Imagine if the government started paying you a fixed salary just for being its citizen. As far-fetching as this sounds, the prospect of automation putting large numbers of workers out of jobs in the near future is spurring governments around the world to actually start testing this concept out. It's name: Universal Basic Income.
This post is inspired by @ronni's comment on my earlier post on global aging.
https://steemit.com/life/@sizzlingmonkeys/how-will-global-aging-affect-you
I've been meaning to write this post for a few days now. @ronni's comment on how machine learning, AI, and automation creates an uncertain future piqued my interest so I did a little research to see how people might address the problem of lost jobs.
The concept of UBI is simple - the government pays every citizen enough money to his or her cover basic needs. UBI is touted as a possible solution to the problem of massive worker displacement in an increasingly automated and artificial-intelligenced world.
The rational behind UBI is that it allows everyone to live a life free from financial worry, thus stabilizing society and potentially helping unleash a tsunami of creativity and innovation when people are able to work not just for food and shelter, but to fulfill their life aspirations.
Both Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk are big supporters. Elon Musk predicts that automation will make "almost everything very cheap" so that it will be less costly than one might think to implement UBI.
Universal Basic Income is not a new concept - Martin Luther King, Jr. supported UBI. However, UBI is recently seeing renewed interest, spurred on by the financial crisis of 2008 and the growth of human-displacing technologies.
UBI is not just a utopian concept tossed around in debates around the world. There have been several small-scale pilots of UBI around the world spanning across several continents. One study carried out in 2008 in Namibia found that the proportion of malnourished children dropped from 42% to 10% after an UBI pilot program was launched in the village of Otjivero-Omitara.
I think Universal Basic Income is a fascinating concept. Mind you, the amount of money we are talking about here is not going to be enough to live an extravagant lifestyle, but it sounds like a good idea to me to guarantee everyone a minimum lifestyle, so no-one needs to be homeless and no-one needs to go hungry.
I am curious whether UBI's effect on human productivity would lean more towards reducing people's drive and making us all more lazy, or lean more towards what Mark Zuckerberg believes, that is, providing the financial "cushion" for people to take more risks and try more new things.
Even if most of us end up becoming more lazy, maybe the creativity unleashed from the few who use UBI as a springboard to try new things is enough to justify UBI.
In any case, Universal Basic Income is certainly a concept that deserves a closer look!
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Images from:
https://www.pexels.com
https://futurism.com/images/universal-basic-income-answer-automation/
Resources:
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/false-promise-universal-basic-income-andy-stern-ruger-bregman
https://futurism.com/images/universal-basic-income-answer-automation/