Artificial intelligence has the power to change the daily lives of all of us. Today we are split into extreme camps over how advanced the technology really is. And yet there is hardly any dispute that it already has the potential to turn almost every industry and field upside down.
Will it take the bread out of many of our mouths? It certainly has the power to relieve us of yet another batch of tasks, taking a great many new activities over to its side. Of course, programmers will be needed for the foreseeable future, but they will become more and more efficient with the help of this kind of technology; a given task will require far fewer hours of work and, as a result, fewer people. Incidentally, exactly the same holds for a huge, unexpectedly large number of professions.
Of course, new roles are appearing too, as they always have, but what will we do if the pace at which that happens falls behind? Will the societies of the developed world manage to respond to the new challenge, and how?
And here comes May 1, Labor Day. Labor is certainly something worth thinking about more often, especially in our part of the world, where we have always taken a somewhat more philosophical view of the subject. So much so that we celebrate labor with a day off.
So, technology is going to free up a lot of our time, but how will society change? What exactly is the much-discussed universal basic income, and what are the big arguments for and against the idea that everyone should receive guaranteed money? Or might the answer to the new challenges turn out to be the four-day work week?
Not Worth a Plugged Nickel
Technology long ago made real the age-old dream of the shop—the proverbial stubborn, work-shy peasant from the villages around Sofia: you can now work both sitting down and lying down. In some of the more bureaucratic institutions, even while sleeping, and that was before dream reading fully became a reality.
Money goes to money… not always. Every major change in history demands a new approach to the common good, new ideas about how to organize society. Even if those ideas only become clear later, even if they sometimes arrive chaotically and unexpectedly.
At first glance, universal basic income seems like something exotic. How does it sound to you: everyone receiving enough money not to live in misery, everyone having enough stability in their lives to keep climbing upward?
Is this the sensible future?
Don't Give Me Advice, Give Me Money…
A utopia? Probably. Exactly as much of a utopia as being a good person, as a fair social system, as having true leaders at the head of our country, as having no corruption.
The idea of the state guaranteeing its citizens a subsistence minimum really does come from Thomas More's Utopia.
But today it is resurfacing with new force and new logic. Stephen Hawking, Pope Francis, Martin Luther King, Milton Friedman, Bertrand Russell, Virginia Woolf, even… Joe Rogan, Larry Page, Sam Altman. Just some of the people who say it is time to think about this new form, the next stage of social justice, which follows logically from the next step in our evolution as a species.
Machines will take people's bread. The motif has been around for over two centuries; the Luddites are the legendary pioneers of the idea that if we destroy the machines, the problem will be solved. Well, it isn't that simple, and so far it hasn't been necessary. Whenever technology took its next step, wiping out the next set of occupations, it created new ones. Yes, since our grandmothers' time far fewer people are needed to keep us fed, but in return far more useful professions for humanity were born, such as digital marketing, influencing and coaching.
Joking aside, the fact is that the labor market always found its next steps toward self-regulation. Now, however, far more professions are hanging in the balance. Will they disappear? Will there be taxi drivers in the future? Or, on the contrary, will it be programmers who become redundant because of automated solutions? By all appearances, artificial intelligence is about to roll its dice and change the everyday paradigm of society and of the labor market.
Workers in Red Tank Tops
Are there people who deserve to be poor?
Think carefully about your answer; mine is clear. Yes, I declare my attachment to utopias, such as the one that says it is time for technological progress to take us to the next step. Which logically looks like the much-discussed universal basic income.
What is it? It's simple: it has to meet a few criteria. All members of a given group receive the means they need to lead a normal life. This does not depend on economic criteria or on their work; the money is received, guaranteed, by everyone.
Is universal basic income even a possible solution?
It depends on whom you ask. So far, many experiments have been carried out around the world in which a given group of people received money on this principle, and yet never in the way the definition requires—including, say, every resident of a city and lasting long enough.
“The money one possesses is the instrument of liberty; that which one pursues is the instrument of slavery,” wrote Jean-Jacques Rousseau. And to a large extent, this seems to be where the arguments for an unconditional basic income come together.
