A.I. and the Guaranteed Basic Income
August 10, 2025 Dr. Roger Ray
When we try to imagine what the future will be like, ten, twenty, or thirty years from now, we tend to think of futuristic novels and movies which are all necessarily in the fiction genre and while a lot of them seem to have kind of cookie cutter themes, they vary broadly. We are aware that we are in for a time of tremendous change. Climate change, whether it is politically controversial or not, is an existential reality and it will be impacting us, our children and our grandchildren in profound ways. We are on the verge of an energy and technology revolution, as we move away from coal and gasoline to electricity and hydrogen.
We are now, as we have been for my entire life, under the constant shadow of the danger of a nuclear war or a nuclear accident. We don’t train our children to hide under their school desks anymore, but the threat is more real than ever. Bombing nuclear sites in Iran is, in effect, a stalling tactic at best. The nuclear club continues to grow and it is just a matter of time before one rogue state or world power will come up with a plausible excuse to use one.
The most tired of futuristic movies and books seem always to be set in a dystopian future in the wake of a natural or a nuclear disaster. Either is possible but neither is necessary to create a grim, dog eat dog, future. In fact, unbridled capitalism could be a greater threat than either environmental collapse or nuclear disaster.
As the changes that will come with the growing influence of A.I., robotics, and engineering, the pathway of money will be changing. It is already difficult to recruit new drivers into training to be over the road truck drivers because those jobs will cease to exist before you could pay off your tuition loans for learning how to be an over the road truck driver.
Architecture firms are shriveling up as computer programs take over more and more of what architects used to do. Journalism will be remembered as a twentieth century profession, especially as concerns print media. Entry level jobs are being taken over by automation …. Cashiers, janitors, a decade ago it became common to see robotic floor cleaning machines in airports and big box stores, now, similar rolling robots are taking inventory and stocking shelves. A. I., robotics and automation will dramatically change the employment picture in the USA. It is already happening but what we have seen in having to check ourselves out at the grocery store is nothing compared to what it coming.
In 1952, fiction writer, Kurt Vonnegut published his novel, Player Piano, about a not too distant future in which automation had replaced the need for almost all manufacturing labor, the way that mechanization took away the need for armies of typists and telephone operators. The government instituted a couple of public works services to give menial employment to the vast numbers of unemployed people but these jobs paid very little and had even less meaning. The two were derisively called the “reeks and the wrecks.” I am thankful that even though Vonnegut was not at all religious that he created a hero in that novel who was an Episcopal minister who helped to organize a revolution against the imposition of meaningless employment on the masses.
In Gene Rodenberry’s vision of the future, Star Trek, earthlings had managed to evolve into an economy in which there was no money, no salaries, and no hoarding of wealth. Everyone got what they needed and everyone could pursue a meaningful career, especially those who got to go into space on the Enterprise. It would be nice to think that our culture could evolve beyond greed, hoarding, and poverty created by wealth being in the hands of the few but that begs the question about how we will guide that changes that are staring us in the face right now.
Automation takes over repetitive and menial jobs but it doesn’t necessarily make life easier. No one has to pick cotton anymore, something that was horrible labor just 75 years ago but the invention of combines did not mean that former cotton-picking farm hands were ushered into greater wealth an ease. The benefits of saving the back breaking labor of cotton only benefited the owners of the farms, not the workers.
As truck and taxi drivers are replaced by self-driving vehicles, and electric cars and trucks reduce the need for mechanics and most auto industry workers.
When child care, cooking and elder care, landscaping and teaching and even nursing and some surgery is done by robots, who reaps the financial benefit of these changes? We are no longer talking about advancements that are a century or even a generation away. A.I. may reduce the number of jobs in America by the millions within 5 years.
Capitalism has controlled our society for generations. In many ways, it controls how we live, where we live, what we eat, what we wear, and even how many children we have in our families. Fear of going broke, of being bankrupted by medical bills or a car accident, or illness, have plagued society for all of modern life.
