\[00:00:00\] Welcome to episode two, Tech Elites and UBI: Unpacking the Discourse

Hello, I'm Joe Williams. As we saw in the last episode of Reclaiming UBI, although UBI as a policy proposal can be summed up pretty straightforwardly, the discussion around both its viability and desirability is far more complicated. In addition to the economic dimensions of the argument for a UBI, we also have to factor in the role work plays both in constructing a positive personal identity and also affording us an opportunity to give expression to our competencies.

However, let's put these debates to one side for the moment and take it as a given that UBI is a good \[00:01:00\] idea, both in terms of economic justice on the one hand and personal development and identity on the other. But even if we fix these two variables, specific UBI proposals still demand a contextualized and critical analysis of their potential impacts if implemented in actually existing societies.

Most pressingly, as we saw during the last episode, is the need to analyze UBI in the context of the digital economy, the modes of production it promotes, and the kinds of inequality it fosters Crucially, any argument in favor of UBI has to contend with the possibility that on its own, UBI isn't necessarily going to attend to the structural causes of inequality in the digital economy and could even potentially simply serve to prop up the current economic model and the rampant levels of inequality, precariousness, and \[00:02:00\] alienation inherent in it.

Developing this line of thought further, a more extreme version of this argument posits that implemented undemocratically, UBI would essentially serve as an apology or moral alibi for current forms of social and economic injustice, legitimizing the status quo by affording people a minimum of economic protection while actually deepening existing power imbalances.

Accordingly, I felt it was vital to examine what powerful tech actors, some of the people who stood to gain the most from maintaining the current economic status quo, had to say about UBI. I was particularly keen to ascertain whose interests various arguments for UBI actually served. Luckily, Hector Perez Urbina, the former Google employee currently researching what he called the tech supremacy doctrine, had plenty of insight on this topic.

I thought his \[00:03:00\] notion of the tech supremacy doctrine, while not directly focused on UBI, could be a great framework to start making sense of tech elites' discourse around AI and UBI and shedding light on the worldviews and value systems this discourse reflected. You've recently published an article which is related to AI ethics and especially the relationship between AI technology in general and society.

And you've taken a slightly different approach here. You've been appro- paying attention to the way that people speak. What first drew you to start paying attention to the way that people spoke about AI, especially powerful people? Was there some specific moment that catalyzed your interest in this? A speech, an interview, or anything like that?

Yeah, that article that you mentioned is like a summarized version of my master's dissertation basically. And I was ... I got r- really interested in discourse, like the way people talk about things, \[00:04:00\] right? When I realized that there were certain assumptions that I already had when I was doing the master's that were preventing me from actually engaging with a topic full on.

These were unspoken assumptions that I already had in my mind that had been n- naturalized, right? So I wasn't even consciously aware of them. And then I was like, "Where are these coming from?" And then I th- I started studying this, and it turns out that discourse is one of the ways that these things, these ideas, these assumptions get naturalized and basically get incorporated into the common sense, right?

And when they do that, they're very insidious because they're really hard to recognize. And I was like, "Oh, maybe the way people talk about AI is full with these things." And of course it is. I ... That is not surprising because it turns out that in any field there are hidden assumptions and there are hidden \[00:05:00\] things.

That is the way ideology kind of works. And I was really interested to see how powerful people in AI, what I call the AI executive elite, talk about AI so that what are, what narratives are they trying to advance? Yeah, that's critical what you've just said, that sometimes language discourse can function to present something that is very specific as something that is universal and general.

So we end up unconsciously, if we're not critical in how we engage with discourse, kind of internalizing certain beliefs, certain viewpoints, certain narratives as if they were objective, neutral, value-free, and so on. And we don't need to get into the methodology of crit- critical discourse analysis, but this is basically the underlying, the foundation of critical discourse analysis, is to try and shed light on the kind of ideological messages that are being encoded in language, sometimes in ways which are not particularly obvious.

So in your research studying, studying discourse from \[00:06:00\] AI executive elites, as you describe them, what kind of characteristics were common across the way that tech leaders sometimes talk about AI? What elements were common? Were there any kind of very recognizable characteristics which, which were coming up?

Yeah. I studied something that I called the techno-supremacy doctrine. This is the belief system characterized by an excessive trust in technology's alleged inherent superiority to deal with complex societal issues, right? And so there's various components, and something that I discovered is that this elite, which is comprised of CEOs, CTOs, VC firms, manage- managing partners, like very powerful people, they're not a monolith.

