People Want Jobs, Not UBI
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What to Know: People Want Jobs, Not UBI
CEOs warn that artificial intelligence may soon be capable of performing many of the tasks white-collar workers currently do in their jobs — and might lead to the highest unemployment rates in living memory.
Universal basic income is often touted as a partial solution to that kind of crisis: a guaranteed payment by the government to all citizens to offset lost wages.
But a new global survey, which polled more than 1,000 people from 60 countries, suggests widespread doubts about UBI. Given a hypothetical choice between guaranteed jobs or guaranteed income, 52% of respondents said they would prefer to live in a world where jobs were guaranteed. Just 39% said they would prefer guaranteed income; 9% said they had no preference.
“This should be a warning to everybody working in AI that people are not being brought along with the successes of this technology,” says Gina Neff, executive director of the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy at the University of Cambridge, who was not involved in the research. “People have more confidence in their ability to get ahead through work than they do that the AI economy will lead to a good and stable income for them.”
The survey—shared with TIME ahead of its release on Tuesday—was conducted by the Windfall Trust and the Collective Intelligence Project, two nonprofits that said they were seeking “to kickstart the conversations around how we can all ensure the benefits of the predicted ‘AI boom’ reach the people who need it most.”
The survey also found that 40% of respondents believed their job was likely to be automated within 10 years—while only 21% believed their job should be automated in 10 years.
The results “speak to the importance of how work has been central in organising our societies, how we find meaning, how we find connection, how we see our purpose, how we structure our lives—all of these things revolve around formal paid employment,” Neff says. “One of the questions this survey raises is, if this AI transition is going to reduce jobs, then we need to think through how people are going to find that meaning.”
Who to Know: Walter Goodwin
The chipmaker Nvidia has a staggering profit margin of 55.8%, according to the company’s financials—meaning that for every dollar of revenue it brings in, $0.55 is pure profit. Those numbers are some of the highest in any industry. As a result, competitors are lining up.
One of those competitors is Fractile: a U.K.-based chipmaker that expects to send its first chip for production later this year. Fractile is betting that the more data an AI model can process while it is running, the more capable it will be. So the company says it is redesigning a specialized inference chip from the ground up, to contain around 100 times more on-chip memory than those designed by competitors, while also being fast and cheap.
Fractile’s CEO, Walter Goodwin, argues that Nvidia faces an “innovators dilemma”—a concept describing how large firms can get locked into inefficient ways of doing things, allowing them to be disrupted by leaner startups. Nvidia’s proprietary software is often described as its moat. “But moats can hold you in as well,” Goodwin tells TIME. He argues that Nvidia must make its chips compatible with older generations—and says this prevents the company from making the structural changes to memory that he believes are necessary to unlock better performance.
Fractile’s forthcoming chip is “the only solution, in our view, to this crisis of trying to run big models, for long contexts, much much faster,” Goodwin says.
Nvidia, of course, disputes the idea that it faces an innovator’s dilemma. “Workloads are changing shape all the time,” CEO Jensen Huang said on an analyst call in January. “Nvidia is just universally the right answer, because we’re flexible… We’re good at almost everything.”
AI in Action
Dozens of civil-society groups signed an open letter on Tuesday calling on Meta to drop its plan to integrate facial recognition into its AI-powered RayBan glasses.
“Integrating facial recognition into Meta glasses is a dangerous and reckless plan that will harm both users and the entire public, regardless of whether they use Meta products,” the letter says. “This move will endanger us all, and particularly give ammunition to scammers, blackmailers, stalkers, child abusers, and authoritarian regimes.”
What We’re Reading
The Decadelong Feud Shaping the Future of AI, by Keach Hagey in the Wall Street Journal
Come for the insidery account of the beef between Sam Altman and Dario Amodei. Stay for … whatever this is. “Living together in the group house, Dario, Daniela [Amodei] and [Holden] Karnofsky had shared both a commitment to AI safety and a sense of whimsy. Daniela was such a fan of her stuffed animals that Karnofsky had proposed to her via a movie of the dolls coming to life. Dario wore a panda outfit to their costume party-themed wedding.”