[00:00:00] Joe Williams: Welcome to Beyond the Paycheck: Reclaiming the Case for UBI in the Age of AI with me, your host, Joe Williams

It's November 2025. Sitting at my desk looking at my computer screen, my freelance email inbox to be precise. Nothing. I press refresh again. Why is nothing coming in? Did I mess up those last jobs I did? Have I alienated myself from my clients? Is this about me? I'm Joe Williams, originally from near Manchester in England, and currently living in Coimbra, Portugal, where I study for a PhD in history and, with decreasing frequency, translate from Spanish and Portuguese to English.

I started working in translation in 2017 after deciding to pivot out of the teaching English as a second language stuff I was doing previously. It had been a pretty good few years work-wise, but then around August 2025, following a very busy period, work just sort of disappeared. Old clients who would regularly send me work just vanished.

The clients I'd been working with most recently were now saying they had less and less work on. On LinkedIn, I saw the CEO of one agency I'd been working with for years posting about the benefits of automation and AI for optimizing efficiency in translation. I was never a techy person, and I've always in some ways been deeply impractical.

So when I first started hearing people talk about AI in 2023, I wasn't quite sure what they were talking about. As a freelance translator, I was already aware of and concerned about the impact of technology on the viability of the translation profession and planning ahead. But still, I hadn't really grasped the enormity of the implications that generative AI would have on the economy and society.

I, impractical idealist that I sometimes am, was kind of burying my head in the sand. I was busy doing things I basically enjoyed and valued, languages, humanities, culture, and getting by reasonably well. While I knew I needed to prepare for inevitable changes, I was hoping that I could hold out a while longer, at least until I'd finished my PhD.

I didn't realize how quickly I would start to feel the impacts of AI on my work, which was both a source of income and identity. The end of 2025 and the beginning of 2026 were dry, barren patches for me, and I prioritized making use of this time to learn more about AI and how I could make myself more employable in this new AI-driven context.

As someone with an almost allergic reaction to quantitive data, fixed values, and mathematical languages, I knew that the practical aspects of AI roles weren't really an option for me. Besides, I was a humanist, a linguist, and a historian whose intellectual interests had always resided in discourse and narrative, in how we produce meaning about the world around us and narrate our experience of it.

I was less interested in the technology and its functioning in and of itself, and more about the relationships between society and that technology. Ultimately, I was curious about the ends to which we direct technological development and the human values this direction reflects. Why do we develop new technologies?

Whose interest does this technology serve, and what is the human impact of it? I first read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance when I was about 23 as a history undergraduate back in Manchester. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, subtitled An Inquiry into Values, initiated an enduring intellectual interest in the ethical and philosophical implications of technological development and a critical curiosity in the notion of progress as it's conventionally defined.

It came into my life at a time when I was becoming increasingly interested in the alienating effect of certain kinds of work, the impoverishing impact of unrewarding activity on our emotional and psychological well-being, and the relationships between humans and the processes that sustain us. It inspired me, someone who, despite having had a couple of manual labor jobs after leaving school, had never exhibited any capacity for practical work to start building cigar box guitars with a couple of mates in the admittedly rather pompous belief that I was connecting to some transcendent higher power by messing around with bits of wood.

In practice, however, with my utter absence of manual dexterity or even basic coordination, I likely served to inhibit rather than facilitate metaphysical transcendence during those sawdust-soaked afternoons in Paul's garage. Nevertheless, a seed had been planted, and the higher-order values to which we subordinate technological development and the question of what constitutes real progress would remain features in my intellectual horizons from then on.

As I sought to learn more about this thing called AI that was drastically reshaping the job market and along with it vast swathes of humanity's identity and sense of self-worth, I found myself reflecting on the extent to which my work as a translator had configured my identity and furnished me with a positive sense of self.

If our current economic model and those responsible for it were capable of stripping people of their economic livelihood and self-worth in the name of progress, then what kind of progress was that? Of course, it's a law of history that certain jobs become obsolete and people have to adapt to new socioeconomic realities.

But these shifts were so sudden and seismic that people were caught totally off guard and offered no safety measures to protect them during the transition, all in the name of increased efficiency and greater optimization, values which in practice seem to amount to even less equitable distribution of wealth and power.

