Whatever happened to U.B.I.?: Guaranteed income in the A.I. age

For much of the 2010s, U.B.I. received a lot of attention and energy as a heterodox, futuristic policy occupying a Venn-diagram overlap between wealthy tech-industry libertarians and wonky left-liberals. (Not coincidentally, groups that made up two pillars of the Obama-era Democratic Party.) In 2016, well before hyperscaling turned large language models into the “A.I.” of present-day hype, Sam Altman, then the president of Y Combinator, announced a long-range study of U.B.I. anticipating a “world where technology replaces existing jobs and basic income becomes necessary”; that same year, Elon Musk said he thought a U.B.I. was inevitable given automation to come: “I am not sure what else one would do.” In 2020, Andrew Yang made a U.B.I. proposal called “the Freedom Dividend” the focal point short-lived, tech-coded Democratic primary campaign--probably the high-water mark of the policy’s salience and buzziness.

Strangely, however, amid the rise of L.L.M.s and jobs allegedly lost to A.I. automation--precisely the kind of dynamic that led people like Musk and Altman to call for U.B.I. in the first place--the personalities and pundits who drove interest in the policy through the 2010s seem much less enthusiastic. Altman now prefers to talk about vague, self-derived concepts like “universal basic compute” and “universal extreme wealth,” while Musk has started talking about an ill-defined idea called “universal high wealth.”