With the proliferation of Artificial Intelligence beginning to be felt in the job market, Richard Branson has said that a Universal Basic Income (UBI) should be an offshoot of the AI development.
Essentially, if AIs prove to make businesses more money at less cost, then Branson says governments should look into providing UBIs to its citizens.
The idea with a UBI is that each citizen receives a certain amount of money each year obligation free. Finland has already begun trialing the scheme, giving 2000 out of work people a UBI for 2 years which they'll retain if they get a job..
Say Australia adopts it and everyone receives $30,000 a year regardless of social class, living conditions, work history etc.
The initial argument against the UBI is that it will encourage people to do nothing.
The argument for the UBI is that people will become empowered to try and drive their businesses and careers forward because they have a safety net.
For example, $30,000 a year more than covers my mortgage. I'm currently trying to start my own small business from the ground up but it's difficult as I've got a full time job and don't have the savings to simply dump my job and dive straight into a small business. $30,000 a year gives me the financial freedom to walk away from a full time job and therefore the time to launch a small business that in the long term sees me contributing to more to society.
So that's my question, if tomorrow the government came out and said they'd be trialing a UBI, would you be interested and support it?
I'd like to see how it would work out financially. I think it would be good to see more people empowered to take financial or business risks as they have a safety net, because right now, if you fail at a business initially, you're essentially bankrupt and it's very difficult to get back up.
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I look forward to Wiz entering this debate. Come on down Wiz!
What would be your reservations towards a UBI? I'm not sure how economically viable it is and there has been some resistance in Finland, however Utrecht in the Netherlands, Sweden and some counties in Canada are looking at similar trials. Without long-term data it'd be hard to have definitive information either way.
The other suggestion that's out there is 6 hour working days, providing people the chance to complete other projects outside of working hours. In the places that's been trialed there have been reports of higher job satisfaction and lower stress levels as they feel they have more freedom.
I am not any way an economic genius but everyone was just simply given 30k and those that worked got to keep it on top of their salary and those who were getting less got what they were or were not receiving now bumped to a level of 30k wouldn't that just create an inflationary nightmare and devalue the dollars buying power against commercial goods and services.
That was one argument regarding Finland's trial. Possibly one of the reasons they only kept it to 2000 people.
Correct Patsy
TOP BLOGS?????
Yeah great idea. Give people money for nothing. What could go wrong....?
Hint: ask Venezuela what could go wrong. The largest known oil reserves in the world and their socialist "Bolivarian Revolution" led to (to quote Wikipedia) "The destabilized economy led to a crisis in Bolivarian Venezuela, resulting in hyperinflation, an economic depression, shortages of basic goods and drastic increases in poverty, disease, child mortality, malnutrition, and crime."
Mapik, come on, you've taken a lot of that out of context and failed to mention that the destabilisation of the economy was majorly due to the drop in the price of oil. Also that shortages of goods and increases in poverty were also related to embezzlement and corruption among the Venezuelan hierarchy.
Chavez moved Venezuela away from trade with America and centred it on Latin America causing a higher dependence on the oil trade and made their economy more vulnerable. In fact according to the International Policy Digest, the major reason for a collapse in the Venezuelan economy was corruption and over-reliance on oil trade.
This argument has been around since the start of the industrial revolution in the 1800's
Google The Luddite Fallacy.
https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/6717/economics/the-luddite-fallacy/
Regarding the Luddite fallacy, Richard Branson as well as Zuckerberg and Musk say their concern regarding AI is that it is developing faster than the industrial revolution developed. There are already bots operating in the media and bots handle a large chunk of financial trading in the stock market. There's no suggestion to destroy new technology, but to find a way to better manage the transition.
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