In short, the values informing our understanding of economic growth and social progress seem totally out of whack. The rhetoric of automation unburdening us from drudgery and creating shared prosperity seemed screechingly dissonant with lived experience. There was something missing from the narrative.

In addition to a reasonable income, working as a translator had given me a sense of purpose and meaning. It had satisfied my human needs to feel like I was making valuable contributions to society and paying my way. As I started to feel the direct economic and psychological impacts of automation on the translation sector, I had time and motivation to return to some questions I'd once been so animated by but had been far too busy with my MA, PhD, and translation work to concern myself with over recent years.

In a context in which material survival and psychological well-being were still inseparably entwined with work, yet in which an environmentally unsustainable consumption-driven model of economic growth was not creating the kinds of jobs which allowed people to satisfy either of these vital human needs, one concept in particular jumped out at me with renewed insistence, universal basic income.

Universal basic income, or UBI, in basic terms, is a fixed sum of money paid to every member of society on a regular basis with no conditionality attached. As a policy proposal, UBI has both advocates and detractors across the political spectrum. As a somewhat idealistic twenty-something-year-old with an armchair interest in heterodox and progressive economics, it had resonated deeply with my worldview and values.

Now, however, UBI seemed to have acquired greater urgency in the light of the wholesale economic disruption affected by the untethered rollout of AI. Locate this economic disruption in the even broader context of the dire environmental consequences of the attempt to squeeze infinite economic growth from a finite amount of resources via exponentially increasing consumption and ever more complex material needs, and the conversation around UBI seemed an urgently necessary one.

The way I saw it, UBI had the potential to decouple work from survival when market mechanisms no longer seemed capable of offering people the opportunity to earn a decent livelihood, and when the spiraling consumption necessary to fuel our current model of economic growth was undermining the basis for human life on this earth.

It seemed that, for better or for worse, some configuration of a post-work context was already starting to loom over us. The primary question seemed to be whose interests would it serve and whose values would it reflect? If technological automation could now create prosperity with significantly reduced human inputs, how were we going to distribute this prosperity, and what were people going to do with their time?

But wasn't this UBI business all sentimental fantasy that only loony lefties with no real understanding of economics could buy into? There's no such thing as something for nothing after all, and besides, who's gonna pay for it? There's no magic money tree, and only a bleeding heart sentimentalist blinded by high-minded yet deeply impractical ideals could possibly give any credibility to such an idea.

It was obviously a complicated discussion, and the case for UBI is particularly susceptible to straw manning and caricature. I wanted deeper clarity in my own understanding of the concept and the arguments both for and against. My first point of call was Andrew White, senior lecturer in culture, media, and creative industries at King's College London, and author of the 2025 book Inequality in the Digital Economy: The Case for UBI.

I wanted to start with the basics and define some terms. So without getting too technical, what is the digital economy for people who aren't necessarily economists, and how does that differ from what sometimes is called the information economy? I would say that it's pretty similar to the information economy.

[00:10:36] Andrew White: I guess what I'm trying to think about is the extent to which almost all aspects of economic activity these days are digital. Now, when I first started thinking about this about 10 or 15 years ago, that wasn't really the case. You would clearly have what we refer to as the industrial economy, and then we would have the digital economy kind of bolted on.

So we would think of companies like Google, kind of search engines, stuff like that, online commerce and things like that, and you would think of those as quite separate. But I think increasingly the digital economy is taking over, both in terms of the infrastructure, the way in, in which things are organized in our economy, but also the kind of products that, that we see.

Now, it is the case of course, that we're both sitting in front of a computer and you still need manufacturing, so I'm not suggesting for one minute that manufacturing is not still important. But increasingly we're very much dependent on the digital or on the information for driving our modern economies, as it were.

[00:11:36] Joe Williams: What is it about the digital economy and the way that it's impacted society which kind of raises this discussion about universal basic income and makes it perhaps a necessary policy proposal? 

[00:11:49] Andrew White: I first started looking, in a previous book actually, I first started looking at these digital companies and the way in which they differed from what we might refer to as manufacturing companies in the kind of Fordist era.