They're not like a st- like homogeneous block, which probably people may think that they are, the Silicon Valley thinking, et cetera, but actually there are very different stances \[00:07:00\] in the, in, in this spectrum. However, as you would probably expect, they are pro-technology, obviously. And so I was really interested in the differences, right?

But you're talking about commonalities, and I also found a couple of very specific commonalities, and the- these are very interesting to me. First, there is a double narrative about the benefits and the role of technology in general and AI in particular. On the one hand, and this was actually the case in 71% of the samples, the texts that I analyzed, so on the one hand, people talk about this, that AI technology will make things better.

It will create a better world, sometimes like a utopia, kind of there's going to be benefit for everyone, right? So that, that's like the promise. And on the other hand, they talk about technology as some sort of the main or even inevitable driver of progress, of societal progress. \[00:08:00\] It makes me think of this, the usual, like the canonical example is that thinking about the printing press and its effect on literacy around the world.

A lot of people are led to believe or think that it was absolutely critical for literacy around the world, and obviously the technology as it was, it was very important, obviously, right? However, there were many other societal issues around literacy spreading around the world that are usually sidelined, right?

So this is a double narrative that it is very common. So utopia on the one side and the inevitability or the importance of technology driving societal change. And the second commonality that I found is that there is a subtle narrative to address concerns, right? Lots of people acknowledge the concerns, but only as a preamble to basically advance pro-technology discourse afterwards, right?

And in \[00:09:00\] particular, a particularly insidious one is the one that basically says, "Yes, technology as it is right now, AI as it is right now, is prob- is problematic, is... There are some concerns, but we just need better, more technology." So it's like a, it's this acknowledgement of concerns makes the second, the latter argument more palatable to critics, right?

Because they're, we're like, "Oh, they get it. They know the concerns." But then what they propose is more technology, right? As opposed to, let's just take a step back and see and consider whether technology's actually the right fix here. Yeah, a couple of crucial points there. So there's this kind of almost like thinking which in some ways resembles kind of religious faith in technology and its supposed superiority, its inevitability.

It's the kind of only driver of social change and progress and so on, which creates a sense of finality, of inevitability, that we've got no choice but to just go \[00:10:00\] with it, to just roll with it. It's here to stay, and it's going to do good if we let it get on with its own thing and just stay out of the way and we embrace it, almost like a kind of article of faith.

It's supposedly inherently good, positive. And you, it, it is funny that you should mention this religious component because actually, one of the components of TSD, of the Techno-Supremacy Doctrine, is the cult of technology. And there are many parallels, and lots of the language is very religious in nature.

There's some sort of mandate. They, some of these people think them, think of themselves as having this higher order mandate, some sort of saviorism. They are supposed to be doing this for humanity. It's a very strong conviction. Obviously, commercial interests and whatever, we'll talk about that. But this is a, this is something that is not to be overlooked because these people are very powerful, and when they be- believe something with such conviction, they're really persistent, \[00:11:00\] and they're really hardworking and really smart and really powerful.

Again, it's a, it's an engine that definitely, if you believe it truly, as I believe some of these people do, because of what they basically, it's even if there were no commercial advantages, a billionaire can ac- can actually do a lot towards their goals if they believe in such conviction. Yeah, absolutely.

There's a kind of triumphalism. There's something biblical about this, a kind of narrative of human redemption. And certainly it's not purely materialistic, but then again, there are different levels going on in this discourse here. You just raised something which I think is really crucial And that's a distinction between what we might call kind of true believerism, people who really believe th- these narratives, rich and powerful people believing that these things are all true, that they are the kind of saviors of humanity and they do have human needs are, are their priority, and the more, like, rationally self-interested pragmatism.

Are they just purporting to believe these things? Are they trying to get \[00:12:00\] people to believe these things because it's in their interests? Do you know what I mean? It's a very fascinating d- debate that always, I think, i- is necessary to have in any kind of conversation around this, around elite discourse, the extent to which elites may believe or not believe their narratives because people could convince themselves from seriously far-out things when it's in their interest to believe it, right?

The myth, the narrative will exist as long as people need that myth or narrative to exist. Did you have any comments on that? Any thoughts on that? Yeah. Something that you, you said, uh, and we need to be very careful here because as the texts that, that I analyzed are publicly available texts, right? And it is very different when somebody, whoever puts something, opens it up to the public, and their public stance might not be their private belief, right?

