I wonder if UBI might be an admittedly dark and cynical way to facilitate a possible AI transition. If e.g. full self driving for trucks is perfected in the US within the next three years and more than six million truckers loose their job at once, there is realistically no way to retrain this cohort. Using taxes on AI revenue to facilitate (somewhat universal) BI for that group, together with very liberal drug policies might keep social peace. Granted, not a satisfying live, but preferable to the alternatives...
What could possibly by dark and cynical about that? This is the only way we can possibly deal with mass unemployment.
Also, 6 million people forced to spend their waking lives driving trucks is not a good thing. The thing that's good about that is the income they get from it. If we create enough wealth to give them the income without the truck driving... We won? That's the goal here. That's what the economy is _for_. Employment is the way the economy has always achieved that, but it doesn't meant employment is the goal, it's a means to an end.
Your point is optimistic and consistent, I won't criticize it.
But you should know that it's a fairly narrow, political, and controversial thing to say that the purpose of the economy is to support people during unemployment crises. In fact it's so axiomatic that I really think it's worth calling out as part of the assumed solution not an obvious and foundational truth.
It’s not the purpose of the economy, it’s the purpose of civilization.
What makes us different than most types of animals is that we’re capable of supporting the less fortunate members of our species even through life-threatening situations.
I can agree with that. But don't assume it's without its own controversy. Maybe the point of civilization is to allow people to help eachother. Maybe they should be forced to under threat of violence. There's a massive spectrum of "solutions" between those two, and UBI could be considered pretty close to forcing, depending on how it's implemented.
The purpose of civilisation (or rather, why it exists in first place) is that “civilized” peoples managed to survive longer and reproduce more and produce better means to take over the land of those who didn’t adopt technology.
Now we are going to see if there is a limit or not. Or if AI changes the game (the dystopian end game is a small amount of people controlling all the production and getting rid of the rest by one way or another)
On the contrary, since truckers also mostly all own guns, they have a lot of political leverage. Everyone knows this; in the US at least. Andrew Wang stated as much in a cnbc interview a few months ago.
>On the contrary, since truckers also mostly all own guns, they have a lot of political leverage. Everyone knows this; in the US at least.
What everyone knows is that American gun owners voted in the system that's eating them alive and that they don't care as long as that system doesn't touch their guns.
So they can just keep shooting watermelons in their backyards and being keyboard warriors on the internet, for as much as their "leverage" matters.
Some trucking is warehouse to warehouse, but a lot of trucking is warehouse to point or point to point where the points are building without a loading dock, or specialized equipment is required to load unload; fork lifts, conveyer systems etc. ok your truck can drive, if 50% of deliveries or pickup’s require a human, what is the gain? Surely there are workarounds like Uber for forklifts, but that’s “extra” capability that doesn’t exist yet.
> Using taxes on AI revenue to facilitate
This why Altman et al talk about taxing ai agents. Then they aren’t paying for it, but their customers are. We should all keep in mind that the oligarchs have never willing shared the benefit of decades of productivity gains. Why would they now?
It seems like truck drivers don’t do the unloading job you’re talking about. The receiving company does it.
That’s not always the case, I know that small trucks like plumbing supply houses, hardware stores, and sod companies will pull the pallet from the truck for you, but I would guess that isn’t typically for your average 18-wheeler.
Somewhere it doesn't occur to you that most people have other skills than doing exactly their day job at a basic level? And that skills can be transfered to other occupations?
Just like a programmer can switch between programming languages without having to re-learn all basic concepts of computing, so people with other occupations can transfer a large part of their knowledge to other sectors.
But that can be hard to grasp in a world where every person is either a supremely intelligent hacker or a trucker or "welder and pipe fitter and whatnot".
I was thinking that everyone would suddenly become a "truck driver" overnight, just so they can sign up for the free money.
We need to keep in mind the scope and scale of the environments in which this UBI experiment is being tried in.
The temporary success or failure of the UBI experiment seems entirely dependent on whether the country is a major currency, a manufacturing base, a service oriented economy, etc, etc, etc. and it doesn't seem likely to work for everyone, or for any individual small nation for an indefinite period of time.
