This morning I read a blog post by Avital Balwit, who is Chief of Staff to the CEO at Anthropic. In it she wonders whether people will find meaning in life after AI takes all the jobs. Notably, she doesn’t wonder whether they’ll find any way to support themselves, and instead assumes that “people can meet their needs through universal basic income or other transfers”.

UBI quote

I find this assumption to be wildly unrealistic, irresponsible, and dangerous. Anyone who believes that America—which at this point in history can’t even agree on the veracity of basic facts—is going to get together behind the idea of an economy based on a universal cash payment to every citizen is, in my opinion, nuts.

The analogy between Universal Basic Income (UBI) and FDR’s New Deal has been drawn but the people making that comparison seem to forget that in order to get to the New Deal, the United States had to go through the Great Depression. Years of severe economic crisis and widespread suffering, not to mention Democratic party control of the White House and both houses of Congress, were required to get the program passed.

In order to pass UBI, I believe we would first have to go through at least as much suffering and have a similarly aligned government, which from the vantage point of June 2024 doesn’t seem realistic.

So we can go on making the assumption that everyone’s economic needs will be magically taken care of once all (or most, or even a significant portion of) the jobs have been automated away, or we can have the hard conversations about how exactly we expect to handle such a radical upheaval.

I certainly don’t have the answer but we better start working on it.