And basically it is very hard actually to know other than interviewing or n- getting to know them personally, et cetera, whether they truly believe this or not, right? So that is y- \[00:13:00\] that is a very good question, is just do they really believe this or who is it serving for them to present themselves as, yeah.

And the other thing is whether or not they believe it, the way that they're doing this, what does that do, right? And what is the impact here, right? So those are two different questions and the... Yeah, this is part of critical discourse analysis. You are basically asking these questions that you don't normally ask yourself, right?

Hector's analysis of the tech supremacy doctrine as a triumphalist, chauvinistic, and almost religiously dogmatic narrative chimed with my own interpretation of tech elite discourse on the relationship between technology and society. While Hector was clear that he wasn't necessarily attributing ill will to all of these actors or insisting that their arguments were willfully bad faith, he was clearly convinced of the need for deep and critical engagement with these kinds of discourses and for a more pluralistic and balanced \[00:14:00\] debate on the role tech should play in society Karen Hao, meanwhile, works from many of the same premises as Hector but arrives at some different conclusions.

Karen is a tech journalist focusing on the political economy of AI and the practices of big AI companies. Her book Empire of AI focuses on OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, to critically interrogate the values and organizational logics of the company and shed light on the reality behind the rhetoric.

Let's look at its title, Empire of AI. What motivated you to choose this title? What is it about the scale or the mode of operation or the values of big AI companies that warrants this analogy with empire? Yeah, the empire analogy is the one that-- the only one that I've ever found to really encapsulate every aspect and facet of these companies.

So I draw upon four different parallels in the book between \[00:15:00\] what I call the empires of AI and the empires of old. First, these companies lay claim to resources that are not their own, so that's the data of individuals, the intellectual property of artists, writers, and creators. They exploit an extraordinary amount of labor.

That includes both workers that they contract to train and annotate their AI models, as well as the, uh, labor exploitation that happens once their AI models are deployed in society because they're designed to be labor automating and then erode labor rights away. Third, these companies ex- they censor and control information.

So one of the ways they do this is in the last decade, we've seen the AI industry start snapping up or bankrolling most of the AI researchers in the world. And you could imagine if most of the s- climate scientists in the world were bankrolled by fossil fuel companies, we would get a very distorted understanding of the climate crisis.

And in the same way, we've gotten a very distorted understanding of the true limitations \[00:16:00\] and capabilities of the AI models that Silicon Valley is producing. They also then exercise this monopoly of knowledge production by conveying to the public that if the public doesn't like their technologies, that's simply because they don't understand them.

By doing this with policymakers, saying that policymakers, in order to regulate this technology effectively, must consult with the companies as the sole keepers of the knowledge of these models. And so ultimately, they shape and distort the public perception and the government agenda based on what ultimately will not undermine the empire, but rather abet its expansion.

And fourth and finally, these companies engage in this narrative that there is this moral or existential race that they are part of. So they are the good empire on a civilizing mission to bring progress and modernity to all of humanity, and the reason why they have to be an empire in the first place is because they're \[00:17:00\] competing against an evil empire.

And if the evil empire builds these technologies first, then humanity will end up in this kind of AI hell. But if they build it first, then humanity has a chance to rise to heaven. Thanks for that. Yeah, in that kind of narrative and that self-perception of legitimization of their extractive and exploitative processes, there's a lot of parallels there you can draw with kind of rhetoric to justify colonialism in the 19th century and so on as a kind of force for human good progress and bringing civilization at darker corners of the world and so on.

So that analogy really resonates. And this is, again, a really interesting angle in your book, is that you examine the people behind the AI. You, you get past the rhetoric, and you start profiling and exploring these actors and trying to understand a little bit about their motivations and so on. So why do you think it's important to start humanizing some of these figures, getting past the rhetoric, and look at the human actors and examining the human actors who are making decisions in AI?

\[00:18:00\] Yeah. I think one of the ways in which the empire accrues power is through narrative and really shaping both the understanding of the technology that they're building and also the impact that technology's gonna have through these, these stories that they tell about the, both of those things. And one of the stories they tell is the fact that this technology is somehow inevitable and apparently just falls from the skies, and is not in fact a product of human decision-making.

And so the reason why I spend so much time in the book profiling the people behind the machine is because you begin to realize that the way that the technology works and looks and the supply chain that emerges from to support its production all stems from very specific \[00:19:00\] values, worldviews, decisions, even personal vendettas among these people.

