Universal Basic Income

“I think it will have to happen, and I think probably as companies will get more efficient and probably they will need less people working for them. Probably they will get taxed more to make sure that we can distribute universal income to everybody.”

“Like, I don't see another scenario if this trend were to continue, these companies will have to be nationalized in one way or another. And then maybe some form of UBI, like universal basic income.”

“My take is that we already have universal basic income. It's called knowledge work. And I don't exclude my job from it, but if you really look about at what do we actually need to live and like to be content, it is a lot less than we've built this hierarchy. A…”

“Unless, you know, there's those who say that if you could create a universal basic income, somehow you would solve for this. I don't think this is about income alone. I think this is about productive use of your mind and feeling that you're a part of society i…”

“I think democratic ownership is the solution to how we deal with AI. The idea that everyone wants to get, like, universal basic income, I think that's a horrible idea, but universal basic ownership, I feel like that is magic.”

“I don't think humans, as much as people like Dario, who I respect a lot, might say, like, well, we're just gonna give everybody a check and, like, everybody will just kind of live off universal basic income. I just don't think humans are wired to just collect …”

“Generally, people hate the concept of universal basic income. It feels something for nothing. People like earned income tax credits. People like child tax credits. There's a framing element to it.”

“I'm a supporter and I don't mean this politically, but the concept of universal basic income, which actually goes very nicely with an AI driven world where it's like, you know, my vision is something simple.”

“Where I disagree with my friends on the right is I just don't think that's what's going to happen. I mean, I could be wrong, but I just don't think that's what's happening. It hasn't happened yet. I don't think that's what's going to happen.”

“The unlocked AI is UBI, Universal Basic Income. It's like Andrew Yang, I think, was absolutely right about this.”

“I don't want, I think I personally, unfortunately, I think we are headed toward at least for many people, some version of UBI.”

“Again, I don't see the evidence that it's moving in a very big direction just because the deficits are already so large for these countries.”

“I expect that like social support or redistribution or whatever you want to call it will increase over time as society gets richer and as sort of the technological landscape shifts. I don't know what way it's going to happen and I expect in different countries…”

“If all human wages go to zero or go below subsistence, then the only way to deal with that is through some kind of UBI rather than, you know, if you happen to sue open AI, you get a trillion dollar settlement. Otherwise you're kind of screwed.”

“In a future world with explosive growth, we're going to see so many new kinds of goods and services that will be possible that are not available today. And so distributing just like a basket of goods is just inferior to saying, oh, if like we solve aging, here…”

“My hot take is there's already a reasonable amount of UBI, and it's just in the form of, you know, companies employing people that the job is either zero productive or counterproductive. And so like, that's actually like a form of it that, that already happens…”

“UBI Crucially separates, like, untethers one's contribution from one's reward. And I don't mean this in a kind of moralistic way, like we need contributors. I think we do need contributors, but I mean that the price mechanism in markets is the thing that tells…”

“I believe that's gonna happen. Again, the big question is, is when is it gonna be? I don't think it's gonna be next five years. It's not going to be, maybe it's going to be next 10 years if you really see a broad adoption of these technologies, more likely may…”

“I think the problem is that while most people complain about their jobs. It does give them meaning. It does give them meaning to be a valuable part of society and to have earned something that they can then give to their family, to their kids, and so on. And s…”

“I don't buy UBI, by the way. I think that is fundamentally lacking. You don't? No, humanity requires purpose. If you remove, if you add UBI, you remove purpose. And people say, oh, we're going to fish and we're going to paint. I promise you that is not how hum…”

“The degree to which we effectively had different forms of UBI or universal basic income in different sectors of the economy. Government is a clear example where there's enormous waste, fraud, grift, et cetera, happening. Parts of academia, if you just look at …”

“I almost feel like it is the only solution to prevent mass revolution. Because people are going to lose their jobs.”

“It doesn't make sense to do socialism in a two percent GDP growth economy. You need to get to 10% GDP growth, and that's like where all the AGI socialists come from, is they say, hey look, yeah, like UBI sounds crazy now, but when we're growing GDP 10%, there'…”

“I don't think this replaces all software. I don't think people are going to be sitting around jobless and need UBI. I don't think You know, I don't think that, that all software just goes away. Someone said that this is the new operating system. I don't think …”

“So it's great to kind of confirm at least my intuition, which is that UBI is a wonderful idea that I think doesn't really understand how humans are both motivated and wired.”

“Our results in that come out very soon. I just, it was a five-year study that wrapped up or started five years ago.”