> there is realistically no way to retrain this cohort. [truck drivers]
I disagree. They had to attend class and pass a test to get a CDL. They were trained to drive a truck, they can be trained to perform another task. Truck drivers are not lobotomized.
> I was thinking that everyone would suddenly become a "truck driver" overnight, just so they can sign up for the free money.
The U in UBI stands for universal. That means that former truck drivers (aka the unemployed) get it but also everyone else to include CEOs making millions. The expectation is that those with other income will give back their UBI and then some via taxes.
This is better than policies that create stupid incentives like in your example.
They aren't, but if you look at retraining programs in coal country, you don't see a whole lot of success. So, while I'm sure mass retraining is theoretically possible, do we examples of where it's actually worked?
Related point - if the truck drivers aren't where the new jobs are located, that doesn't work. We should subsidize their move (via increased taxes on AI or corporations or whatever) but like WV, we probably won't. Assuming they even want to move.
People in "coal country" who can't get a job in a mine, do something other than mining. Hunger is a powerful motivator.
A $10 a month cell phone plan is all it takes to get 24/7 access to all the worlds information, and AI's intelligent queries into it.
And yes, you will have millions who never learn how to use said information to their own benefit, but we've known for awhile that poverty is a behaviorial problem as much as it is a resource problem.
Sure, let's blame the economically displaced, not the billionaires who displaced them. Giving some serious "she wore a short skirt and had it coming" vibes.
> I disagree. They had to attend class and pass a test to get a CDL. They were trained to drive a truck, they can be trained to perform another task. Truck drivers are not lobotomized.
I don't think the difficulty is with the drivers, more with the logistics of retraining them all at once. As a cohort they came up through their class and training nicely spread out over, what, a 40 year period? Making sure there are that many training spaces for other trades over a much more condensed period is non-trivial.
> I don't think the difficulty is with the drivers, more with the logistics of retraining them all at once.
The only events that happen "all at once" are in our heads as hypotheticals.
In the real world, every change takes time to propagate.
It stands to reason, all of the "experts" of the world are going to be in less demand than they were before, because some percentage of people, will replace them with AI, for some percentage of tasks.
Stated another way, each of us will be consulting with AI more, and assigning some number of tasks to a non-expert, with the help of expertise from AI, and talking to human experts less frequently.
Interactions will decrease in frequency. In the commercial space, this means transactions will decrease in number and amount. This is "bad" for everyone, in the financial sense. Corporations lose revenues, governments lose revenues, employees get pay cuts, etc.
But downward trajectories on financial charts have been a problem for every fiat based economy we know of, long before AI came into the picture. The only thing people universally agree upon when sales, taxes, salaries, etc start going down, is that "confusion" is the first response, followed shortly by "panic", followed by "doing something to fix it" followed by "pretending it worked, even if it didn't."
Maybe AI will teach the world what to do when the charts turn down instead of up.
Infinite growth doesn't exist in a closed ecosystem, and we arent expanding into space yet.
For decades magazines and other media have promoted the idea that some day, technology will relieve us of the base burden of existence, and free us to do all those wonderful leisure activities we enjoy.
Now that AI seems to be able to deliver on the promise, the thing we seem to fear the most is the deflation of our own egos.
A conversation with an AI agent carries as little as $0.00 transactional cost, with a few cents in electricity expense, after the small fixed capital outlay for the computer.
A conversation with a consultant costs $200 an hour, and benefits taxing authorities, gas stations, phone companies, etc etc etc.
Again, it stands to reason, if we replace an expensive form of communication, with one that is almost free, that people are going to use it, and all those "expenses" they save on, were someone elses income.
The end game ... most of us will adapt, and some of us will self destruct during that process, and in 1 or 2 generations, everything will be "normal" again, and AI will be taken for granted, and we'll all be worrying about the new crisis.
