How should we pay the bills after AI kills all jobs? Perhaps some kind of basic income?
This question – however absurd – keeps popping up. Netopia covered it first time twelve years ago, but let’s look at it again. First, let’s accept for a moment that the assumption that jobs will go away is correct. No jobs, mass unemployment, great opportunity of fulfilling all our life goals as AI will do all the boring work. But how to pay the bills? Why can’t the government just pay us a minimum income to cover our basic needs? Let’s say 2000 Euros per month. If anyone wants to make more, they can do some work (yeah, except AI took all jobs).
Question 1 – where should all that money come from? Let’s take my home country Sweden. 11 Million citizens, let’s just assume everyone gets the payout including children and retirees. That is (2000*12*11=) 264 Billion Euros per annum. Some of that can be deducted as many groups receive cash benefits that won’t be necessary. Total transactions for things like unemployment benefits, parent support and others in Sweden’s state budget is around €30 Bn. (There is also some similar funding from local municipalities budgets, but I don’t have access to those numbers so let’s just assume it’s not significant). This would bring the Swedish state’s cost to circa 235 Billion per year. The total state budget is circa €120 Billion, so the minimum wage is about double that. Nothing left to pay for the legal system, defence, infrastructure or any of the other bits the government traditionally covers. (Rather, the government needs to find double its current income.) But perhaps AI can look after those things anyway?
Question 2 – who should pay the taxes? The state budget needs tax income. If we don’t have jobs, there would still be tax revenue for things like capital gains, sales value added tax, administrative fees, some government owned enterprises etc. But X Billion would be missing from the governments income budget, at least if nobody works in jobs. It gets worse, a majority of the employment taxes is collected by the municipalities, so those budgets would suffer even greater. No more streetlights or playgrounds (but not to worry, AI will fix those things).
Question 3 – what happens to inflation? In traditional economic theory, adding large amounts of cash to the economy leads to higher prices. That would sort of defeat the purpose, the €2000 monthly allowance will not have the same purchasing power as that salary today. In order to keep the same standard, we would have to work anyway (except no more jobs because AI, remember?).
Question 4 – who should get the payout? The spontaneous answer would be citizens. Bad luck for those on temporary residence permits, but you have to draw the line somewhere. European migration systems which are under pressure today would likely see many more applicants. Of course that bureaucracy will be much quicker thanks to… you get it. What does such a society look like? We already have the answer, look at some of the oil-rich gulf states with its privileged class of citizens on the one hand and all the guest-workers who live in difficult circumstances on the other. Except no demand for guest workers because… yeah.
Advocates of basic income would likely object that it has not been tried on a large enough scale yet, so all my objections are hypothetical. Except how large does the scale need to be before we can draw any conclusions?
I don’t want to sound boring. I want to be fun and cool and open to new ideas. But on this one, I’ll disappoint. The comment by NN is Estonia 2015 still sums it up nicely:
Oh, and will AI actually kill all jobs? Let’s see. Jeff Bezos of the Amazon e-trade company says “AI will create more jobs than it eliminates”. Will time prove Bezos right? Or is that just a snappy soundbite to deflect the criticism? Who can tell? We can safely assume that some jobs will be lost and some will arrive. Just as has always been the case throughout the history of human endeavour. I hardly know anyone who works as a hunter or a collector these days.
