Our current social and financial structure is based on people exchanging their skills and knowledge for money in the form of wages, which they then use to purchase goods and services from third parties to improve their quality of life. But what would happen if the first link in the chain breaks and people no longer need to work because a machine (or AI) works in their place?
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman once asked himself that question about humanity’s future, and one of the answers was a universal basic income (UBI). For eight years, Altman funded a study conducted by the nonprofit research lab OpenResearch that analyzed what would happen if we all received a certain amount of money every month without working.
Giving Silicon Valley an allowance. Although the UBI concept has been around for several decades, it only gained significant traction when Silicon Valley tycoons like Altman and Tesla CEO Elon Musk pointed to it as a solution to human unemployment caused by automation and AI.
Nearly a decade ago, Altman advocated implementing this recurring income on the Y Combinator blog. “We’d like to fund a study on basic income—i.e., giving people enough money to live on with no strings attached. I’ve been intrigued by the idea [of universal basic income] for a while, and although there’s been a lot of discussion, there’s fairly little data about how it would work.” For his part, Musk claimed in a 2016 CNBC interview that “[UBI is] going to be necessary. There are going to be fewer and fewer jobs that a robot can’t do better.”
$45 million given away for the good of humanity. To make the study as reliable and accurate as possible, OpenResearch sought out 3,000 participants living in Texas and Illinois with incomes of less than $28,000. One-third of these participants received $1,000 monthly for three years with no strings attached, while the rest of the control group received $50 monthly.
In total, the nonprofit research lab gave away $45 million. $14 million came directly from Altman’s pocket, who raised an additional $60 million to complete the payout and fund the study’s authors, led by researcher Elizabeth Rhodes, director of research at OpenResearch.
The results: meeting needs and helping others. Data from the OpenResearch study shows that those who received the $1,000 monthly payments increased their monthly spending by an average of $310 but used that increase to buy food, pay rent, and pay for transportation. People in this group provided more support to others in need than the rest of the participants.
Improvements in mental health. The researchers found “no direct evidence of improved access to health care or improvements in physical and mental health” among those who received the $1,000.
However, they did see “significant reductions in stress, psychological distress, and food insecurity in the first year, but these effects fade in the second and third years of the program.” The researchers note that “cash alone cannot address challenges such as chronic health conditions, lack of childcare, or the excessive cost of housing."
The pride of being useful. UBI emerges as a subsistence response for people who may be displaced from the labor market and replaced by robots or AI so that the surplus value offered by that technology covers the needs of the person it replaces.
Jaron Lanier, a computer scientist and virtual reality pioneer, is one of the loudest voices against the idea of a UBI, expressing his opinion on the matter in an interview with The Guardian. He told Forbes that the universal basic income would create a sense of detachment among those who receive it without working: “I’d like to see people become proud data providers in a new economy. People won’t say, ‘You’re so nice.’ They’ll say, ‘I hate you, you’re telling me you’re useful, and I’m not, I’m dependent on your generosity.'”
The other UBI studies. This long-running study funded by Altman isn't the first one to look into UBI. The philanthropic organization GiveDirectly is conducting a similar, 12-year study in Kenya that's still ongoing. Since the 1980s, Alaska has distributed annual royalties from its oil and gas reserves to its citizens.
This article was written by Rubén Andrés and originally published in Spanish on Xataka.
Image | Wikimedia Commons (TechCrunch)
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