Jobs are not a zero sum equation. Six million unemployed workers, means six million units of production looking for an outlet that was not previously feasible due to a shortage of available labor
Will we say the same thing about the 4 million software jobs? When we're doing landscaping work in our 40s for 1/10 our past salary is that improved economic efficiency at it's finest?
Sorry, spatial intelligence and embodiment is coming for those jobs too. But if you are making “a 10x salary” today then it’s probably a good idea to prepare for an early retirement. An opportunity never afforded to the old folks currently doing those 1x salary jobs.
As a software engineer who is working on retiring to a small farm somewhere, I have no problem with the prospect of living on 10% of my former income, assuming, the other 90% of my income used to be spent on obtaining resources that I now can obtain for myself or no longer need.
In other words, if I can do more for myself, I require less interaction with commercial and governmental institutions.
Since money is a form of communication, if I am conducting fewer financial transactions because I am solving problems on my own, my standard of living doesn't necessarily decline with reduced income.
Long term, sure, but those newly-feasible jobs don't pop into existence in a day, or even a year. Short term, they flood the labor market and suppress wages.
This doesn't sound terribly different from eg Alaska's Permanent Fund payouts? The main difference seems to be that PF payments fluctuate a lot, while the Marshalls plan seems to be a fixed, predictable sum.
It is very similar but works differently. Also the two programs do not have the same intent.
The US has a Compact of Free Assocation (COFA) with the Marshall Islands, which provides a lot of the funds for this. Versus Alaska where it is paid for by natural resource extraction. All that said, it is the government of the Marshall Islands making the decision to pay it out this way.
From the US point of view, this is a good program because it incentivizes people from the Marshall Islands to stay put rather than emigrate to the US mainland (which they have a right to do under the COFA).
>From the US point of view, this is a good program because it incentivizes people from the Marshall Islands to stay put rather than emigrate to the US mainland
Why is this a good thing? Naively, as an American citizen, I would rather have someone emigrate and work in America where they can provide additional labor to the mainland economy
The US is competing with China in the Pacific. Keeping those islands healthily populated by USA-sympathizers helps maintains overall US influence in the region.
While what's good for a tiny island might not be good for the gander, I like the attached cost analysis of a negative income tax. The author points out that this might be a more practical way to deliver a basic income, and more amenable to both sides of the argument.
And at more or less no greater cost than the welfare system at time of writing. I wonder how the numbers would shake out now?
It can be called whatever someone wants and it can be delivered various ways, but its still functionally the same thing.
Headlines latch on to the term UBI, and people largely are parrots so they argue about UBI specifically as well, but at the end of the day the question is whether its a good and sustainable idea for the government to decide what our basic necessities are then pay us so we can buy them.
You just mean food stamps, right? We already have that in the US.
I often see people in my area chest that program. I know when food stamps were sent out or refilled because multiple people are at Walmart with a cart full of sodas. They buy as many as they can and sell it to friends or family to have the cash instead.
> because multiple people are at Walmart with a cart full of sodas. They buy as many as they can and sell it to friends or family to have the cash instead.
Some do that, yes - not everybody can (eg: small communities, limited travel, few people with cash that want to buy basics)
If my tax dollars have to pay for war crimes and the Epstein memorial ballroom then I'd happily pay for people to be able to eat, drink and live. I sure as hell don't trust corporations and the "free market" to ensure the common welfare.
I believe that governments have an obligation to their citizens beyond simply taxation and violence, and that the social contract goes both ways. I understand that I'm in the minority of Americans in this belief.
The government should have an obligation to not waste our money. Let's start with balancing the budget, letting elected Congress again hold the purse stings and war responsibilities, then we can talk about more spending.
I can't justify more debt spending because we already waste money on stuff I disagree with.
The US has by far the lowest spending (fed + state + local) among the major advanced economies in the world. [1]
The US also has by far the lowest taxes (fed + state + local) among them too; in fact, the US could have raised taxes by more than 15% and still been lowest. [2]
Regardless, if someone does believe spending should be cut:
A) What specifically should be cut, and
B) What % of the 11.5T/y [3] gov spending does it add up to?
