A Canadian province has joined the growing list of governments that want to experiment
with giving everybody free money. But this isn’t pure utopianism – it could be our
only salvation against a storm of machine productivity that threatens to push the human
species into early retirement.
According to an official 2016 budget outline, the provincial government of Ontario, Canada
– home to almost 14 million people -- wants to run a “pilot project” to test what
happens when you give people what’s known as a “Basic Income.”
Basic Income is a stipend guaranteed to all citizens by the government. You work, you
get it. You don’t work, you get it. Everybody gets money. The appeal to liberals is obvious,
but there are reasons plenty of conservatives actually back it as well. For example, it
may be one way to decisively reduce the size of government, replacing huge, labyrinthine
welfare administrations with a very simple principle: Everybody gets the basic income.
But where does all this cash come from? Fair question. Also, some economists think citizens
who receive free money might simply quit their jobs. This could lead to some people actually
having less money, plus it could decrease the overall productivity of a country’s
economy, which hurts everybody. But then again – we won’t know unless we try it. Plans
to study or implement a basic income are also being discussed in Quebec, plus countries
like Finland, Switzerland and the Netherlands.
Lots of tech industry leaders and artificial intelligence experts have also spoken up about
the basic income. Why? Because their research might be exactly what makes it not just possible,
but necessary. In a 2013 study, Oxford researchers Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne
looked at recent trends in big data, machine learning and mobile robotics, in order to
rank human occupations according to how easy it would be for a machine to steal them.
For example: If you’re a professional choreographer, don't worry, your job is safe. If you’re
a telemarketer, there is a robot standing behind you right now. Frey and Osborne concluded
that 47 percent - 47 percent - of all U.S. jobs were at high risk for being replaced
by machine labor within the next couple of decades.
If we extrapolate trends like these, it’s possible that within the foreseeable future,
most humans won’t be able to do any job that a robot can’t do better and cheaper.
On the plus side, cheap robot labor will create a huge amount of extra wealth. But if that
wealth only accrues to the minority of humans who own the robots, let’s be real:
This is the prequel to Mad Max.
Movie dialogue: "We go in, we kill... [unintelligible]"
That’s where the basic income enters the plot. If machine productivity means that humankind
has access to ridiculous amounts of surplus wealth, but 95% of humans can’t find a paying
job, something like a basic income seems like the only solution.
Of course, we don’t have that superhuman robot workforce just yet. So the big question
is: How will we know when it’s time to start giving everybody free money? Let us know what
you think, and for more stories like this, check in at now.howstuffworks.com every day.