So a classic example would be Ford itself, Ford Motor Company. Ford made sizable profits, and it employed something like 100,000 or 200,000 people. This is when I was looking at this 10, 15 years ago. And if you, in a sense, divided the profits or even the income by the number of people, you would see that it was quite reasonable.

It would become to something like 150,000, 200,000 American dollars, and once you take out administration costs and all, that's a kind of reasonable cost for a large number of people. When you start to look at these tech companies, what is huge profits and small number of people being employed, so Google back at that time probably 20 odd thousand, but huge profits.

Apple again, similarly huge profits, small numbers of people. So what I thought then was that if you look at these kind of companies, then we see that if- this pattern of working is replicated across the economy, this is going to lead to greater inequality. 'Cause what's happening is you have a small number of people earning huge amounts of money, and either a lot of people are not being employed, or if they are being employed, they're being employed on zero-hours contracts.

'Cause if you think of Amazon, Amazon does employ a lot of people. The c- the core employees, the full-time employees might be low, but it employs a lot of people on zero-hours contracts, and they is ... Are treated quite badly. So when I ... So back then we still had this ... We, we still have a strong industrial sector, but I think it's fair to say that these tech companies have became, become even more powerful, and that, I think, has led to this kind of great inequality where there's a greater divide between the rich and poor.

But also I think it is starting to lead to the loss of jobs, 'cause we don't need as many people to work in those industries. If you look at the figures for worldwide employment levels from about the mid-1990s up until about 5 or 10 years ago, it has actually dropped from 62% of the working age population to 58%.

So there is this kind of trend, and I think then that's exacerbated by AI, 'cause AI is amplifying these things. It is kind of, or it has the potential to eliminate quite a few jobs, especially at entry level. I think there was a recent report by some researchers at, I think it was MIT, that said a lot of entry level jobs are being wiped out.

So a, a lot of young people now are finding it difficult to get jobs because the machine can actually do these jobs better than they can. So I guess what we're seeing over the long term is people struggling to earn a living wage. And the question we should ask then, is a modern economy able to create good, well-paying jobs?

'Cause we assume that it is, and that's the basis of the kind of social contract, as it were. But if that kind of breaks down, then we have to find ways of paying people who cannot work, and I think this is where the universal basic income comes in. 

[00:15:02] Joe Williams: My conversation with Andy had helped me to clarify my understanding of the digital economy and how it was deepening economic inequality and precariousness.

It seemed that automation was creating a kind of winner-takes-all economy in which the owners of the technologies on which increasingly greater numbers of people depended for their livelihoods were able to consolidate ever greater wealth and power among a tiny elite, with people having few alternative job opportunities as the need for human labor reduces, driving people into competition for fewer jobs, resulting in deteriorating working conditions and increased precariousness.

None of this was unprecedented, of course, but AI seemed to be accelerating these dynamics at a rate far beyond what we had seen before If the digital economy was failing to create stable and well-paying jobs for huge sections of society and work was no longer functioning as an effective means of meeting our material needs, then conventional attitudes towards work and its purpose, both as a means of earning a living and as a central element of individual identity, no longer seemed fit for purpose in this new economic reality.

If implementing UBI meant decoupling work from the ability to pay our basic needs, then the conversation around UBI seemed to me to need to be embedded in a broader ethical, even philosophical debate around the cultural significance of work and its centrality in defining our individual self-worth and role in society.

Leaving aside the practical aspects just for the time being, a necessary first step in this conversation was to explore reconfiguring narratives around work and w- how we construct meaning around it. Andrew White's own argument for UBI was informed by these philosophical reflections on the social, cultural, and personal meanings individuals and society construct around work, and the problem of whether modern work practices really served any social function.

How can we talk about different ways of decoupling meaning and value and purpose from work? And just to mention in the book you cite, this is a slightly different dimension, but I'd like to include it here. You cite a hunter-gatherer society in what is now South Africa, who work about 15 or 20 hours a week.

You say that model has something to teach us in industrialized economies. We're obviously not gonna go back to hunter-gatherer societies, but there's something about the way that they configure work which you think is relevant to us. So could you talk a little bit about that, please?