“There was a program that was done with homeless people, I think in California recently, and they gave them like 500 dollars, no questions asked per month for like a year. And at the end of the study, if they made the assumption, some people made an assumption …”

“We have UBI for Native Americans. It's called the reservation system, and it's horrible. And, you know, it's 65,000 dollars a year a piece, and it does not do anything.”

“And the reservation system is essentially UBI. It's 65,000 dollars a year, I believe, per resident.”

“Without the UBI wouldn't have happened. A lot of things wouldn't have happened. I think it's a phenomenal change in technology landscape itself because of that.”

“I think it's a bad idea to pay people to not work. I think we're running an experiment in this country right now to pay a lot of people not to work, and, you know, it's sort of a big catastrophic mistake.”

“And so we probably will have some version of universal basic income. Coming down as more robots and AIs come online”

“The rate of UBI not necessarily being the same, but the thinking of the world has to go in this direction together, because if country A remains Overtly capitalistic and competitive, where company, country B goes to the UBI way, it'll cross discrepancies in th…”

“My optimistic expectation is productivity goes up across the world, across the board. UBI comes into play. UBI brings some kind of equanimity across the world.”

“And Susan, my wife and I have been long-term advocates for universal basic income. We are funding a universal basic income trial in the city of Hudson in the state of New York. And we've contributed to other universal basic income campaigns and trials.”

“What you do is you kick out the bottom rungs of the ladder of economic success when you basically pay able-bodied people not to work. I mean, they need those entry-level jobs that may not pay much better than the UBI are an important stepping stone to where th…”

“If you all of a sudden let people opt out of it, then it's going to be a very it's what they're not going to realize is by the time they get old enough where they will want to have some kind of purpose. It'll be too late because then activating yourself in you…”

“I do think this other idea I heard was better, which was what if you got a birth dividend? So let's say every U S citizen, when you're born the government or whoever puts 2500 dollars in your account. Could be 2500 or 5000 dollars, something like that. So from…”

“I do think things like universal basic income and whatnot are going to have to come up more and more in this conversation because well, okay, it's an existential threat to our democracy.”

“The notion of some sort of flatlined or even flatlined and inflation adjusted basic income level for a large number of people will inevitably result in kind of what we're trying to prevent, which is, you know, some sort of decay, societal decay.”

“Well, I don't, it doesn't matter whether you're a Democrat or a Republican, you should fight for UBI instead of fighting for minimum wage.”

“We could actually be paying for a 2000 dollar a month fully universal basic income for the amount of money that the, in, in, in the Fed is doing in one week.”

“If you enable people to actually move from cities to rural areas, And it would even make sense to do that because your, you know, thousand dollars or 2000 dollars or whatever it is, is going to go further in those lower cost of living areas. Then again, you're…”

“So if you do that, and then if you're going to do a thousand dollars per month per person, and you're going to go to citizens in the United States, then it's a little over three trillion dollars. That's the gross cost.”

“Charles Murray's plan is to actually cash out everything and just provide people this universal basic income, and it actually, it was asked of economists if they would approve of that, and, like, it was virtually, like, no economist approved of that approach”

“The only reason we're talking about UBI like we are right now to the degree that we are is because of this crisis.”

“I think it's really important that we have a fully universal amount, especially right now. Because of this not knowing The situations that people are in.”

“This actually passed the U.S. House of Representatives twice in 1971 and almost became law under Nixon.”

“True. If I'm gonna just say true or false, true.”

“I'm of the belief of you have to go to one or the other extreme. You can't kind of put one foot in the water here. So either you give everybody zero and you just say, we are not going to give money. We are not even going to go down that path and people need to…”

“Universal basic income will not give those benefits. It'll only feed the physical needs.”

“And a disruption of the economy, say by the rise of AI, will require a global solution. And most people who think about universal basic income, they think in national terms. Universal for them means US citizens.”

“So I would say, first of all, it's kind of an unnecessary link and it's sort of a damaging way of thinking about things.”

“If you have universal basic income, the things you tend to strive for tend to be bigger. That's actually a reason that a lot of the startups coming out of the Nordics are aiming big, which is we don't need to aim small.”

“The basic income, which is the idea of everybody getting enough money to be able to cover basic needs such as food, clothing, shelter I believe is what's necessary to make people free economic actors in the labor market, and I think that's essential for innova…”

“And one of the criticisms that people raise is, well, who will do these sort of dirty jobs? And I think the answer to that is it means that the price that has to get paid for somebody to say clean bathrooms will go up. And that's a good thing because when the …”

“I think the biggest challenge to getting to basic income is purely a intellectual and cultural challenge that has to do with Having constructed a system for over a hundred years or so, or several generations that, you know, has a specific perception of how the…”

“I don't actually know what Tim Draper's view is on it, but I think there's no possible way that it won't happen.”