And that is what then makes people begin to realize that, wait a minute, the way that this technology works is not inevitable. It was actually just because a few powerful people that got to be in the room where it happens enabled this current race, or fueled this current race. But that also doesn't preclude everyone else who is a human that has choices to actually then join in on the decision-making and influence the way that the future of AI and the future of technology could look.

So both Hector's and Karen's work highlighted something central. Namely, the AI elites, whether out of a genuine, if misguided idealism, or a rationally self-interested pragmatism, legitimized and naturalized their political and economic power via a triumphalist, at \[00:20:00\] times almost providentialist narrative around technology's potential to create better worlds.

Contextualized in this broader narrative, certain AI elites' advocacy for UBI began to feel like an additional element of this tech supremacist ideology, which conceived of UBI as a means of consolidating and reinforcing powerful tech firms' economic power. One vital aspect of this conversation around AI elite narratives, or indeed any attempt to critically deconstruct any dominant discourse, is the question of intentionality and the extent to which powerful actors may or may not genuinely believe their own narratives Karen's characterization of AI firms as empires with intentions and practices which paralleled those of 19th century colonial projects had resonated with me.

But Hector had some compelling points to \[00:21:00\] make, which perhaps complicated my understanding. Coming back to the answer you gave to the question a moment before that, you were talking then about this, what we might call a performative kind of tokenistic engagement with concerns posited, uh, against the impact of AI and its potentially negative consequences.

And you say that a really characteristic element of what you've characterized as a techno-supremacist discourse is this kind of superficial engagement with those concerns. But your argument is that this isn't really a serious attempt to engage with concerns. This is a kind of rhetorical move. This is a bit of a performance, a rhetorical sleight of hand.

This is about disarming and shutting down opposition. It's about making it look like you've attended to the question when all you've really done is reinforce your original kind of argument. It's like a circular reasoning. You're saying, "Technology's great," but hold on, what about these con- concerns over here?

It's fine because technology's great, so it'll solve those problems. It's begging the \[00:22:00\] question, so to speak. You're going round in a circle there. So that was... That's one a- aspect that you've identified, isn't it, in, in techno-supremacist discourse, this kind of apologism for tech, this kind of even if tech does create problems, tech is a...

More tech is a solution, isn't it? And that now something important here, which is related to the previous point, is that we cannot really know their intention, right? And attributing malice that this is like a conscious performance and performative and just a little show while I'm gonna fool you and stuff like that, that's going a bit too far in my opinion.

So you know, but regardless of what was their intention, whether this was a conscious move, manipulative move, I don't actually think so for some of them. For some of them, I do believe that they actually are in- you know, to their, to the best of their ability, they're trying to engage and actually address some of these things.

But regardless of what they do, they end up pushing more technology, right? And again, I don't \[00:23:00\] know if that is a conscious choice or that is just because of... Because this techno-supremacy doctrine also has this component called the tech goggles, right? So basically, it's a way of understanding the world, where the world looks like a bunch of nails, and you have a big hammer, right?

So you are trying to help, and you could assume that people are well-intentioned trying to help, right? But you're trying to help just with this narrative in mind to push more technology because that's what you're conditioned to think, right? So yeah, regardless of what their intentions are, they are, in the vast majority of cases, acknowledging risks, but then proposing more pro-technology solutions.

Yeah Yeah. It was an interesting distinction. Yeah. So I suppose people have got a certain lens of looking at reality through which we all do, and that lens is conditioned by your position in the world and your in, in position in society and so on. Your experience of reality is the \[00:24:00\] product of your specific position in that reality.

So whether or not it's a kind of cynical kind of performative trick or whether it is a genuine earnest kind of belief, but it, i- in the outcome anyway, in any event, there is a potential conflict of interest. There is a potential negative impact of this uncritical narrative around technology and its supposed ability to solve all human problems, e- even if it is a sincere, potentially sincere hope to help and to solve human problems.

Yeah. The way to hell is paved with good intentions. Good ... Exactly. Yeah. Sure, sure. Well, i- I think that what the masters did for me was basically make me aware of my own tech logo That is in a nutshell what it did, right? And of course, once you see the truth that the emperor is naked and you see it everywhere, right?

