AI leaders have long championed a universal basic income.
Most basic income pilot programs range from $500 to $1,500 a month, no strings attached.
Former OpenAI researcher Miles Brundage said those numbers should be much higher.
Would you be interested in a $10,000 monthly check with no strings attached?
That’s a reality that former OpenAI researcher Miles Brundage said could be possible in the age of AI.
Tech leaders have long called for a universal basic income, or UBI, to offset job loss due to artificial intelligence.
A universal basic income is generally considered a monthly government stipend for the entire population. It differs from the guaranteed basic income programs that many cities and states are experimenting with these days. Those typically provide recurring payments to a specific population based on socioeconomic status. So far, most of these experiments have offered cash payments between $500 and $1,500 a month.
Brundage said on X this week, however, that policymakers should be thinking bigger.
“I think that a significantly more generous UBI experiment than has been tried so far (say, $10k/month vs. $1k/month) would show big effects,” he wrote.
Brundage said this would be possible due to the impacts AI will have on the economy.
“$1k/month is relevant to what’s feasible policy-wise today,” Brundage said. “$10k/month is relevant to what will be feasible policy-wise in a few years with AI-enabled growth.”
AI Advancements are already threatening some entry-level jobs. Many AI industry leaders, including Elon Musk, have championed basic income programs. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman helped fund one of the largest basic income studies, which gave recipients $1,000 monthly for three years.
Brundage resigned as OpenAI’s senior policy advisor and head of the AGI readiness team in 2024. In a blog post at the time, he said labor disruptions caused by AI was top of mind for him.
“In the near-term, I worry a lot about AI disrupting opportunities for people who desperately want work, but I think it’s simultaneously true that humanity should eventually remove the obligation to work for a living and that doing so is one of the strongest arguments for building AI and AGI in the first place,” Brundage wrote.
Brundage said our current systems aren’t prepared to address that reality right now.
“That is not something we’re prepared for politically, culturally, or otherwise, and needs to be part of the policy conversation. A naive shift toward a post-work world risks civilizational stagnation (see: WALL-E), and much more thought and debate about this is needed,” he said.
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