[00:17:39] Andrew White: I think Hannah Arendt makes this distinction between work and labor.

So she says a lot of what we talk about in terms of work is actually labor, and labor has, in her perspective, it has a more negative connotation. We're laboring for someone else, whereas if we work it, it implies a degree of autonomy. And so it's a case of promoting work rather than labor. So in a sense, even if we do less work, that, that's good if it reduces the amount of labor we're doing, if you s- if you see what I mean.

And again, we shouldn't be wedded to this idea of 40, a 40-hour week. We should do whatever needs to be done in the time that it takes. And you're probably familiar with the late David Graeber, who talks about bullshit jobs, and that basically we don't need a lot of these jobs, is what he says. They're created for the sake of it.

They're existing for the sake of it. It's labor, it's not work. He also talks about the bullshittification of jobs, which means that, let's say... I'll give my own example rather than talk about someone else's job. But as an academic, I guess about 50% of what I do, pos- possibly more hopefully, is worthwhile, teaching, research, doing things like this.

But probably about 40% is not so worthwhile. It's taking registers, doing a lot of kind of admin, a lot of self-promotion actually, which you think we don't really need to do that. And so we need, do need to think about work in that sense. Let's try to get, do stuff that is worthwhile rather than thinking Andy is working 25 hours a week on teaching and research, but we need to bump him up to 40.

People don't say this explicitly, but this is the organizational logic, isn't it? We need to bump them up to 40 hours. And what I often find as well in organizations, not just in academia that I've worked in- Is that people will say there's too much admin, let's employ another administrator, and actually the admin goes up.

And why is that? It's because the administrator creates yet more admin, 'cause the re- the administrator is justifying his or her or their own existence. So again, I think if we can get away with this sense of the need to create work for the sake of it. And we've all done it. If I've been in a job where I feel that I'm idle for a short while, I start going around trying to do something, 'cause I think the boss will say, "What is the s- p- point of this person?

If he can't find work for 40 hours, we might as well just get rid of him." So I think we do need to think about work in that way. It'll be difficult, but we do have experiments like the four, four-day week. A lot of people i- I know some of my colleagues now in academia are working three or four days a week.

They don't get paid the same wage, but... So it is becoming increasingly common, and I think we should encourage those kind of modes of work.

[00:20:24] Joe Williams: These days, I'm a bit of a workaholic. More than anything, I get bored easily and like to keep busy. I need the stimulation. Over the past 10 years or so, work has been an increasingly important element of my identity and how I define myself in relation to the world around me.

But that hadn't always been the case. In my late teens and early 20s, I'd been pretty rudderless, working in factories and offices for a couple of years, studying music for a couple of years at high school equivalent level, and not beginning my bachelor's degree until 2009 when I was 22. A middle-class kid from a predominantly white suburb about 10 miles outside of Manchester, I was hardly instilled with the tireless work ethic the working-class elements of my families possessed.

I was unmaterialistic in that way that people from comfortable middle-class backgrounds quite often are, and my primary motivations at that age were listening to music, playing guitar, going to the pub, and reading books. My attitudes towards work really began to shift in 2012 when I got my first graduate job as an English teacher at a private language academy in South Korea, a job which I didn't necessarily love, but which did catalyze some shifts in how I related to work, the world around me, and to myself.

One of the people I spoke to in the course of making these programs was Hector Perez Urbina, who had recently quit his job at Google and was transitioning into the area of AI safety and ethics. During our conversation, he shared some insights with me about his own relationship to work and how this was informed by his cultural background 

[00:22:04] Héctor Pérez-Urbina: One aspect that I don't think gets challenged enough is whether we believe as a society that th- having all of that leisure time is going to be a good idea.

People seem to assume that UBI, a lot of proponents seem to assume that it is just a good idea. It would be great if we had the safety net, if people could do whatever they wanted, et cetera. But there's a lot to be said about the value and the meaning that work gives people, the, the sense of purpose. It, it, there's honest work, right?

I am from Mexico. I come from Mexico, where work is, is something that is cherished, valued, right? Even if it's menial, even if it's something that you don't really want to do because you are doing something valuable, right? So I actually would challenge the idea that UBIs would be such a good idea even if that were possible.

