Universal Basic Income (UBI) is not a new concept but it has recently gained momentum as AI and automation are increasingly replacing workers in all sectors of the economy.
According to Investopedia, “UBI is a government program in which every adult citizen receives a set amount of money on a regular basis”. Wikipedia further explains that “there are several welfare arrangements that can be viewed as related to basic income, in one way or the other”. An example mentioned is negative income tax (NIT).
Originally UBI was proposed as a way to alleviate poverty and replace other need-based social programs that require more bureaucracy. Today, UBI is seen as a possible solution to the social disorder and chaos that automation-induced mass unemployment might cause.
The term universal refers to two key aspects of the basic income system:
It should be delivered to every adult citizen of a given population, both poor and rich alike.
It should be delivered without a means test or work requirement, i.e. no questions asked.
As far as I’m aware, no country has ever implemented a full UBI system, which means that most of the criticism against it comes from theoretical considerations. The main arguments against UBI are that it would be way too expensive to implement, that it might cause widespread idleness or laziness, and that for a variety of reasons many would end up considering the system unfair.
While all of the above mentioned objections are relevant, I think the fairness problem merits special attention. There are probably hundreds of academic papers written on the topic, but just thinking on the dilemma from a personal perspective, I don’t think I would feel entirely okay participating in a system where those who genuinely choose idleness or unproductive activities would get their livelihood subsidized by the rest of society.
Now, immediately as I wrote those words a lot of new questions popped into my mind: What is idleness? How should we define productive vs. unproductive activities? What about those, who in normal circumstances would happily choose to do something good, but who for some reason end up in a situation where they aren’t capable of doing it?
So, while my gut reaction tells me that some form of work / contribution requirement will be needed in order to tackle the fairness problem, I do realize that it immediately opens up a can of worms. It may in fact turn out that, when you slice and dice the issue, it’s still better to have the system universal also in this sense, i.e. give everyone their basic income with no questions asked.
How the fairness problem should be solved thus remains unclear to me, and I probably need to study and think about the question much more in detail. It may also be that we need to completely revisit the concept of “productive” work, because it’s possible that our new technologies will allow us to produce much more value and wealth than we’ve ever imagined. In other words, perhaps productive – or rather good – work in the future will mostly consist of humans producing arts, music, design, and creating wonderful experiences as well as taking care of each others.
In any case, as I’ve noted many times before, there’s a high probability that AI and automation will displace jobs faster and at a much larger scale than what most people currently believe. Furthermore, I don’t think it’s realistic to expect that an equal or higher amount of new and “better” jobs will be created as a result of the process.
Here I will admit that Andrew Yang, the former U.S. presidential candidate and nonprofit founder, has influenced my thinking a lot, and I completely agree with his assessment that emerging technologies will probably fail to deliver a lot of employment and that the reverse may in fact be true, because the new industries will rarely, if ever, be highly labor-intensive.
To conclude, our societies and cultures will have to change when there are fewer jobs available and in general less work for humans to perform. In order to avoid total chaos, new mechanisms are needed for redistributing the ever-increasing amount of wealth and prosperity our machines and algorithms will be producing. UBI could be a part of the puzzle, but I sincerely hope no-one thinks it’s a magic wand that’s going to solve everything. I also believe that the fairness problem needs to be addressed in one way or another, but I’m just not sure yet how.