wellbeing but little effect on employment, a three-year US study reported in 2024 found that recipients of $1,000 a month worked 1–2 hours a week less, and a 12-year study in Kenya is under way; none tests a permanent, truly universal scheme.
If models do most cognitive work, she argued, universal basic income stops being utopian and becomes infrastructure.
Origin
Precursors include Thomas Paine's proposal of a universal endowment in Agrarian Justice (1797) and mid-20th-century negative-income-tax plans associated with Milton Friedman. The modern idea was organized from 1986 by the Basic Income European Network (now the Basic Income Earth Network); technology-industry interest surged after 2016 amid fears of AI-driven automation.
Related
- technological unemploymenttechnological unemployment, n.: Joblessness caused by machines or software taking over work that people used to be paid for, faster than new kinds of work appear for them.
- automationautomation, n.: Using machines or software to do work that people would otherwise do, from factory robots to programs that sort email or write reports.
- concentration of powerconcentration of power, n.: The worry that AI will put enormous economic, political or military power in the hands of a few companies, governments or individuals, beyond the reach of ordinary checks and balances.
- intelligence curseintelligence curse, n.: The worry that once AI can do most jobs, governments and companies will no longer need ordinary people and so will stop looking after them, like oil-rich states that neglect their citizens.
- explosive growthexplosive growth, n.: A hypothetical jump in the world economy's growth rate to 30% a year or more, about ten times today's pace, which some economists think AI that replaces human workers could cause.
Sources
- Van Parijs, P. & Vanderborght, Y. (2017). Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy. Harvard University Press.
- Vivalt, E., Rhodes, E., Bartik, A. W., Broockman, D. E., Krause, P. & Miller, S. (2024). The Employment Effects of a Guaranteed Income: Experimental Evidence from Two U.S. States. NBER Working Paper 32719. nber.org/papers/w32719
Mentioned in
technological unemploymenttechnological unemployment, n.: Joblessness caused by machines or software taking over work that people used to be paid for, faster than new kinds of work appear for them., windfall clausewindfall clause, n.: A proposed promise by AI companies to give away a large share of any enormous profits they make if their AI transforms the economy, so that the gains are widely shared.