So once you become a little more critical, then you start asking yourself these questions more and more, and then you get to s- you get to, to see how these narratives are being pushed around. And then, of course, you can ask true \[00:25:00\] intentions and what is going to be my response, what is going to be my reaction, et cetera.

And in particular, I believe that ... So, some of my, some of the, uh, literature that I read was, in my opinion, too critical of technologists. And in fact, I felt defensive. I felt attacked as a Googler doing this master's reading some of this thing. I feel attacked because i- it was very, uh, aggressive, adversarial, right?

Because they were assuming that I was like, I didn't care, and I was just performing my little magic trick to advance more technology because I want to get rich and stu- stuff like that. And I do think that whether or not that's the case, taking this position to critique is counterproductive, right? We should give be- the benefit of the doubt, and we should try to be critical and very clear, obviously, as to the effects of this, these stances, but do not assume more than we, that we must.

Mm. \[00:26:00\] Interesting. Yeah. We all have our biases, don't we? We all have our, our worldview, and that sometimes leads to blind spots. It doesn't necessarily mean we're trying to manipulate and damage the world around us and see the world around us exclusively as a means to advance our own ends. But people do need to be held accountable for the outcome of their actions- Yes

in any event. Exactly. And that's exactly ... Th- this is a slippery slope. It's not like a free pass. No. It's not, "Oh, you had the greatest intentions at heart. It's all okay." No, no. Accountability is very important, right? So yes, we should just make that distinction. So even if we do, where appropriate, give the benefit of the doubt to actors from the tech sector, in the outcome, there is still a vital need to hold people accountable for the impact of their actions and call attention to the blind spots in their narratives, irrespective of intentionality.

Of course, this kind of benefit of the doubt is less applicable to \[00:27:00\] high-profile figures whose intentions are perhaps more cleanly discernible in their actions and decisions. But still, Hector had identified some important nuances in this debate. I wanted to dig deeper into how this tech supremacist discourse related to the conversation around UBI, with a view to ultimately reclaiming the case for UBI as a transformative measure embedded in a progressive economic agenda, rather than the essentially conservative, perhaps even regressive vision of UBI espoused by some powerful tech actors Andrew White, who we met in the first episode, is primarily interested in the economic impacts and implications of UBI But his argument for UBI is grounded in a critical engagement with AI elite discourse.

There's probably some common characteristics and points of convergence which exist between the worldview of people like Elon Musk or Peter Thiel, as you \[00:28:00\] suggested. Again, this might involve a degree of speculation on your part, but if you could summarize some aspects of that worldview, of that agenda, how would you characterize some of that?

Yeah. I suppose those two in particular are extremely right-wing. So that would be, in terms of economics, that would mean that there's no regulation on financial activity, there's no regulations on the increasing concentration of wealth to this, this 1%. And that would take place at a kind of global level as well.

Employment rights would be stripped back as well, so leave aside the argument of whether or not people would actually have a job. Those in jobs would have their employment rights pretty much stripped away, as far as I can see. And also around, on social issues like immigration and that, they're extremely right-wing, i- if not racist as well, and I think that this agenda is extremely problematic.

And for that \[00:29:00\] reason alone, I think there needs to be a greater kind of restrictions on the way in which they operate. I think some of it could be quite simple to start with. I'm not saying this would solve the entire problem, because it wouldn't, but it surprises me in the UK, for instance, that the UK government still makes announcements on X and it doesn't do it on Blues...

It's, I think it does do it on Blue Sky as well, or sometimes. I do think that governments are not really tackling these kind of serious problems, the serious problems that the tech giants are bringing to bear on society. While the AI elite class is not necessarily a monolith, it seemed clear that there was sufficient common ground between some of them to start tracing out elements of a shared worldview, without falling into the trap of uncritically attributing full uniformity between all of them on all matters.

One of the most instantly apparent similarities between this class of actors was their social and \[00:30:00\] ethnic background. They were overwhelmingly white, male, and middle or upper class. This homogeneity was a crucial focus of Karen's research. One thing that comes up in the book often, and is cited quite commonly in other places too, is the homogeneity of AI elites.

This class of powerful AI actors generally come from similar social backgrounds. They tend to be white men. What do you think accounts for this lack of diversity among this class of people? I, I think it's two things. One is the fact that we exist in A society that privileges those types of people, and so those types of people rise more quickly to the top.