Work Hard, Kid, So You Won't Have to Study
According to its advocates, this changes the paradigm: if the welfare system is a net that saves you from falling, basic income is a floor that everyone gets and on which they can build. A strong argument is the victory over gender inequality—in countries where maternity leave is short, women would be able to choose whether to work or to care for their child.
As Guy Standing, author of Basic Income: And How We Can Make It Happen, writes, in today's world wages—the income a person receives in exchange for actual work—grow very slowly, if at all. At the same time, income generated by non-work activities—rents, intellectual property, financial assets—is growing at an ever faster pace. This constantly feeds inequality.
Although it still sounds exotic in political circles, the idea has been gaining popularity in recent years. Tellingly, it made its way into the debates for the first time during the last US presidential election.
Andrew Yang, who ran for the Democratic Party nomination, championed his own version of the idea, called the “Freedom Dividend.”
There have been parties advocating an unconditional income in Canada, Australia and New Zealand. In the German parliament in 2013, a special committee examined the idea and concluded that it was unworkable, because it would require far too sweeping a restructuring of a huge number of systems and, as a result, would discourage people from working.
Then again, as far back as 46 BC, Julius Caesar gave every Roman citizen 100 denarii. Later came Thomas More with the ideas in his book Utopia, whose title became a common noun.
The Universal Store
The American experience of the COVID pandemic offers some ideas in this direction. Interestingly, convincing arguments can be found both ways. Some analysts show how the experience proved how well the mechanism works; others, on the contrary, how it failed.
One example comes from the child tax credit, introduced in 1997 and expanded in 2021. Right at the height of the pandemic, the government began paying this form of aid monthly, and the requirement that parents be working was dropped from the eligibility criteria. The measure reached the families of 3.7 million children in the US living in poverty. It turned out that the employment rate among parents did not change in any way—quite the contrary. Meanwhile, families kept working, and many of the children went back to school.
Officially, a full 37.9 million people in the US live in poverty. Clearly, traditional assistance measures are not doing the job when we are talking about 11.6 percent of the US population!
“Providing a government-funded monthly payment to every individual would lift them out of poverty and at the same time give millions of children a better chance at a good education, health and higher future incomes,” argues philosophy professor Michael Howard, a well-known advocate of the idea. And really—what if we looked at universal basic income as an investment in the future, a better chance for the generations to come?
He Who Does Not Work…
According to Prof. Howard, it is time to completely rethink the welfare system. In the US, and in most developed countries, benefits are granted when certain requirements are met—a minimum income, say, or children in the family. On the one hand, though, this leads to ever-increasing social segregation; on the other, it usually traps families in a closed circle they cannot escape for generations.
“One could argue at length about what exactly counts as work. Today every able-bodied person is expected to look for a job. But on the one hand, many people draw a salary without contributing anything to society or doing any work at all, while others are counted as unemployed while caring for their children or elderly relatives, or while studying. And that is work! Basic income is a way of supporting and recognizing it, without intrusive state monitoring and without deepening the division of labor,” Prof. Howard adds.
Well, big changes like this apparently don't happen without other big steps to trigger them. Otherwise, inertia and tradition make a step like introducing a universal income almost impossible.
Labor Ennobles Man
One of the most popular examples comes from Alaska, where the state authorities have in recent years given every resident a share of oil revenues amounting to about $1,600. Since the measure was introduced, no decline in employment has been observed.
Many targeted experiments have been carried out with groups of people, for example in the 1970s in the Canadian province of Manitoba. There, too, people receiving the guaranteed income did not stop working. A certain drop in employment was recorded, but it turned out to come from people who had decided to continue their education or to look after their children.
In a similar experiment in Finland in 2017, 2,000 unemployed people received 560 euros a month for two years. Compared with the control group, they felt calmer and looked at the world with more optimism, while there was almost no difference between the two groups when it came to the motivation to look for work.
The most recent attempt is in Minneapolis, where 150 low-income people are receiving $500 for 18 months. The statistics are once again in favor of the idea, but… then why isn't the project being expanded?
