Artificial intelligence isn’t a good argument for basic income

We’re flooded by guaranteed income pilot experiments that offer some promising results, but don’t seem to be moving us any closer to actual federal policy. Yet findings published today from the largest randomized basic income experiment in the US to date, backed by Sam Altman and OpenAI, should get your notice

The study, held from November 2020 through October 2023, gave 1,000 recipients $1,000 per month, no strings attached. It’s one of the biggest and longest trials ever run on direct cash giving. Many other basic income pilots have given people $500 or less, and rarely for more than a year or two.

While the study was run by a group of academics, it was set in motion by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. For years, Altman has been publicly worrying that basic income will become necessary as AI eliminates traditional jobs while creating huge stockpiles of wealth held by a few.

“If public policy doesn’t adapt accordingly, most people will end up worse off than they are today,” he wrote in 2021. (Disclosure: Vox Media is one of several publishers that have signed partnership agreements with OpenAI. Our reporting remains editorially independent.)

Altman isn’t alone. Many major figures in the tech world, from Elon Musk to the “godfather of AI,” Geoffrey Hinton, believe AI will usher a wave of technological unemployment, and basic income will become necessary to keep us all afloat.

On this, I’m conflicted. In general, unconditional cash can be an effective anti-poverty policy, but the extensive list of small experiments and accumulating evidence doesn’t seem to be furthering the case of basic income to becoming a reality. So maybe any press is good press, and all the attention AI leaders are bringing to basic income will help it along.

Spreading the fear of AI stealing all our jobs seems to garner much more enthusiasm for basic income than continually pointing at the evidence. (Just look at Andrew Yang’s 2020 presidential campaign, which cantered on universal basic income as a response to automation.)

But hitching the case for basic income to fears of rapid AI progress makes it far more vulnerable than it needs to be. If there’s no great wave of AI-driven unemployment, if the AI bubble bursts and turns out to be hardly any different than cycles of innovation and technological unemployment in the past, support for basic income would fall, too.

Yet the arguments for some kinds of basic income are strong, no matter what happens with AI. There could be absolutely no further progress, AI could come to a complete and eternal standstill, and the case for basic income would remain as strong as ever: unconditional cash can be a simple and flexible way to style income-support policies that actually reach everyone in need (at the trade-off of higher taxes).

The basic income movement might be better off severing ties with speculations about AI altogether. Then, the conversation could focus on what basic income can actually be: an effective anti-poverty tool that would neither stave off dystopia nor usher in a leisurely paradise, but instead, just a world with less poverty.

News from the largest randomized study of basic income in the US to date

Many cash transfer advocates feel that the movement is overdue to graduate from research to actual policy. But the “Unconditional Income Study,” as this three-year endeavour by the nonprofit Open Research has been dubbed, added some welcome substance to the otherwise slim pile of research on big cash transfers over long periods of time. (Open Research is not affiliated directly with OpenAI, but it grew out of the tech accelerator Y Combinator when Altman ran it, and has received a combined $24 million from Altman and OpenAI’s nonprofit organization.)

The study gave out monthly checks to people between the ages of 21 and 40 living in Texas and Illinois. To qualify, their 2019 household income had to be less than 300 percent of the federal poverty line: that would mean $77,250 for a family of four, or $37,470 for an individual. The average participant’s household income in 2019 was about $30,000. One thousand people were randomized into the treatment group and received the full $1,000 per month, while another 2,000 were part of a control group that got $50 per month.