But the other thing is, I think the people who don't look like the white male tech billionaire don't really thrive in this kind of environment in the long run. Either, \[00:31:00\] either they get pushed out, and I talk in my book about the case of Dr. Timnit Gebru, who is a prominent AI researcher who's also a Black woman, and she previously was a lead...

led the ethical AI team at Google, co-led the ethical AI team at Google, and she was forced out after raising significant concerns about the direction that Google was taking by chasing large language models because of competition with OpenAI. But the other thing is, I talk with a lot of researchers within the AI space who are from different types of backgrounds that are not white male tech billionaires, and they also say that they don't agree with the approach of these companies because they recognize that it's imperial.

They recognize that it is exacting extraordinary harm on large swaths of the global population, and especially on vulnerable and marginalized communities like women, \[00:32:00\] indigenous people of color, poor people, working class people. And so they just don't wanna partake in that at all. And so I think it's the...

a self-reinforcing cycle that the people who rise to the top look a certain way, and then the people who don't look that way also just don't wanna be a part of it. And then following on from that, what are the some of the implications that might arise when we concentrate people from similar backgrounds and perhaps with similar worldviews into a, a powerful class and give people from very similar backgrounds a lot of, a lot of power?

Is there some danger here that their specific interests, values, and worldviews and so on can start to be generalized as, as almost universal, and they can start to have a disproportionate, outsized sense of power to define agendas and promote their interests and so on? Yeah. This is yet another facet of the colonial aspect of this project, is that there is a particular worldview, a particular set of knowledge, and a particular \[00:33:00\] reflection of values that's being codified into these models, and then these companies or the executives who- whose values are in fact reflected within these models then try to sell this model as a one-size-fits-all solution to the entire world, regardless of whether the person who's ultimately using this tool has a totally different language background, cultural background, historical background, or just h- lives in a life that fundamentally looks completely different from the elite class that's forging these technologies.

So it absolutely has a huge impact on the way that these technologies ultimately affect society. I fundamentally believe that the reason why we as a society moved historically from an imperial model of governments- governance to a, these more democratic modes of governance \[00:34:00\] was because of this reflection that having a small group of people, very homogenous people at the top making decisions for everyone else just does not actually result in successful outcomes for most people.

It does not allow most people to live dignified lives. And that's why we agreed that having this more inclusive mode of governance where everyone can collectively decide on what is ultimately the best way to move forward will enable, like, a higher success rate of us getting to more m- most people in society being able to have access to that dignified life.

So that is, to me, the crux of the project of what Silicon Valley is building, is that they are trying to revert us back to these imperial modes in which this tiny class of people get \[00:35:00\] to dictate how the rest of the world lives irrespective of whether or not it's good for them. AI elite's discourse on automation and UBI then was a product of a rather homogenous group with a significant degree of convergence in their worldviews.

In light of this, their narratives inevitably reflected specific value systems. Crucially, given their disproportionate platform and resources to disseminate their narratives, they had an outsized capacity to amplify their messages, potentially universalizing their specific perspectives and interests via discourse.

One element of tech supremacist discourse which seemed to me to be particularly loaded was the narrative of finality and inevitability of currently dominant models of AI, a claim that clearly naturalized AI elite's class interests. I \[00:36:00\] asked Hector to expand on this a bit Regarding tech supremacist discourse, which we were talking about, one interesting thought that came to me is I was recently reading something as part of my PhD, which is about critical discourse analysis of Portuguese print media narrative, uh, here in Portugal in the '30s.

And one interesting point that an author made is that print media discourse was a product of modernity, and plenty of people were very dubious and skeptical of it for its sensationalism, for its reductivism, so on. And potentially, it's a... It's potential to condition people to see things in terms of binary opposites.

It presents every social conflict, any moral or philo- philosophical dilemma as a kind of either/or, black and white, winner takes all between two extremes, and doesn't really foster and promote reflective, nuanced, respectful de- debate, a- and so on. It's kind of vested interest in being \[00:37:00\] sensationalist, in being reductive, in rewarding very heavy-handed, one-dimensional, black and white ways of framing things.

So does some of this apply then to tech supremacist discourse? Is there a risk that then tech supremacist discourse, which presents technology is inevitable, the only, the only potential, the only possible solution to contemporary human, social, and economic problems? If that narrative is perpetuated unchecked, is there a danger of it limiting our responses and our ability to conceive of a- and imagine a broader array of responding to social human problems?