In practice every time someone goes to Washington to "clean house" the first things to get gutted are welfare and funding for science and research, because unfortunately a lot of Americans consider all of that to be waste. Never the military, never the police, never the pork.
I'm not arguing that the federal government can't be required to balance the budget. I'm arguing that cutting social spending and science and research in order to balance the budget should not be allowed, and that social spending shouldn't be contingent on a balanced budget.
One caveat I don't think they understand, especially within a tropical environment, is retirees. Anywhere resembling FL and handing UBI out will slowly become flooded with old couples and retirees. Florida 2.0 if you will.
Someone should survey our lands to find naturally-occuring billionaires to exploit. Billionaires are the next oil- green oil if you will! They practicially grow on trees.
Edit: LoganDark4 replied but I got an error when submitting my reply to them, so including here:
> Even the smallest crappiest studios in most areas exceed $800/mo. Then you also have utilities and food before you even approach comfortable living.
Multiple percent of the population in the small Pacific country we're discussing lives on <$3/day (<$90/mo).
> Universal basic income means something you can live on.… UBI means you don't need external support to sustain comfortable living. That's its entire purpose.
From the very first paragraph of the link you replied to: "If the level is sufficient to meet a person's basic needs (i.e., at or above the poverty line), it is considered a full basic income; if it is less than that amount, it is called a partial basic income."
This page https://wage.is/marshall-islands/ claims the average is US$168000 per year and the median US$9600 per year. [My guess is that the poverty line is close to US$5000 per year, probably higher.] This program adds US$800 per year. So it's a "universal partial basic income" instead of a "universal total basic income".
In all the discussion I remember, "universal basic income" == "universal total basic income" but perhaps I was not paying too much attention.
Your link is to the term universal. From the reporting, this payment goes to all citizens including children. Perhaps you could more clearly state your objection?
No, I don't know what you mean - is your objection that people who aren't from the Marshall Islands don't receive it? UBI going to citizens as opposed to others seems to be very common: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income
And there is no need for insults.
No, I don't know what you mean - is your objection that people who aren't from the Marshall Islands don't receive it? UBI going to citizens as opposed to others seems to be very common: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income
And there is no need for insults.
Also, 6 million people forced to spend their waking lives driving trucks is not a good thing. The thing that's good about that is the income they get from it. If we create enough wealth to give them the income without the truck driving... We won? That's the goal here. That's what the economy is _for_. Employment is the way the economy has always achieved that, but it doesn't meant employment is the goal, it's a means to an end.
That or something like the Public Works Administration (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Works_Administration).
(And you get infrastructure out of it.)
But you should know that it's a fairly narrow, political, and controversial thing to say that the purpose of the economy is to support people during unemployment crises. In fact it's so axiomatic that I really think it's worth calling out as part of the assumed solution not an obvious and foundational truth.
What makes us different than most types of animals is that we’re capable of supporting the less fortunate members of our species even through life-threatening situations.
Now we are going to see if there is a limit or not. Or if AI changes the game (the dystopian end game is a small amount of people controlling all the production and getting rid of the rest by one way or another)
What everyone knows is that American gun owners voted in the system that's eating them alive and that they don't care as long as that system doesn't touch their guns.
So they can just keep shooting watermelons in their backyards and being keyboard warriors on the internet, for as much as their "leverage" matters.
> Using taxes on AI revenue to facilitate
This why Altman et al talk about taxing ai agents. Then they aren’t paying for it, but their customers are. We should all keep in mind that the oligarchs have never willing shared the benefit of decades of productivity gains. Why would they now?
That’s not always the case, I know that small trucks like plumbing supply houses, hardware stores, and sod companies will pull the pallet from the truck for you, but I would guess that isn’t typically for your average 18-wheeler.
Certainly, they're after all just stupid truckers and not supremely intelligent hackers. I mean, do they even know how to sudo their Kubernetes!?
I’m sure they’ll love starting from scratch as basically an apprentice making beans compared to their previous wage
Just like a programmer can switch between programming languages without having to re-learn all basic concepts of computing, so people with other occupations can transfer a large part of their knowledge to other sectors.
