Tech leaders like Elon Musk predict that advanced AI and robotics will eventually take over all human labor, making traditional jobs entirely optional.
During a 50-minute fireside chat with former UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak at the end of November 2023 AI Summit, Elon said: “I think we are seeing the most disruptive force in history here. We will have for the first time something smarter than the smartest human. It’s hard to say exactly what that moment is but there will come a point where no job is needed.
“One of the challenges in the future will be how we find meaning in life. So, I don’t know if that makes people comfortable or uncomfortable.
“That's why I say if you wish for a magic genie that gives you any wishes you want, there’s no limit. You don’t have this three-limit nonsense – you just have as many wishes as you want,” he said, adding that the world would enter ‘an age of abundance.’
Musk added: “We won’t be on universal basic income; we will be on universal high income – because everyone will have access to this magic genie.”
Leading CEOs—including those from Ford, Amazon, Salesforce, and JP Morgan Chase—have proclaimed that many white-collar jobs at their companies will soon disappear. AI is currently the leading reason cited for job cuts, accounting for tens of thousands of layoffs—including major cuts at companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and Salesforce, according to a recent Harvard Business Review article.
Rather than waiting for Elon’s “universal high income” to become reality, the UK’s Labour government have allegedly been considering a “robot tax” which will target companies that sack staff and replace them with artificial intelligence. The robot tax would fund a “universal basic income” scheme, long a top priority on the Socialist wish list.
It is hard to think of a more dystopian result of the Artificial Intelligence and robotics revolution now sweeping the world than the creation of a new government-dependent class of those who find themselves unemployed after being replaced by a robot or AI, and then government collecting new taxes on robots and AI to dole out a basic income to its new wards.
Not everyone is buying the whole, “you won’t need to work anymore” idea. Jeff Bezos for one has pushed back on one of artificial intelligence's biggest fears, arguing that AI won't leave people with less to do. Quite the opposite.
"I know there's a lot of concern that many people have, including many smart people, that AI is going to make humans redundant and so on," Bezos said during a discussion reported by Yahoo Finance. "I totally disagree with this point of view. And I think, in fact, AI is going to create a labor shortage."
Still, the concern about AI and robots making millions of workers redundant is entirely reasonable, given the number of workers reportedly being laid off due to employers switching to AI and robots.
Which prompts us to wonder, how will Elon’s “universal high income” become reality, if it is not the government handing out the checks?
It strikes us that, given how inefficient government is at almost everything it does, cutting out the middle man – government – and putting the entire transaction in the hands of AI and robots would be the most logical and efficient way to go about making good on Elon’s promise that AI and robots will create universal high income for all.
Just spit balling here, but why not require any Artificial Intelligence, or robot, that displaces a human worker to “adopt” that human worker and his or her family?
The AI or robot would be required to replace the human’s lost income, and the humans would then have a vested interest in the success of the AI or robotic enterprise, creating a harmonious symbiotic relationship between humans and machines.
Some might object to that idea on the grounds that such an arrangement appears to grant personhood to AI and robots. However, it would also ensure that, instead of being empowered by doling out a miniscule universal basic income to the unemployed, a rapacious government would be cut out of the transaction entirely, and thus not be able to steal the vast wealth that Artificial Intelligence and robots are expected to create.
In 1978 CHQ Editor George Rasley built his first computer from a kit and taught himself to program it to execute direct mail and other election-related projects.
