I fully agree with this, but I’m of the belief that in order to fund it, we need to tax the “labor” that companies are saving with AI. If a company names profit normally with humans, they are creating a system in which the government is getting paid twice, once on the income of the company and once on the income of the people. But if AI just takes half of that away, the country is missing out on trillions of tax dollars.

So what’s the plan? Require all companies to disclose their electric bills and what they used that power for. If it’s AI? Tax them a rate dependent on the size of the company and the size of the AI portion. This has the additional benefit of incentivizing companies to simply hire people again.

This will never happen but I can dream.

This sounds interesting. It reminds me of past workers movements in history, namely the Luddites and the UK miners strike. If you want to learn more about the Luddites and what they were asking for, the journalist Brian Merchant has a good book named “Blood in the Machine”.

Closer to my heart and my lived experience is the miner’s strike. I wasn’t born at the time, but I grew up in what I semi-affectionately call a “post industrial shit hole”. A friend once expressed curiosity about what an alternative to shutting the mines would have been, especially in light of our increasing knowledge of needing to move away from fossil fuels. A big problem with what happened with the mines is that there were entire communities that were effectively based around the mines.

These communities often did have other sources of industry and commerce, but with the mines gone, it fucked everything up. There weren’t enough opportunities for people afterwards, especially because miners skills and experience couldn’t easily translate to other skilled work. Even if a heckton of money had been provided to “re-skill” out of work miners, that wouldn’t have been enough to absorb the economic calamity caused by abruptly closing a mine, precisely because of how locally concentrated and effect would be. If done all at once, for instance, you’d find a severe shortage of teachers and trainers, who would then find themselves in a similar position of needing to either move elsewhere to find work, or train in a different field. The key was that there needed to be a transition plan that would acknowledge the human and economic realities of closing the mines.

Many argued, even at the time, that a gradual transition plan that actually cared about the communities affected would lead to much greater prosperity for all. Having grown up amongst the festering wounds of the miners strike, I feel this to be true. Up in the North of England, there are many who feel like they have been forgotten or discarded by the system. That causes people a lot of pain; I think it’s typical for people to want their lives to be useful in some way, but the Northern, working class manifestation of this instinct is particularly distinct.

Linking this back to your question, I think that framing it as compensation could help, but I would expect opposition to remain as long as people don’t feel like they have ways to be useful. A surprising contingent of people who dislike social security payments that involve “getting something for nothing” are people who themselves would be beneficiaries of such payments. I link this perspective to listlessness I describe in ex-mining communities. Whilst the vast majority of us are chronically overworked (including those who may be suffering from underemployment due to automation), most people do actually want to work. Humans are social creatures, and our capacities are incredibly versatile, so it’s only natural for us to want to labour towards some greater good. I think that any successful implementation of universal basic income would require that we speak to this desire in people, and help to build a sense that having their basic living costs accounted for is an opportunity for them to do something meaningful with their time.

Voluntary work is the straightforward answer to this, and indeed, some of the most fulfilled people I know are those who can afford to work very little (or not at all), but are able to spend their time on things they care about. However, I see so many people not recognise what they’re doing as meaningful labour. For example, I go to a philosophy discussion group where there is one main person who liaises with the venue, collects the small fee every week (£3 per person), updates the online description for the event and keeps track of who is running each session, recruiting volunteers as needed. He doesn’t recognise the work he does as being that much work, and certainly doesn’t feel it’s enough to warrant the word “labour”. “It’s just something I do to help”; “You’re making it sound like something larger than it is — someone has to do it”. I found myself (affectionately) frustrated during this conversation because it highlights something I see everywhere: how capitalism encourages us to devalue our own labour, especially reproductive labour and other socially valuable labour. There are insufficient opportunities for meaningful contribution within the voluntary sector as it exists now, but so much of what people could and would be doing more of exists outside of that sector.

We need a cultural shift in how we think about work. However, it’s harder to facilitate that cultural shift towards how we view labour if most people are forced to only see their labour in terms of wages and salaries. On the other hand, people are more likely to resist policies like UBI if they feel it presents a threat to their work-centred identity and their ability to conceive of their existence as valuable. It’s a tricky chicken-or-egg problem. Overall, this is why I think your framing could be useful, but is not likely to be sufficient to change people’s minds. I think that UBI or similar certainly is possible, but it’s hard to imagine it being implemented in our current context due to how radical it is. Far be it from me to shy away from radical choices, but I think that it’s necessary to think of intermediary steps towards cultivating class consciousness and allowing people to conceive of a world where their Intrinsic value is decoupled from their output under capitalism. For instance, I can’t fathom how universal basic income would work in a US without universal healthcare. It boggles my mind how badly health insurance acts to reinforce coercive labour relations. The best thing we can do to improve people’s opinion of universal basic income is to improve their material conditions.

Finally, on AI. I think my biggest disagreement with Automation Compensation as a framing device for UBI is that it inadvertently falls into the trap of “tech critihype”, which the linked author describes as “[inverting] boosters’ messages — they retain the picture of extraordinary change but focus instead on negative problems and risks.”. Critihype may appear to criticise something, but actually ends up feeding the hype cycle, and in turn, is nourished by it. The problem with AI isn’t that it is going to end up replacing a significant chunk of the workforce, but rather that penny-pinching managers can be convinced that AI is (or will be) able do that.

I like the way that Brian Merchant describes the real problem of AI on his blog:

"[…] the real AI jobs crisis is that the drumbeat, marketing, and pop culture of “powerful AI” encourages and permits management to replace or degrade jobs they might not otherwise have. More important than the technological change, perhaps, is the change in a social permission structure.”

This critical approach is extra important when we consider that the jobs and fields most heavily being affected by AI are in creative fields. We’ve probably all seen memes that say “I want an AI to automate doing the dishes so that I can do art, not automate doing art so I can spend more time doing the dishes”. Universal Basic Income would be limited in alleviating social angst unless we can disrupt the pervasive devaluation of human life and effort that the AI hype machine is powering.

Though I have ended up disagreeing with your suggestion, thanks for posing this question. It’s an interesting one to ponder, and I certainly didn’t expect to write this much when I started. I hope you find my response equally interesting.

You might be on the right track. We’ve been selling these ideas to the people who already want them, we need to expand the market!

I think that if people get to have Universal Basic Income, and society can be arranged to provide it without causing big problems to society, then it doesn’t need to be tied to Automation in any way, and instead can simply be viewed as a core benefit of being a member of society. That seems like a more elegant approach.

People would not want to be told ‘oh, it seems like we are going to scale back automation some, so everyone is going to only get 50% of the UBI they have been receiving previously’.

What I’ve seen as the most talked about part of this is, how are we going to pay for it. Of course, wealth tax has to be a huge part of it. We’ve seen the following work, so it’s not hard to understand. The billionaires don’t want it:

• Social Security, but the companies only are the ones to foot the bill
• Alaska dividends, same concept but of course, a lot more money.
• Medicare, Medicaid and people on disability.

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