Will Universal Guaranteed Income Save Us From the Robot Apocalypse?

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“Robots are poised to eliminate millions of jobs over the coming decades. We have to address the coming epidemic of “technological unemployment” if we’re to avoid crippling levels of poverty and societal collapse. Here’s how a guaranteed basic income will help — and why it’s absolutely inevitable.”

“The idea of basic income has been appearing among the tech-bro elite a lot lately. Mega-investor and Netscape creator Marc Andreessen recently told New York magazine that he considers it “a very interesting idea,” and Sam Altman of the boutique incubator Y Combinator calls its implementation an “obvious conclusion.” Albert Wenger, a New York–based venture capitalist at Union Square Ventures, has been blogging about basic income since 2013. He’s worried about the clever apps his company is funding, which do things like teach languages and hail cars, displacing jobs with every download.

“We are at the beginning of the time where machines will do a lot of the things humans have traditionally done,” Wenger told me in October. “How do you avoid a massive bifurcation of society into those who have wealth and those who don’t?” He has proposed holding a basic-income experiment in the dystopian fantasyland of Detroit.”