💸 Turning UBI on its head

Are they seeking to ensure that this technology genuinely and truly benefits all people across society? Or are they looking only to avert a worst-case scenario of social upheaval? Are they willing to put in the legwork needed to build new institutions or merely looking for a quick fix that will assuage their own consciences and absolve them of resp

... See more

Regarding the robots, UBI is less compelling when framed as a shield against job loss than as a tool to design a more democratic distribution of the gains from automated productivity.

We can choose a purely technocratic approach—one that sees each of us as a set of financial and material needs to be satisfied—and simply transfer enough cash to all people so that they don’t starve or go homeless. In fact, this notion of universal basic income seems to be becoming more and more popular these days. But in making that choice I belie

... See more

Funding for these programs would come from steep taxes on the winners of the AI revolution: major technology companies; legacy corporations that adapted to leverage AI; and the millionaires, billionaires, and perhaps even trillionaires who cashed in on these companies’ success. The size of the stipend given is a matter of debate among proponents. S

... See more

To implement UBI at the expense of every other social program is to make the presumption that the people helped by those programs are competent and capable of shifting to a life of budgeting and managing their own money and of avoiding exploitation. Think of the most vulnerable people you’ve ever encountered and remember that, with UBI, they all ge... See more

The means of funding UBI determine so much of its long-term impact. Each funding method carries a different set of properties, a unique host of alchemical interactions with socioeconomic incentives. Some promise to ’twist’ capitalist logic and pave a road to communism. Others may pit the minority class whose tax increases exceed their UBI against n... See more

From my perspective, I can understand why the Silicon Valley elite have become so enamored with the idea of a UBI: it is a simple, technical solution to an enormous and complex social problem of their own making. But adopting a UBI would constitute a major change in our social contract, one that we should think through very carefully and most criti

... See more