I'm not saying it would be possible. That's another conversation, right? But let's assume that AI could bring it about, right? Do we really want that? What would I do with my leisure time? Would that cause a lot of mental illness across all over the world because people don't have a sense of purpose and meaning?

That, that's a question worth exploring at depth, right? 

[00:23:25] Joe Williams: Andrew White also had some interesting things to say on parallel associations between work and morality in the UK context 

[00:23:33] Andrew White: I think certainly we should celebrate those who see value in their work, and I don't think that is in tension with the UBI.

So if people really say that my job is something that gives me meaning to life, I think that's great. We should always encourage that. I suppose though I've always had the problem with universalizing this because especially where it has this kind of moral dimension, because then what you're saying is if people don't have a job or if they have a job which they really don't like, then their life has no meaning.

That, that, that's a kind of logic- logical extension of that argument. So I think what we can say is that work does have meaning for many people, and we should encourage that, but for others it might not, and in that sense they can find meaning or they will find meaning in other activities in society. So it could be something like childcare.

Someone might just decide this... There's so much drudgery in this job that I want to give it up and I want to spend all my time looking after my children. Now the problem is because of this kind of moral argument which unfortunately does have some resonance in contemporary societies, especially in the UK, that person would be almost criticized if not vilified.

They will be told, "You're," in the words of the tabloids, "sponging off the taxpayer," or whatever, "Can't you just continue in your job instead of staying at home looking after your children and taking money from the state?" But of course, what you might say is that not only is that more meaningful for that person, but in many ways it's more valuable for society.

Developing children to their full potential, loving for them, caring for them is one of the most important things that you can do, and it does... It has unden- undeniable social benefits, but it has economic benefits as well, and I don't want to suggest that the economic benefit is the most important thing.

But if you're going to argue against those who say this is just a waste of time, then sometimes you do have to point out the financial benefits of that. So I think it is a case of finding meaning not just in work, but in other activities as well. It may be activism, might be environmental activism, it might be environmental cleanups, but I think it needs to be, you know, stressed that we can find meaning in many different activities.

And I think that's something, going back to UBI, that UBI could enable, that we can do a range of different activities. It doesn't prevent you from continuing your job if you love the job you're doing. In fact, it can make it easier for you to go and work in a job if the job is part-time and something that you couldn't do if you didn't have a UBI 

[00:26:10] Joe Williams: Across the world then, it seemed that diverse cultures had their own specific ways of configuring work as the source of a person's individual worth and social utility, a seemingly general phenomenon with its own culturally specific manifestations.

These conversations motivated me to revisit Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and observe how my relationship to it had shifted in the years since I'd last read it, to see if any new dimensions to it opened up to me at this different vantage point. I was particularly keen to reflect on what the book, undeniably somewhat aged, might have to say to us in the context of the digital economy, automation, and AI-driven job disruption.

The first thing that jumped out at me, of course, was what is basically the book's central theme: that manual labor, especially if it's skilled, has a value entirely independent of either its immediate external objective or perceived social utility. In other words, work affords people opportunities for self-cultivation and fulfillment, to develop and give expression to competencies and engage in purposeful activity.

In short, meaningful work is one of what Eric Olin Wright would have called the conditions for living a flourishing life that human societies should strive to provide individuals In light of this, any argument in favor of UBI would have to attend to each of these aspects, namely on the role of work in structuring identity and a positive sense of self on the one hand, and on the other, the potential of work to furnish us with opportunities for meaningful self-expression, accomplishment, and at least in Robert Pirsig's understanding, metaphysical transcendence.

If we liberate people from the burden of making a living, do we also run the risk of depriving them of the opportunity to fulfill some of their most fundamental human needs? Anyone who thinks seriously about UBI as a serious policy proposal will inevitably have contended with these dilemmas. So naturally, Andrew White had some thoughts on this.

[00:28:25] Andrew White: So I think we're stuck with this industrial mode of working, which we, I say we, often people in Western Europe see as natural as it were. But in a sense it's not natural. The 40-hour week was arrived at as this... Through a series of negotiations between trades unions and the governments of the day and kind of factory owners in the 19th century.

