By Beatrice Nolan
The tech industry has grand plans for an AI utopia — and as models become ever more advanced, some tech leaders are calling for a form of universal basic income.
UBI has long been a passion project for high-profile Silicon Valley leaders, including Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Tesla chief Elon Musk. But as AI companies race toward artificial general intelligence, the conversion is getting more urgent.
UBI typically refers to making recurring cash payments to all adults in a population, regardless of their wealth or employment status, and with no restrictions on how they spend the money.
Matthew Johnson, a professor of public policy at Northumbria University, told Business Insider there has always been a connection between tech and UBI.
“It’s been popular because they realize that the consequences of the technological developments that they pursue are that lots of people are going to be put out of stable work,” he said. “There’s clearly a business incentive to remove those employees and replace them with technology that doesn’t cost them salaries.”
Making AI work for everyone
Many of the people developing AI think a basic income system could help mitigate the tech’s negative impact on workers.
Figures such as Musk have backed the concept since at least 2016.
In an interview at the VivaTech conference in Paris in May, he said the “benign scenario” of AI development would leave everyone jobless — but with “universal high income.”
These fears are echoed by some of the tech’s earliest founders, who are sometimes called the “AI godfathers.” One figure, Geoffrey Hinton, recently told BBC Newsnight that governments will need to offer basic incomes to deal with the impact of AI on inequality.
Sam Altman, who runs one of the leading companies in the race toward AGI, has also long supported UBI. Recently, the OpenAI CEO also floated the idea of what he calls “universal basic compute.”
Johnson said tech leaders were essentially trying to fix the real-world consequences of technological development that they’re invested in.
He added the UBI push is partly down to “concern about the wider social consequences of their activities” and fears that their companies won’t survive if society faces widespread unemployment.
Avoiding a dystopian future
Scott Santens, a key advocate for universal basic income, told BI he first became interested in the concept through a tech angle.
While studying the future of work and the impact of technology on the labor market, Santens became interested in finding a way to make technology benefit everyone.
“My question was, what is the realistic way of making technology work for all of us, instead of leading to this dystopian future where there’s a small percentage of rich people and many poor people? That thought got me interested in basic income,” he said.
“We’ve already been impacted by automation, at least since the 1970s,” Santens said. “When computerization took off, wages did not increase in the same way productivity did.”
For prominent tech figures, there’s also a PR dimension to supporting the basic income concept, he said.
“It’s outright lying to say tech won’t impact employment at all,” Santens said, meaning leaders need to suggest solutions to balance potential diminishing demand for human labor.
Altman, for example, has been pouring funds into basic income research. He raised $60 million for one of the largest trials of the systems, including $14 million of his own money.
The experiment gave low-income participants $1,000 a month for three years, no strings attached. The research found that recipients put the bulk of their extra spending toward basic needs such as rent, transportation, and food. They also worked less on average but remained engaged in the workforce and were more deliberate in their job searches compared with a control group.
A slice of the pie
There’s another argument for sharing the spoils when it comes to AI.
AI models are only as good as the data they’re trained on —something that has proved to be a thorny issue for companies such as OpenAI.
Altman’s company and others are locked in a number of legal disputes over the right to use copyrighted content in training data for its large language models (LLMs) without payment. (OpenAI has a deal with Axel Springer that allows ChatGPT to summarize and answer user queries based on select content from BI and its other outlets including Politico.)
Legal or not, most AI models are likely trained on content scraped from the internet, some of which belong to creators or companies.
“We created the data for AI, so we all should benefit from it,” Santens said.
Sharing LLMs
Altman has floated the idea of sharing the computing capacity of large language models as another form of basic income.
“Everybody gets like a slice of GPT-7’s compute,” he told the “All-In” podcast in May. “They can use it, they can resell it, they can donate it to somebody to use for cancer research.”
The idea is that as AI becomes more advanced and embedded into more facets of our lives, owning a unit of future large language models could be more valuable than money.
Anna Yelizarova, a project lead at the Future of Life Institute, said tech companies have discussed sharing access to the AI models themselves.
“A lot of the conversation has been more around access to compute or access to the models themselves, which is a great start,” she said.
“But if we really do get AI technology that can replace intellectual human labor at scale, we’re going to have to think of new approaches to ensure that economic gains are really evenly distributed.”
