If you want to understand anything to do with a Universal Basic Income (UBI), Scott Santens is your man. Recently, he has set up a new ITSA Foundation in the US to fund ‘awareness raising’, and to implement a pilot UBI. Well done Scott!

He has also cogitated upon the impact of AI on his self-directed profession (getting the world to adopt a UBI), and has come to the conclusion that:

ChatGPT has already decreased my income security, and likely yours too.

I agree that there are many AI advances across the arts that are going to change how art (in all its forms) is produced. We only have to look at the‘creatives’ Hollywood striketo get a glimpse of the disruption coming for ‘traditional’ film makers (already disrupted by streaming and COVID).

However, it is doubtful based on its current algorithms, that AI will replace well-informed people.

This article by Colin Fraser explains why. Essentially, ChatGPT (or any similar) knows nothing of people or society, truth or lies, nothing about goals, or context or purpose. It is simply a mathematical model that constructs a string of words, where each succeeding word is added to the string based on the most likely (or randomly likely, but not necessarily the most likely) word derived from the probabilities in its training data. As Colin says, it’s all ‘bullshit’. A lot of it appears to us as ‘meaningful’ because it is based on our words. But the AI just ‘makes stuff up’… literally.

Yet, AI is already proving highly useful for both creatives, and their audience… as long as we continue to value a well-informed human to act a ‘Trusted purveyor of The Truth’. (Though weeding out the dross is a problem in itself, that may require some support from AI!) Without these people in the loop, AI could devolve into ‘self-referential goop’, as more and more of the content that it uses to generate new text is itself AI generated goop!

As Scott says in his ChatGPT reflection :

If people really care about what you specifically think about something, they won’t care what ChatGPT says. What they want to know is what you as a specific individual have to say. This is the subscriber route of building a faithful following of loyal subscribers who really truly care what you create and want to consume it because you, not anyone else, created it.

On another tangent, Scott’s concern about technological unemployment may not eventuate. There really is a never-ending stream of work to be done: to repair infrastructure, and beautify our cities and homes, and repair our environment, and to transition to new energy sources, and to localize production, as well as to provide great care for our young, disabled, and old (and so much more).

Even so, it is possible more people will be pushed in lower-paying jobs… UNLESS we think of the UBI as a new tool to balance the Labor Market.

In this case, as people lose employment, we can lift the UBI above the poverty line to a level where enough people chooseto stop looking for paid work, or drop out of paid work, or reduce their hours, leaving space for those who want the work. The process would never be perfect, and as the UBI is raised, it would likely ‘overshoot’, causing a shortage of labor in some sectors and/or regions. This could also have the effect of lifting wages for work that people did not want to do. The combination of the higher UBI, and lift in wages, and perhaps shortening of the work week, would mean that more people get a share of the increase in productivity generated by automation, virtualiztion and AI, just as Scott suggests.

Of course, the rich will benefit too: on what do you think people are going to spend this extra money? On goods and services of course. Boosting turnover and profits and company value.

A UBI offers a win for all: lifting people out of poverty, boosting entrepreneurship and creativity, while also adding to society’s wealth. The rich can get richer, without the poor becoming poorer!

In Australia, we’ve just formed a not-for-profit company (Basic Income Australia Limited) to advance the cause here. We are in the throes of planning a big event as part of a Festival in Melbourne. The Festival already has the City’s agreement to close off one of the main city blocks to celebrate ‘new ways of living and working’; and is expected to attract some 10,000 visitors.

Back to the topic. Scott, you have great insights and novel metaphors… no ChatGPT is going to replace you.

Human creativity, plus AI, plus a UBI, could indeed see a flowering of human potential as human’s are released from the mundane. Imagine more tradespeople and other neo-craftsmen helping to constantly improve our physical environment (natural and built), while those of a more cerebral bent join with AI to explore the world of ideas… to conjure new possibilities.

How wonder full it could be…

But also a dystopia, if we don’t find a way to achieve some level of common understanding/agreement about ‘The Truth’.