Sam Altman is fond of claiming that the advent of the LLMs means that, at some point, we’ll have to consider bringing in UBI because ‘AI will take all our jobs’. He’s even sponsored a study, done over a three year period, giving participants a grand a month.
For those not in the know, UBI stands for ‘Universal Basic Income’ and was first introduced as a concept (as we shall see, in its modern form) by Andrew Yang during his 2016 run to be the Democratic Presidential nominee. Yang’s idea was that every US resident (presumably limited to citizens and ‘resident aliens’ – ie green card holders) would receive $1200 a month as a base income, no matter what they made from their regular jobs. Such an idea had apparently been popular in parts of Silicon Valley (where Andrew Yang had been working) for some time; Yang just brought it to the public.
In other words, instead of just chidren of well-off baby boomer parents getting a trust fund – EVERYONE would get a trust fund. And why not? The US is a rich country. With some sensible, thoughtful taxation, UBI would be entirely feasible. Now with AI threatening to take everyone’s jobs, perhaps UBI is an idea whose time has come.
Thing is: I’ve lived through an early prototype of UBI, in Canada (and the UK) in the ’70s and ’80s. Only it wasn’t called UBI back then, it was called the welfare state, and came in the form of either unemployment or welfare payments. Montreal in particular, when a significant percentage of the population lived in whole or in part on UI (from the feds) or the Bien-Aide Sociale (BS, from the provincial government), supplemented by odd jobs, artistic or musical pursuits, or spells of grueling, physically intense work in the hinterlands. For many, it was more or less a way of life.
In those good old days, Canada’s second largest city, was recovering from the tumult of the ’60s and ’70s, when the FLQ had been setting off bombs and kidnapping government ministers, the election of the separatist Parti Quebecois and the subsequent referendum on Quebec’s sort-of-separation from the ROC (rest of Canada), along with the massive outflow of its Anglo population – and their money. This, at a time, when not only the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway had reduced Montreal as a port, the ’76 Olympics which had left the city with ruinous debt, and the general industrial decline that bedevilled cities across the North-East. Montreal was not in great shape.
Into this void came the welfare state, attracting a generation of artists, slackers, and riff-raff from the ROC and the Montreal suburbs, drawn to a city where a two or even three bedroom apartment in a picturesque neighborhood with easy access to great food, cheap bars and restaurants, could be had for a couple of hundreds bucks a month. No deposit, no first and last: in most situations, you paid month by month. Basic BS was a mere $180/month, not enough to live on, but if you could scam medical BS, you could get up to $500/month. If you went out into the bush for the Great Canadian Migration that was tree-planting, and put in 8-12 weeks of back-breaking labour in all kinds of weather fighting off hordes of biting insects, you could come back with not just somewhere up to ten grand, but that prize of prizes, max UI weeks, which translated to over a grand a month (after taxes), paid in bi-monthly installments.
What a time.
Sounds great! Power to the People! But what did it mean in practice?
In St. Henri, a blue collar neighborhood just off downtown where I lived for a time, the factories that had been the neighborhood’s chief employer had long since closed and most of St. Henri’s residents had few options. For most of the month, the tavernes, the few diners that still existed, even the depanneurs (corner stores to those not familiar with Quebec) were largely empty. But come the last Friday of the month, when the BS cheques came out – hey presto! St. Henri came alive! Tavernes were suddenly full from noon ’til close. People lined up in the depanneurs for 24 cases of Cinquante, Molson Ex, cartons of cigarettes! For a weekend, St. Henri was as lively and vital as it must have been in its industrial glory days.
Then come Monday, everyone went back to staying home and watching TV.
Among my circle of bohemians and artists on the other side of the city, results were mixed. Some people got their UI weeks, then left the country to go traveling, or skiing, or to spend a few months on a beach, their bi-weekly check-in card filled out and signed by a trusted friend or relative. Many planned to use their newfound free time the BS or UI allowed to do their own work. And some did. Some had the discipline to set goals, then spend an allotted time – six months, a year – to fulfill them. But for most, myself included, the lack of structure was curiously dispiriting. One day stretched into another. We spent hours in coffee shops, nursing a single coffee, only to spend hours more on the phone, talking about more or less the same things we’d talked about in the coffee shop. Come evening, we’d gather in some cheap bar for the even cheaper happy hour, often with the same people we’d seen or talked to that day.
It kind of got stale. Fast.
That said, I wasn’t against it then, and I’m not against UBI now. It can’t just be the children of the rich – or the plain rich – who get to do art or work in media or launch startups. Or hang around and do nothing. Regular folks should be able to do all these things too. But if AI really does take all our jobs and we ended up with masses of leisure time, we’re going to be need to be trained on how to use that time. We’ll need to be trained as tinkerers, inventors, founders – or even just volunteers. We’ll need to be trained in how to be useful.
But this is only if AI takes all our jobs and the US government has the vision, the courage, to bring in some as profound as UBI. Since the US has been unable to even bring in a universal health care, this seems very unlikely, whatever Sam Altman says.
