The Left-Wing Policy That AI Evangelists Suddenly Love
At the same time, it’s not just cash welfare reborn, because its aim is to have fewer strings attached and be easier to access. “It’s not a net that holds people and keeps them safe,” said Natalie Foster, president and founder of the Economic Security Project. “It is a trampoline where people can have a floor that they cannot fall through and then jump up and live the lives of agency and dignity and live on their own terms, which you can’t do if you’re working hand to mouth, or if you are in deep economic uncertainty, which is what the future holds without bold policy interventions.”
There are conversations we need to have about UBI, separate from its potential as a salve for a labor apocalypse. At the same time, the development of AI requires a discussion about what the industry owes society for the damage it will cause. “AI’s worth is created by all of our all of our data, all of our experiences, so everyone should have an ownership stake in that,” said Michael Tubbs, the former mayor of Stockton, California who ran an AI project in his city—which TNR featured in 2020—and now works with an organization called Mayors for Guaranteed Income. “People who are going to be harmed have to have an ownership stake.”
Who works, how much they work, and how they’re compensated are political questions. Productivity gains over the past several decades have led to benefits for the very richest Americans, but many of us are working harder than ever without seeing gains. If we don’t tackle these issues in the right way, our future will be even more unequal than today, with the tech billionaires further enriched while the rest of us struggle to find new jobs and are encouraged to retrain or work harder. “I’m afraid inequality is likely to continue getting worse,” Dr. Stuart Russell, a professor of computer science at UC Berkeley. “Most of the gains are likely to go to the owners of the technology.” And AI may hit white-collar jobs as severely as blue-collar jobs were pummeled by past technological changes.
For decades, economists and futurists have promised that technology gains will lead to increased leisure—famously, the economist John Maynard Keynes thought his grandkids would work 15 hours a week—and it largely hasn’t come to pass. It’s broadly true that we work less per week than our predecessors, Russell said. “Having said that, we’re certainly not living a life of leisure: as productivity improves, we are consuming a lot more rather than working a lot less.”
