"Basic income is going to reach mainstream politics. Just ask Andrew Yang, a former tech executive from New York, his entire 2020 campaign is based upon it. We saw it with Bernie Sanders being so popular among Millennials in 2016.
We see it with the decline of trust in Capitalism among younger Millennials and GenZ. Late in 2017, it was found that preliminary analysis of a European-wide survey has found young people are more in favour of introducing a universal income than their older peers.
This is not hard to understand, we have higher student loans, the cost of housing has risen dramatically, and job stability and economic uncertainty is on the rise. Healthcare costs are ballooning and last but not least, automation is coming. Automation is on our technological doorstep and we’re all in denial of its impact that could become personal.
With technological unemployment and a declining labor pool and falling birth rates, consumerism could be in trouble. You don’t disenfranchise young people and expect that it leads to good future outcomes. In fact, the political left and the right are already preparing their stances on basic income. You have to follow the script guys, if Silicon Valley are advocates for UBI, and AI regulation, there could be many explanations for it.
Experiments in Africa, have shown UBI has positive impacts and recipients do not abuse the “free money”.
If Robots and AI improve productivity and help automate tasks that humans used to do, free money might empower the sharing-economy and new forms of social entrepreneurship where humans will be most active: helping each other and the attention economy.
You cannot talk about regulating AI, without talking about the human consequences that AI and automation will create on human systems. Indeed this idea that Universal Basic Income is trending more, is in a way true. Basic income has its own subreddit, and pretty active tags here on Medium as well.
This is not something that’s going away, because technological unemployment is on the rise. We are just about to enter another wave of automation and if AI and robotics grows as some believe it will in the next two decades, the future of our children will be radically different from ours. This is because the very future of work and income might be irrevocably changed. In such a world of uncertainty, it will likely to take another great recession for things to finally make sense to all of us, and we’ll need something to lean back on."
Source
https://hackernoon.com/ubi-is-inevitable-de36ee5ab474
#UBI #UniversalBasicIncome #UniversalBasicIncomeWashington