Might we end up internalizing this kind of black and white dichotomy between kind of technology or nothing? Yeah, for sure. We talked about tech goggles before, right? And I think that this techno supremacy doctrine is like a self... Forms like self-reinforcing circle where you have your tech goggles and then \[00:38:00\] you start pr- proposing some sort of easy fix or like a solution, right?

Then you believe in the superiority of technology. This is the chauvinistic view of technology. And then you go into the cult of technology because the very narrowly framed tech problem that you define with your tech goggles, not surprisingly, was solved to a certain extent with technology because that's the reason you fr- because of how you framed it.

And then you reinforce that this technology is really good, effective, and then you have some sort, awe or some sort of reverence towards it. And that awe obviously reinforces your tech goggles because you're like, "Oh, yeah, I was right. I solved that problem." The more you do that, the more you start seeing everything as this could be solved with an app, right?

There's the problem of education. Oh, AI tutors, right? Or the problem of global warming, or the problem of deforestation, or the pl- there's many problems, and it is more and more natural for people, for \[00:39:00\] us, to think in terms of how could an app or technology solve it, right? How could AI solve it? As opposed to should AI solve it?

Is this bigger than AI? Is this something that maybe has nothing to do with technology? Maybe this is more like a social, political, governance, economic, et cetera thing, right? Or maybe it's a bit of both, right? We ... Part of TSD is also this solutionism that we think and we frame problems s- as a singular problem that can be fixed with a simple solution, as opposed to a wicked problem they call them, right?

These problems that are actually not that simple and you can't really ... You don't solve problems, you tackle problems with different approaches, right? And so the issue, my concern with TSD is precisely that we start m- accepting more and less consciously these premises. For example, AI's inevitable, right?\[00:40:00\]

Or it is the main driver. It is objectively superior. That is a dangerous one, right? And then we start playing into this narrative, and we basically amplify it. Yeah, and this is what ideology does, is it gives power to the people promoting these ideologies, and the power is called power by consent, right?

It's not by force, it's not economic, it's another type of power. It's power where you basically accept, tacitly accept what it's been said because you just shared it, because you just keep buying the product, because you keep ... Y- you believe it yourself, right? You incorporate it into your own psyche, into your own set of assumptions.

When I talk to a lot of people, they always say, "Yeah, but technology's on a, is inevitable, unstoppable," right? That is one of the most common things that I hear. I say, "What about human cloning?" We thought that was also not going to be stopped, and we did stop it. Or nuclear power, right? That has also \[00:41:00\] been curtailed or stopped or contained or

In several ways. We have reverted the hole in the ozone layer. There's a lot of species that have been brought to their natural habitat. There's things that as a society we can actually choose not to do, right? And it is truly very li- very few things are truly inevitable, right? And certainly AI is one of them.

At least ... And this is something that I ... There's a little issue that I have here, which is using AI as an umbrella term, because that is another narrative. We consider AI everything from the type of AI that is solving protein folding or doing some sort of analysis with respect to global warming, right?

From that, all the way to chatbots or to sex companions or erotic or even social companions. There's a big difference, right? And when we actually use AI for everything, people can say, these people say, "Oh, \[00:42:00\] but AI is solving global warming or attacking these diseases and stuff like that." But then they also include in that label all the chats and all the trivial stuff, mundane stuff that basically could be very harmful.

We should also challenge that AI term, right? But absolutely, AI should be dissected. In certain things as a society, we could just say, "No, this is not a good idea." In that, the other thing, it's a great idea, right? The conversation should be more nuanced. It's not yes AI or no AI, as you said, the false dichotomy, right?

This is not a, you know, either/or. It's like where Do we go for it and where we actually say no? So far, my conversations with Hector, Karen, and Andy had helped me get a clearer understanding of the ideological charges and blind spots in tech elite narratives around AI's economic impacts, and this class of \[00:43:00\] actors' potentially dubious motivations for advocating for UBI.

Hector's category of the tech supremacist doctrine can clearly be discerned in AI elites' discourse on UBI. As we've seen, AI elites are not necessarily unanimous in their advocacy for UBI, but their pro-UBI arguments evidence aspects of this triumphalist rhetoric. In these narratives, UBI does not appear as a radical redistribution mechanism, but rather a much more limited and less ambitious means of offering a modicum of protection against the most significant impacts of AI without addressing the structural causes of inequality.