But that can be hard to grasp in a world where every person is either a supremely intelligent hacker or a trucker or "welder and pipe fitter and whatnot".
We need to keep in mind the scope and scale of the environments in which this UBI experiment is being tried in.
The temporary success or failure of the UBI experiment seems entirely dependent on whether the country is a major currency, a manufacturing base, a service oriented economy, etc, etc, etc. and it doesn't seem likely to work for everyone, or for any individual small nation for an indefinite period of time.
> there is realistically no way to retrain this cohort. [truck drivers]
I disagree. They had to attend class and pass a test to get a CDL. They were trained to drive a truck, they can be trained to perform another task. Truck drivers are not lobotomized.
The U in UBI stands for universal. That means that former truck drivers (aka the unemployed) get it but also everyone else to include CEOs making millions. The expectation is that those with other income will give back their UBI and then some via taxes.
This is better than policies that create stupid incentives like in your example.
I wasn't aware that I promoted a policy. Can you point it out for me ?
Related point - if the truck drivers aren't where the new jobs are located, that doesn't work. We should subsidize their move (via increased taxes on AI or corporations or whatever) but like WV, we probably won't. Assuming they even want to move.
You let them retrain themselves.
People in "coal country" who can't get a job in a mine, do something other than mining. Hunger is a powerful motivator.
A $10 a month cell phone plan is all it takes to get 24/7 access to all the worlds information, and AI's intelligent queries into it.
And yes, you will have millions who never learn how to use said information to their own benefit, but we've known for awhile that poverty is a behaviorial problem as much as it is a resource problem.
No they don't, they vote for someone to open up the mines again and keep the immigrants away.
I don't think the difficulty is with the drivers, more with the logistics of retraining them all at once. As a cohort they came up through their class and training nicely spread out over, what, a 40 year period? Making sure there are that many training spaces for other trades over a much more condensed period is non-trivial.
The only events that happen "all at once" are in our heads as hypotheticals.
In the real world, every change takes time to propagate.
It stands to reason, all of the "experts" of the world are going to be in less demand than they were before, because some percentage of people, will replace them with AI, for some percentage of tasks.
Stated another way, each of us will be consulting with AI more, and assigning some number of tasks to a non-expert, with the help of expertise from AI, and talking to human experts less frequently.
Interactions will decrease in frequency. In the commercial space, this means transactions will decrease in number and amount. This is "bad" for everyone, in the financial sense. Corporations lose revenues, governments lose revenues, employees get pay cuts, etc.
But downward trajectories on financial charts have been a problem for every fiat based economy we know of, long before AI came into the picture. The only thing people universally agree upon when sales, taxes, salaries, etc start going down, is that "confusion" is the first response, followed shortly by "panic", followed by "doing something to fix it" followed by "pretending it worked, even if it didn't."
Maybe AI will teach the world what to do when the charts turn down instead of up.
Infinite growth doesn't exist in a closed ecosystem, and we arent expanding into space yet.
For decades magazines and other media have promoted the idea that some day, technology will relieve us of the base burden of existence, and free us to do all those wonderful leisure activities we enjoy.
Now that AI seems to be able to deliver on the promise, the thing we seem to fear the most is the deflation of our own egos.
A conversation with an AI agent carries as little as $0.00 transactional cost, with a few cents in electricity expense, after the small fixed capital outlay for the computer.
A conversation with a consultant costs $200 an hour, and benefits taxing authorities, gas stations, phone companies, etc etc etc.
Again, it stands to reason, if we replace an expensive form of communication, with one that is almost free, that people are going to use it, and all those "expenses" they save on, were someone elses income.
The end game ... most of us will adapt, and some of us will self destruct during that process, and in 1 or 2 generations, everything will be "normal" again, and AI will be taken for granted, and we'll all be worrying about the new crisis.
Will we say the same thing about the 4 million software jobs? When we're doing landscaping work in our 40s for 1/10 our past salary is that improved economic efficiency at it's finest?
In other words, if I can do more for myself, I require less interaction with commercial and governmental institutions.
