Is the World Ready for a Guaranteed Basic Income? (Update)
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Yeah. It's Steven Dubner. Over the past several years, artificial intelligence has gone from something you read about, to something you encounter once in a while, to something that many of us use every day. But a lot of people find it off-putting, even frightening. One fear is that the more useful AI gets, the more it will displace human workers. Companies like Amazon and Ford and JP Morgan are talking about reducing their workforce since the AIs can do some of the work at a fraction of the cost of human employees. We have made several episodes that touch on this, including a twenty twenty-three series called How to Think About AI, guest hosted by Adam Davidson.
And an episode from last October called What Do People Do All Day? The fear that technology will replace human labor is nothing new. In fact, it comes up in just about every generation. There is also a proposed solution to this problem that comes up again and again, a guaranteed basic income, is what some people call it. And we made an episode about that way back in 2016, years before anyone had heard of ChatGPT. The idea was having a moment then, and now, thanks to the AI boom, it's having another moment, so I wanted to replay that episode for you today. We have gone through and updated facts and figures as necessary. We'll begin with the economist Eric Brynyolfsen, who was at MIT when we spoke back then, but has since moved. To Stanford. Here's how Brinjolfsen describes the central problem.
We're now beginning to have machines be able to augment and automate Our brains. and replace mental tasks. Machines can do computations and make decisions And we're still in the early stages of this. But we believe that the implications will be at least as profound as what the industrial revolution did for our muscles.
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