In this sense, UBI almost functions to furnish the economic status quo with a kind of moral alibi to legitimize current power imbalances and reinforce utopianist narratives AI elites have a vested \[00:44:00\] interest in perpetuating. To bring the threads of these conversations back together and reflect on how to reformulate the case for UBI in light of its potential to entrench inequality, I went back to Andrew White and asked him whether it was still possible to make an economically progressive argument in favor of UBI in the context of the digital economy.

How do we stop kind of UBI as a policy measure for just propping up the status quo without attending to more structural inequalities and so on? Because as you've talked about here, on the political and economic right, there is a kind of neoliberal, libertarian, uh, uh, economic libertarian argument which would quite like UBI, which kind of supports that agenda.

'Cause if im- UBI was implemented today with the way that the economy's configured, there's a danger that it might just become a means of transferring wealth from the public sector to the private sector. We take taxpayer money, public money, which give it to people, and then they have to pay energy bills to energy companies and so \[00:45:00\] on.

And it feels like it could even be like a kind of transfer of wealth. It could be quite a regressive measure, which might, if anything, concentrate existing power imbalances and economic inequalities then. But y- as you mentioned at the beginning, you've got a kind of more comprehensive kind of overarching vision.

So how do we then attend to that kind of, that, that danger of UBI becoming an instrument for entrenching and kind of legitimizing current economic and political inequalities? Yeah, I think there is this argument that some people advance that UBI is like a sticking plaster. It's mitigating, but it's not really dealing with the structure, structural problems in the global economy.

So I think that simultaneously you would continue to have those debates and push for those kind of structural changes. So I, I guess you could say that, yes, we're bringing UBI, but this is not the whole picture, as it were. We do need to think about the structural inequalities that will make UBI, in a sense, \[00:46:00\] less relevant.

Although I would still say not completely irrelevant because if we are losing jobs, then we do need to find ways of paying people a living wage, as it were. I guess what I would say is that if you introduce a UBI, it might start to change behavior. It does have this redistributive aspect, so it gets people used to the idea of redistribution, that the richest in society have to transfer a lot more of their taxes to funding a universal basic income.

So redistribution becomes... is back on the agenda again. I would say another thing that it could do, and you saw this during COVID, is again we're thinking about the usefulness of certain jobs and we're thinking that why should bankers be paid a fortune, whereas people who are doing very useful jobs like cleaning the streets and that are getting paid a kind of pittance.

And I would say that's kind of- That kind of idea is propped up by the current system in the \[00:47:00\] sense that the free market isn't working as well as it should. And now this sounds a little bit paradoxical, but what I mean by that is the kind of state is interfering because the state is essentially saying to people that if you don't take this menial job for a basic wage, then we're gonna take away your unemployment benefit as it were.

So in a sense, we're saying this is a free market, but actually it's not because the state is intervening in the market. If you could say, I'm not gonna take that job because I have a universal basic income, so if you want me to do this job, delivery job or whatever, I'm just gonna refuse because I still have enough money.

What it would mean is the salaries in those kind of roles would start to go up and we saw this during COVID. We really needed delivery drivers in COVID. We needed people to stack the shelves in supermarkets in COVID. What then happened was that wages started to go up. So in a sense, the market was working much better than it does at the moment.

So that's the, that's is something \[00:48:00\] positive that I see in a UBI because one of the questions that people have about UBI is to say, who would do all these jobs? If you are paying them to do nothing, why would they do all these jobs? And my answer would be, actually, because we're gonna pay a lot more for those jobs.

So I think it would be positive in that sense. So yes, you can say it's a sticking plaster, it's mitigation. It doesn't deal with the structural problems as much as it should, but I would say that to a certain extent it does. It does bake redistribution into the system. It does value or price those low skilled jobs, which I don't actually think are low skilled.

It, it gives them a, a kind of more realistic price as it were in the market. At this stage, I was still convinced that UBI could be a wonderful thing, but also keenly aware of the need for a critical discussion to salvage the case for UBI from the triumphalist rhetoric of tech elites and their advocacy for UBI as a means of propping up the status quo while leaving their power \[00:49:00\] unaffected.

Join me in the next episode as I set about trying to do precisely this and demonstrate how UBI could be an element towards achieving a fairer and more sustainable economic model rather than merely an apology for the digital economy and tech utopianists. The, the kind of pilots are showing that people are not becoming idle, they're just improving their position within the labor market.

AI can in fact be a technology that brings broad benefit to people, that even reverses historic inequities, that reverses the power dynamics of the present day