What Money Can't Buy…
The truth is that not a single genuine experiment has ever been organized, because the concept requires not only the participation of everyone in a given community but also a long time frame. When payments last only a year, that strongly affects expectations. Almost all of us make the important decisions in our lives with a much longer perspective.
Such an experiment is under way right now, though it won't produce results any time soon. It is taking place in Kenya; it began in 2017 and is meant to last a full 12 years. Around 20,000 people are taking part, divided into four groups. The first will receive the basic income throughout the entire period, the second get the whole sum for the period as a lump payment, the third take part for a shorter period, and the fourth serve for comparison. What the results will be is more than interesting.
Advocates of the idea often cite the research of Belgian scholars Philippe Van Parijs and Yannick Vanderborght, according to which each person's personal income, or lack of it, is the result of luck to a far greater extent than of work.
Skeptics, for their part, point out that lottery winners—people who have won money by chance—very rarely manage to put it into meaningful investments; in very few cases does that money improve their lives in a lasting way. What's more, winners rarely take up a more creative or long-dreamed-of occupation, and few of them start a successful business. And yet there are quite a few differences between the serious sums from such games and a basic income.
As mentioned, the COVID pandemic handed the skeptics some serious arguments as well. For 18 months, the US government paid unemployment benefits for longer than usual—39 weeks instead of the previous 26. And an in-depth analysis published in the Financial Times showed that “if you give people the financial support that allows them to stop working, a large share of them probably will. And that doesn't help anyone in the long run. Just ask the 44 percent of small businesses in the US who say they can't find anyone for the jobs they're offering.”
Money by the Hatful
So, seen from a distance, there are two big questions we need to answer to decide whether the idea makes sense.
Will a guaranteed minimum motivate people to develop and to do work they enjoy, or, on the contrary, will it demotivate them because they have enough handed to them?
Here the answer is more philosophical and abstract, and the idea's advocates are unlikely to convince the skeptics, or vice versa. Besides, everyone can find their own answer: close your eyes and imagine you are receiving enough for your basic survival. Would you look for more and keep working? Would it give you peace of mind?
The second question is even more obvious and even harder:
Who Will Give Us the Money?
Let's do the math this way. If we introduced an unconditional basic income in Bulgaria equal to the minimum wage—780 leva (about $430)—then for 6,519,789 people, our number according to the latest census, we would need just over 61 billion leva a year. That is serious money, especially against our gross domestic product, which for 2022 is about 360 billion leva.
For the US, at $1,000 a month, the bill comes to $4 trillion a year!
Advocates say it is entirely possible to offset this expense. On the one hand, part of the money is already being handed out in various forms of social assistance, and the need for the hefty costs of the social services responsible for it would disappear. In return for the investment, people would have the peace of mind to develop, would be healthier and happier, which in the long run would raise productivity. Whether the numbers add up, let's leave to the economists.
Work, Work, Work
The fact is that technology is freeing up more and more of our time, and the big question is what to do with it. Another solution is looming on the horizon: solving the problem by simply spending less time at work. Interesting dishes are simmering in the pot of the future. Only a few generations ago Saturday was a working day; today there is more and more talk of a four-day work week… Curiously, as far back as 1930 the idea that technology would lead us here came from none other than John Maynard Keynes, who predicted that automation would force us to work fewer days a week.
Recently it turned out that this is an attractive solution even for business. Between June and December of last year, the largest experiment to date took place in the United Kingdom. Employees kept their salaries while working four days, or up to 34 hours a week in total. Sixty-one companies took part, and a full 92 percent of them liked the results and decided to continue with four-day weeks! Meanwhile, 15 percent of employees said that under no circumstances would they go back to five working days.
Is something similar on the way in Bulgaria? Who knows. With our working-age population melting away, it is hard to guess whether demand for labor will win out or whether companies will find themselves increasingly forced to look for unconventional solutions.
The most important thing, though, both before and after artificial intelligence, remains going to work with a smile…
