I’m a big believer in the concept that serious problems require serious solutions. For that reason, whenever I hear people say that Universal Basic Income (UBI) can solve the problem of job automation, I tend to be skeptical.
Maybe UBI is a solution that could work for a couple of years, but it’s definitely not a long-term solution. Those who believe it is a solution are missing one key element: politics.
The naive view may be that since automation would lead to mass unemployment, there would be a majority of people who support UBI, and therefore the government would want to enact it.
But that is not how power works in politics; with greater automation economic and industrial power would be more concentrated in the hands of corporate interests. These interests would have a lot more sway in government policies than they already do today (if you can believe that). So any politician who wants to finance their election campaign would need to heavily rely on these corporate interests and adopt the policies they favor.
It’s possible that if the situation becomes really desperate, corporations may relent and allow the government to provide the most basic form of UBI – just enough to prevent people from dying in the streets, though not much above that. But obviously that’s not what UBI proponents have in mind as the solution.
So what happens when power becomes more and more concentrated in the hands of a few corporations? Wouldn’t UBI become even more popular and therefore more likely to become the law of the land? You would think so, but at that point corporations are likely to hold nearly all the economic and industrial power in society. Maybe they would even have their own private automated armies. Which means that the government at that point would largely hold a ceremonial role; much like the King of England ceremonially approves laws, democratically elected representatives of the people will ceremonially pass laws dictated by corporations.
Of course, there is nothing inevitable about this scenario. The point of this thought exercise is to think seriously and critically about how automation can affect the economy and politics, and look for solutions that are grounded in reality. Automation (especially coupled with AI) is a challenge to our current economic paradigm, but it’s not a challenge we cannot overcome.