Since money is a form of communication, if I am conducting fewer financial transactions because I am solving problems on my own, my standard of living doesn't necessarily decline with reduced income.
The US has a Compact of Free Assocation (COFA) with the Marshall Islands, which provides a lot of the funds for this. Versus Alaska where it is paid for by natural resource extraction. All that said, it is the government of the Marshall Islands making the decision to pay it out this way.
From the US point of view, this is a good program because it incentivizes people from the Marshall Islands to stay put rather than emigrate to the US mainland (which they have a right to do under the COFA).
Why is this a good thing? Naively, as an American citizen, I would rather have someone emigrate and work in America where they can provide additional labor to the mainland economy
And at more or less no greater cost than the welfare system at time of writing. I wonder how the numbers would shake out now?
https://martin-farley.medium.com/how-a-negative-income-tax-c...
We almost have that with the earned income tax credit. The catch is you have to work: https://www.irs.gov/credits-deductions/individuals/earned-in...
If you have negative income tax and you create 0 taxable value, how much do you receive?
Headlines latch on to the term UBI, and people largely are parrots so they argue about UBI specifically as well, but at the end of the day the question is whether its a good and sustainable idea for the government to decide what our basic necessities are then pay us so we can buy them.
> then pay us so we can buy them.
If a government pays out money then people can buy whatever they chose, not just food, clothing, and shelter.
Some governments have implemented schemes that issue variations on constrained cards (not generic money) that can only be used to obtain "necessities"
I often see people in my area chest that program. I know when food stamps were sent out or refilled because multiple people are at Walmart with a cart full of sodas. They buy as many as they can and sell it to friends or family to have the cash instead.
A variation of.
> We already have that in the US.
Dandy. It's different to cash.
> because multiple people are at Walmart with a cart full of sodas. They buy as many as they can and sell it to friends or family to have the cash instead.
Some do that, yes - not everybody can (eg: small communities, limited travel, few people with cash that want to buy basics)
I believe that governments have an obligation to their citizens beyond simply taxation and violence, and that the social contract goes both ways. I understand that I'm in the minority of Americans in this belief.
I can't justify more debt spending because we already waste money on stuff I disagree with.
The US also has by far the lowest taxes (fed + state + local) among them too; in fact, the US could have raised taxes by more than 15% and still been lowest. [2]
Regardless, if someone does believe spending should be cut:
A) What specifically should be cut, and
B) What % of the 11.5T/y [3] gov spending does it add up to?
[1] https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WEO/weo-database/2025/Ap...
[2] https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WEO/weo-database/2025/ap...
[3] https://www.bea.gov/data/government/receipts-and-expenditure...
In practice every time someone goes to Washington to "clean house" the first things to get gutted are welfare and funding for science and research, because unfortunately a lot of Americans consider all of that to be waste. Never the military, never the police, never the pork.
The freeloader problem will devour this when some fanatic tries with a substantial population.
Which word(s)? From the reports I've seen, it's available to all citizens, and it's one of the 2 kinds of UBI. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income
Edit: LoganDark4 replied but I got an error when submitting my reply to them, so including here:
> Even the smallest crappiest studios in most areas exceed $800/mo. Then you also have utilities and food before you even approach comfortable living.
Multiple percent of the population in the small Pacific country we're discussing lives on <$3/day (<$90/mo).
> Universal basic income means something you can live on.… UBI means you don't need external support to sustain comfortable living. That's its entire purpose.
From the very first paragraph of the link you replied to: "If the level is sufficient to meet a person's basic needs (i.e., at or above the poverty line), it is considered a full basic income; if it is less than that amount, it is called a partial basic income."
Details aren't as sexy as the headline would lead one to believe.
This UBI is 37% of the poverty line, and the % living in poverty has dropped from 7.2% to 1.3%. https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/0997063042125181...
In all the discussion I remember, "universal basic income" == "universal total basic income" but perhaps I was not paying too much attention.
This payment is 37% of the poverty line. Poverty has been reduced from 7.2% to 1.3%. https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/0997063042125181...