In 2018, in this paper, I made the case that Basic Income was urgently needed, but to be politically viable, implemented at a meaningful financial level, and worth doing to help our civilization solve many problems urgently needing help, it needed to be combined with a requirement to give back to society.
With AI now coming for white collar jobs at a rapid pace, the paper’s arguments are more urgent than ever. But the extreme BI position that financial compensation must be unconditional, and that any requirement for societal giveback would be equivalent to a workfare slave economy, remains the biggest barrier to any meaningful progress. Year after year after year. Something needs to change.
Combining BI with a modest level of societal giveback, say 24 hours a week, would make it politically viable: we could actually implement it. It would enable it to get to a meaningful level, say $70K a year. And most importantly of all, it would provide a mechanism to provide human capital for the many urgent societal needs, starting with health, education, and the environment, with no capitalist business model.
We need a movement around a socially beneficial BI, which I am calling SBBI to give it a short hand name. This is really, really, really urgent. Ideally, many mainstream BI supporters would join the movement for an SBBI, and push it over the political hump.
I am going to try and create such a movement. If you are interested, please read the paper, and let me know by sending me an email at sbbi (at) gmail dot com.
On a related note, while I believe AI can be a huge help in automating work and freeing up human capital, I am also certain that it will never be able to feel emotion, feel suffering or love, understand the difference between right and wrong, or be truly concious in a meaningful sense. If you thing through the details, it turns out the brain and analytical power is not the big difference between humans and AI, it is our nervous system, a profoundly biological construction, immersively integrating us with the universe. I expand on this in my paper The Human Biological Advantage Over AI, available in PDF here and online here.