Thoughts on Basic Income Guarantee
I keep on hearing people talking about this:
Article: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-02-10/top-01-loves-guaranteed-minimum-income-one-caveat
Top NYC VC (mentions it in the end): http://avc.com/2015/01/five-changes-being-driven-by-zero-marginal-cost/
Econtalk podcast on AI (mentions it at the end): http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/12/gary_marcus_on.html
There is clearly a disruption of labor going on. I would be willing to vote yes on a large scale test of a basic income guarantee as a means to solve the societal issues of falling employment (it’s worse than we think: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/big-lie-56-unemployment-jim-clifton).
I see a disconnect between people equipped with tech, education, wealth, great networks of peers and those without. One group is working more than ever, the other less than ever. Maybe basic income guarantee can change this, if so let’s try it!
One word of caution though: didn’t the world look just like this when we moved from agriculture to industry, or from industry to services? It may be that what we are witnessing is the death of the non-technological human, and the birth of the “cyborg”. Maybe in a decade or two all people will be connected, educated, wealthy and have great networks of peers. And they will have a need for meaningful work, and thus the basic income guarantee could be unnecessary.