Opinion | A Real Plan for A.I. Job Losses

The A.I. Dividend starts from thinking about how we can give Americans a real stake in the A.I. economy, and it starts with humility that we don’t know exactly how it’s going to go. We don’t know how disruptive it’s going to be, but right now is the time to plan for the potential outcomes that could come. And there’s always been this conversation, right in my econ classes at I.L.R., it was that: Oh, every technology revolution has always created more jobs than it’s destroyed. Arguable maybe, but this is the first time someone’s building a technology and stating that the goal is to replace all human labor. It is to be better than humans at everything —— And that the metric by which we understand how good the technology is getting is how functionally, how well it is capable of mimicking different forms of human labor. Exactly right. And then exceeding them. Exactly right. I mean, you are creating a replacement for human labor machine. Exactly. And it’s the first time that has been tried. And it doesn’t mean it will succeed, but it certainly means government needs to take it seriously. And so the idea of the A.I. Dividend is: What if we end up in that world where all human labor is replaced, or just a significant portion of it is displaced? How do you have a society that is actually functioning then? And you have to start talking about universal basic income, and the idea is to make sure that we are setting up the structures now that would lead for Americans to be protected if we end up in that future. And I have a lot of things about how we can prevent that future, changes, et cetera. But the A.I. Dividends is almost that insurance policy, and you could fund it via boring things like a wealth tax that have been talked about. You could fund it via a token tax. So putting a tax on the usage of A.I., maybe limited to commercial opportunities where you’re replacing human labor or not, and that’s a fine policy as long as investment in capital always leads to more jobs, which has been economic theory for hundreds of years. But maybe A.I. is shifting that. And so if it’s shifting that, we need to shift our tax policy to be taxing A.I. and to be discounting hiring humans and a token tax starts to get at that. But then the other funding mechanism that I talk about for the A.I. Dividend is actually taking warrants in these companies, large out of the money warrants where you say, if the value of this, the A.I. companies, were to go up an enormous amount, then the government would have the right to buy shares at a set price. They basically only pay off if one or multiple of the companies are wildly successful. Basically, if they are replacing all human labor. And if you Institute that now, then V.C.s celebrate it and say you’re participating in the upside. And if you try to implement it after one of them is successful, then you’re seizing the means of production and seizing wealth. And so my idea is you go down all of these paths, you start to find ways to have the revenue to actually fund universal basic income or investments in job retraining, or just a broader safety net, but do it in ways that automatically scale and adjust and kick in at the speed of A.I. Here’s a concern I’ve always had about this set of policies, or this set of answers to the problem of A.I. and job displacement. The trick of universal basic income to me, which maybe you support on its own merits, which is fine, but is under any plausible scenario of A.I. job displacement, it is happening to some people and not all people. And I see looking skeptically, but I don’t see a world in which one day we wake up and everybody’s jobs are gone. It’s going to start with some people’s jobs. It’ll start with some people’s jobs. So if I thought it was going to be everybody’s job all at once, I wouldn’t worry about it because then we would just figure out a policy to compensate everyone. But you imagine you’re a Teamster, and you drive a truck, right? And you’re making 80,000, $120,000 a year. And the autonomous truck companies put you and your fellow Teamsters out of work. And, don’t worry, we’ve actually passed universal basic income. No, it’s totally —— And you’re now getting $37,000 from your universal basic income. One hundred percent. And I’m getting $37,000 from the universal basic income. And I’m still here in my podcasting studio. You got screwed. I got a check. What worries me the most is — I don’t think we’re going to a world of full automation, so — but even if you believed we were, is transition, and some people are going to really lose out and other people are going to be unaffected or gain. And I don’t hear policy ideas that seem to know what to do with the people who are losing out along the way, the people who are actually getting displaced — not the world of everybody is displaced, but the world is graduating with a marketing degree is now likely — you are three times more likely to be unemployed than you were before, or coders are suddenly seeing a contraction in demand for their services. But some coders are making a ton of money. Yeah. Like, how do you think about the differentials here? Universal basic income by itself is insufficient, and I would love to understand why you think we’re not headed to a world of full automation, because it’s tough for me to see where that stops once we start on it. But we can come back to that. There will be a period of transition either way. I don’t think it’ll be all at once. And so the idea is not just: Oh, yeah, we’re all going to have this basic income because you’re right, people will be screwed by that. The idea is to do a number of things simultaneously, which include changing the tax code so that we’re actually charging for the use of A.I. and discounting the use of labor. And that’s a way to protect jobs and slow down the transition itself. It’s investments not just in universal basic income, but in job retraining programs and in structures that help people go into new careers. Now, granted, they have a really bad track record. This is my concern. Really bad track record. But it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t still be investing in community colleges and finding ways to improve it as much as possible. But you’re right; to just say that: Oh, we’re just going to give a universal basic income is not enough. We have to think about other ways of adjusting that transition, which could include when you have people who have a permit or training or a license that takes a number of years to acquire. Maybe you still require that for the transition for five years or 10 years, so people can turn that training into equity. And that’s another way that they have a stake in the A.I. economy. We’re going to need a lot of policy solutions. That’s why the framework I put out has 43 different ideas in it.