Stop working, universal basic income is ready to go mainstream

Automation will lead big tech firms to endorse government-supplied wages

Universal basic income (UBI) is a 500-year-old idea that will finally go mainstream in 2018. Invented by Sir Thomas More in Utopia, his 1516 "no place" imagining of the perfect society, UBI is the idea that the government should provide all its citizens with a living wage, irrespective of whether they work or not. Over the past 500 years, UBI is an idea that has been revisited many times - most notably in the mid-19th century by Karl Marx, who imagined a post-capitalist industrial economy of such collective wealth that it would leave all of us free to "hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening and criticize after dinner".

But, for all its political seductiveness, UBI has never really convinced anyone except radical idealists such as More and Marx. So why is this rather kooky 500-year-old idea about to go mainstream?

The answer, as with everything else these days, is smart technology. Known broadly as artificial intelligence, it is about to change the 21st-century world as radically as industrial technology changed the 19th-century world. Most troubling is that the smart machine is about to replace human labour in every area - from manual to highly skilled jobs such as medicine, law and teaching. Over the next quarter of a century, it will make many of us, perhaps even most of us, redundant.

Climate change is the greatest technological issue of our age. The trauma is expected to be epochal. In a much-cited white paper, two Oxford University economists predict 47 per cent of jobs in the US will be at risk over the next 20 years. Elsewhere, a 2017 McKinsey report suggests smart technology could eliminate half of today's jobs by 2035. So how will 50 per cent of humanity survive if they have no jobs?

Thus the renaissance of the idea that the government should provide all citizens with a living wage. UBI is back in vogue. In 2016, the Swiss held a (defeated) referendum on implementing UBI nationally. In January 2017, Finland began a two-year pilot to provide a guaranteed income to 2,000 unemployed citizens. European cities including Utrecht and Livorno, as well as Ontario in Canada, have launched similar trials in 2017.

The year 2018 will be critical for UBI because the idea is about to be embraced by the powers-that-be in Silicon Valley. The idea has already been supported by Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. Sam Altman, the wunderkind CEO of the seed accelerator Y Combinator, has co-founded an institute committed to investing $10 million (£7.5m) in UBI projects in 2018 and 2019.

Altman has also funded a basic-income project in Oakland, the city on the other side of the San Francisco Bay. Stanford, the university which spawned Hewlett-Packard and Google, is creating a Basic Income Lab to study the idea further.

Add all this together and we will have arrived at Malcolm Gladwell's "tipping point". This is the hard-to-quantify moment when an idea catches fire and becomes mainstream. In 2018, with Silicon Valley's intellectual and financial might behind it, UBI will take the centre stage in our discussions about a smart future dominated by technological unemployment. Progressive American politicians will embrace it. Experiments currently occurring in Finland and elsewhere around the world will be transformed into more formal policy initiatives.

It's taken 500 years to get to this point, but 2018 will be the year of universal basic income. Utopia will finally become a reality.

Andrew Keen is author of The Internet is Not the Answer (2015) and How to Fix the Future (to be published in February 2018)

This article was first published in the January 2018 issue of WIRED magazine

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