Universal basic income provides recurring cash payments, no strings attached.
Wong Yu Liang
AI advances could widen wealth gaps, which has prompted calls for a universal basic income.
UBI offers recurring cash payments to all adults in a population, regardless of status.
AI leaders such as Elon Musk and Sam Altman have called for a universal basic income.
Universal basic income, once a utopian ideal, has become a hot topic among AI leaders.
It's a recurring cash payment made to all adults in a certain population, regardless of their wealth and employment status. There are no restrictions on how recipients spend their money.
As advancements in artificial intelligence technology drive economic growth, concerns are rising about whether the wealth it generates is shared equitably.
Industry leaders such as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and AI's "godfather," Geoffrey Hinton, have warned about AI's potential to eliminate jobs — and subsequentlywiden the wealth gap between the haves and the have-nots. They, along with other tech leaders, are advocates of a universal basic income as an antidote.
The concept of countries implementing UBI has shifted in recent years from a niche topic within tech circles to a mainstream conversation, thanks in part to the former presidential candidate Andrew Yang, who made UBI a central part of his platform in 2020.
Yang campaigned on what he called the "Freedom Dividend," monthly $1,000 payments with no strings attached to all American adults. The idea was met with skepticism, and Yang's candidacy quickly fizzled. After the success of pandemic-era stimulus checks, though, and now the rise of AI, the idea has gained new traction.
Guaranteed basic income, which is similar to UBI but targets specific groups of people for a set period of time, has been piloted over 100 times across the country. The United States has basic income programs in 16 states, along with Washington, DC, thatgive residents cash — no strings attached.
The movement toward basic income programs is not without its critics. Some argue the programs could disincentivize recipients to work or even encourage them to spend frivolously. Some say the expenses of basic income programs could lead to higher taxes or local government budget cuts.
For now, though, AI leaders say it's the best option to mitigate the adverse economic impacts the technology could have. Here's what some of the major AI figures are saying about UBI.
Sam Altman
Microsoft
Altman has long been a vocal proponent of universal basic income.
In July, the results of Altman'suniversal basic income study were published. The study, which began in 2019, was conducted by the nonprofit research lab OpenResearch, and OpenAI contributed $60 million to it — $14 million of which was Altman's own money.
The study distributed payments to 3,000 urban, suburban, and rural residents of Texas and Illinois, all of whom had annualincomes below $28,000. One-third received $1,000 a month for three years, while the rest received $50 a month.
The study found that those who received the $1,000 payments increased their overall spending by an average of $310 a month, but most of that spending went toward food, rent, and transportation.
"We do see significant reductions in stress, mental distress, and food insecurity during the first year, but those effects fade out by the second and third years of the program," the report said, adding: "Cash alone cannot address challenges such as chronic health conditions, lack of childcare, or the high cost of housing."
But that's not Altman's only UBI endeavor. He also has a futuristic cryptocurrency startup called Worldcoin, which aims to build the largest encrypted identity network in the world by scanning people's irises with a baseball-sized orb. One way this technology could be implemented, its founders say, is to underpin the network that lets it collect UBI.
As OpenAI continues to build more capable foundation models, Altman has also suggested that rationing their computational resources across individuals might be more economically efficient than distributing cash. Altman has floated the idea of a "universal basic compute" in which people would get a "slice" of the computational resources of the company's large language models that they could use however they liked.
Elon MuskCANNES, FRANCE - JUNE 19: Elon Musk attends 'Exploring the New Frontiers of Innovation: Mark Read in Conversation with Elon Musk' session during the Cannes Lions International Festival Of Creativity 2024 - Day Three on June 19, 2024 in Cannes, France.
The world's richest man has said that universal basic income could give people more freedom over how they use their time and money and that AI would increase the share of UBI that people could receive.
Musk imagines a near future in which AI and robots create abundance for everyone, allow people not to work, and even make money irrelevant.
"There will be no poverty in the future, and so no need to save money," Musk wrote on X in December.
On the "Moonshots with Peter Diamandis" podcast in January, Musk championed the idea of a sort of universal high income.
"The good future is anyone can have whatever stuff they want," Musk said. That would mean "better medical care than anyone has today, available for everyone within five years."
He added, "No scarcity of goods and services. You can learn anything you want about anything for free."
"As AI reduces the need for human labor, UBI could become crucial, with governments playing a key role in regulating AI's impact and ensuring equitable wealth distribution," Khosla wrote in a post on the website for Khosla Ventures, his firm, in September 2024.
Unlike the internet or mobile phones, which have assisted human workers, he wrote that AI "amplifies and multiplies the human brain much as the advent of steam engines and motors amplified muscle power." In other words, he suggests humans will be too slow and expensive to contribute meaningfully to the labor force in the age of AI.
Dario AmodeiDario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic.
Anthropic
Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, has said UBI is the least that can be done to mitigate the effects of AI.
"Civilization has successfully navigated major economic shifts in the past: from hunter-gathering to farming, farming to feudalism, and feudalism to industrialism. I suspect that some new and stranger thing will be needed, and that it's something no one today has done a good job of envisioning. It could be as simple as a large universal basic income for everyone, although I suspect that will only be a small part of a solution," he wrote in an essay on his personal blog in October 2024.
In Amodei's opinion, AI will alter our world in such a fundamental way that we'll need to think about a more comprehensive solution to inequality.
Andrew Yang
Hollis Johnson/Business Insider
Even before AI took the world by storm, Yang, an entrepreneur and lobbyist, was a proponent of universal basic income. He advocated giving all Americans a $2,000 monthly stipend for the duration of the pandemic.
In Yang's interview with Business Insider in June 2020, a few months after he dropped his presidential campaign, Yang said he was "very confident that universal basic income was the future of our country."
Geoffrey HintonComputer scientist and Google Brain VP Geoffrey Hinton
Hinton has discussed his fears about AI-induced job losses and advised the UK government to adopt universal basic income as a solution.
Demis HassabisDemis Hassabis is the CEO of Google DeepMind.
Getty Images
Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis also supports the idea of a universal high income.
At SXSW in London in July, he said that AI will generate enormous abundance and that we'll need to envision ways to distribute that.
"We may need things like universal high income, or some way of distributing all the additional productivity that AI will produce in the economy," he said.