If artificial intelligence takes your job, the Government could pay you an income purely for being human - that’s the future this economist expects as tech companies talk up AI in this week’s earnings. Video / NZ Herald
If artificial intelligence takes the majority of our services and manufacturing jobs, we could adopt 20-hour working weeks and a universal basic income (UBI), according to Salt Funds’ economist.
“You don’t need to extrapolate it too far to get to a point where maybe there is more widespread loss ofjobs, and in that case, there is a need for some form of a universal basic income,” Bevan Graham told Markets with Madison.
But how such an income would be funded was uncertain, and capturing the wealth generated by machine employees instead of humans would require new tax policy.
“There is a real risk that AI evolves in some way separate to what you might call the existing, formal economy ... outside the regulatory environment and the ability for governments to tax.”
A new project launched this week by ChatGPT mastermind Sam Altman offered an insight into how such a future could look for humans without jobs.
Altman’s company, Tools for Humanity, has created a biometric verification device called the Orb to identify humans from robots, with the intent that humans would use that identification to apply for a UBI.
The Orb is a biometric verification device that scans human's eyes to identify them as human. It was created as part of Sam Altman's WorldCoin project.
While it may seem far-fetched, it’s an evolution that the major US tech companies Microsoft, Meta and Google are preparing for, as they continued to hype their investments in, and the adoption of, artificial intelligence in their quarterly earnings reports this week.
Stake chief marketing officer Bryan Wilmot said while the hysteria was clear, how the firms would profit from AI was not.
“It doesn’t seem that, at the moment, it’s quite translating to the bottom line or in full clarity exactly what those [AI] strategies look like.”
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Madison Reidy is the host of New Zealand’s only financial markets show Markets with Madison. She joined the Herald in 2022 after working in investment, and has covered business and economics for television and radio broadcasters.