Our diet of sugar and carbohydrate rich foods is killing us, it is making us fat, giving us diabetes and heart trouble and probably is a major factor in cancer but we have gravitated to growing crops that can be planted and harvested by huge machines: sugar cane, beets, potatoes, rice, soy beans, oats, and corn . . . . all of which we should be eating less of but growing green vegetables and fruit is still labor intensive, and so we grow less of what we should eat and more of the foods that are killing us.
But can we imagine a world in which capitalism did not make decisions for us about what we eat, wear, drive, and where we live and how many kids we have? How, in this time of tremendous changes in the world of labor and technology can we steer the course of humanity towards more of a Star Trek future than the dystopian future that would be shaped by the profit motive, a world where a few people are very wealthy and most people live in fear and poverty?
The solution is not a new idea, in fact it is a very old idea, one proposed even by the one of America’s founding fathers that I talked about last month, Thomas Paine. It is a great idea that has been experimented with, very successfully, but has never been broadly implemented. That idea is a Universal Basic Income or a Guaranteed Basic Income. The idea is this: we pay every adult in the country a sum between one and two thousand dollars a month. We couple this with universal healthcare and tuition free higher education.
It is obviously an expensive proposition but here is what we get in return. We end poverty, for everyone. We do away with the fear of homelessness and hunger. We end food stamp and subsidized housing and welfare and disability checks. We give everyone the ability to survive, not luxuriously, not lavishly, not the way they really want, but it is a basic social safety net. The unmotivated might find a way to survive on their minimal income but most people would use it as a base that allows them to go to college and grad school. It allows them to pursue their dreams of being an inventor, an artist, a musician, an actor, a writer, or to give themselves wholeheartedly to a profession that might not pay well enough to have kept them previously.
Alone it is not enough to pay rent in a major city but that might incentivize people to move to more unpopulated areas, easing urban crowding and pollution. It would give young couples the security to have children when they might have believed that they never could. Also, it would encourage people to return to small family farming, growing the green vegetables and fruits, we should be eating anyway.
This obviously would result in a huge drop in crime, and it would have beneficial effects in both mental and physical health. Folks this would make America the greatest country in the world and it would inspire other countries to do the same.
As the Catholic Worker movement founder, Dorothy Day, said a century ago, most of our problems stem from our acceptance of this stinking rotten system. We have accepted an economic model which allows a few people to hoard the resources which belong to all of us. A Guaranteed Basic Income doesn’t prevent the motivated from becoming rich through their genius and hard work, but it does keep anyone from living in abject poverty. Sure, we would have fewer billionaires, but we would have ended poverty. There will always be a class of people who own two, three, or four houses but we could remove the class of people who sleep in doorways, under bridges, and in public parks.
Yes, the wealthy will be taxed at a higher rate to fund this but all of the money would be going straight back into the economy. A person who gets a basic monthly allowance will spend it to buy groceries, clothing, housing, and transportation, all of which serves to make the wealthy more wealthy.
Any serious person knows that a trickle down economy has never worked. If you give the wealthy another $2000 a month, that money goes into off shore accounts and just becomes a part of hoarded wealth. But trickle up economics always works because the poor will spend that money, fueling our economy.
As Will Rogers famously said during the Great Depression about President Hoover’s mistakes, “The money was all appropriated for the top in hopes that it would trickle down to the needy. Mr. Hoover didn’t know that money trickled up. Give it to the people at the bottom and the people at the top will have it before night, anyhow. But it will at least have passed through the poor fellow’s hands.”
A.I., robotics, and automation will dramatically change our society, and it will be doing it very quickly. We have reason to fear it if we allow unbridled capitalism to reap the harvest of these changes by widening the wealth gap, creating an army of unemployed people, while increasing homelessness, illness, suicides, lowering our birth rate, and destroying any reasonable vestiges of democracy.
Or it can usher in the golden age of humanity in which we finally wipe out poverty and restore security and dignity to the young and the old. This shouldn’t be a hard choice and yet, the status quo has a powerful grip on our minds. I hope that our generation can rise above the cruelty of this stinking rotten system and give birth to the greatest nation ever imagined.