So it just so happens that's the figure we arrived at, kind of 40 hour, a 40, 40-hour week. But before then, people would work a variety of hours. If you're working in certain, in agriculture for instance, it might be the case that on some occasions you'll be working around the clock cer- certain seasons of the year.

Other times you'll be working not very much. So it's a kind of your hours are attuned to the task at hand, as it were, rather than saying, "Here's, we have to fill in this 40 hours, even if something only takes three hours for me to do this week, I'm gonna have to drag it out for 40, 40 hours." So I think that we need to start thinking a little bit about that mode and people have started to talk about four-day working weeks and stuff like that.

And I think the reason I'm talking about this is because there, there's almost kind of agreement on the left and the right that we should give people these kind of full-time jobs because it's worthwhile on the right in the sense that it's a kind of negative thing in, in the sense that we don't want people to be lazy or we don't want them, as they would see it, taking money from the state.

But also on the left, and a- again, it's more positive, but it's a similar kind of idea that a job is worthwhile. If someone doesn't have a job, then their life in a sense might be meaningless. And we think about that in terms of if you think about the Coal mining industry in the 1980s, now we're talking about the steel industry in South Wales today.

And there is a debate... I'm not suggesting, by the way, that those jobs should have been lost and should be lost today, but I think one of the arguments is it goes beyond the economic. It's to say that, oh, if those jobs are lost, then the community will be broken, as it were. And I guess what I'm saying is that sometimes we have to be honest and say, if we think about this debate over Grangemouth in Scotland where the government is not going to issue new oil drilling licenses for obvious reasons, and of course, then people in the oil fields will start saying, "What if we lose our jobs?

Think of the effect on the community." But I think sometimes we have to be honest with people and say, sometimes those jobs are gonna go and they're not gonna come back, but then we have to provide an alternative. And the alternative is not just a universal basic income, but I think it, it's to think about this philosophically so, so to develop other forms of community interact- interactivity, or activity, sorry, which is not dependent on the job in the local factory, as it were.

It could be things like en- environmental work, cleaning up the environment. It, it could still be... Often you would get in those mining communities, you would get the local band or something. The local band could still continue, even if the factory, the local factory, was no longer there or the local coal mine was no longer there.

So I think we do have to give a sense to people that we have to detach work from meaning to your life, as it were. Which, as I say, is quite difficult because both on the right and the left there is this sense that a work, good well-paid job for 40 hours a week does provide meaning to your life. And what I'm suggesting is we can think of other things.

We can think of how we ret- redefine work, so things like, as I say, childcare is work, but we don't call it work. And of course, as sometimes people are stigmatized. If I'm actually a parent but not a single parent, but if I was a single parent and had to give up my job and went on Universal Credit, I would probably be stigma- stigmatized, and people would say, "This guy," in the tabloid terms, "is scrounging off the state," or whatever.

But actually, that's a useful, it's use- it has a useful social utility. But also economically, what can be better economically than developing a child? So I think it is a reconfiguration of the way in which we think about work, and indeed not to stigmatize non-work. I think that's important as well. If someone wants to go off and learn to play a musical instrument or learn a language or something, I think that's absolutely fine.

I think that should be encouraged. 

[00:32:43] Joe Williams: This point also came up in my conversation with Hector, who, like me, had reflected extensively on the psychological and emotional drivers of humans' work ethic and how these related to the cultural and personal meaning of work in an age characterized by economic instability and employment insecurity.

I want to see people engage in purposeful, meaningful activity. And I think perhaps one kind of way of reconciling that then is to have a conversation then about how we define work. What are some of the assumptions and biases we might have internalized about how we approach work and how we conceive of work, and how we sometimes dismiss work that isn't paid, that isn't remunerated by market mechanisms as not being work, as not being valuable.

Because the market sometimes rewards some very antisocial, reckless, irresponsible activity, which has a very negative social impact. Very volatile, risky hedge fund management and investment funds and so on, which create a lot of economic and social volatility, which have a lot of negative, negative economic and social impacts.

But they're very well rewarded by market mechanisms. S- so we seem to have internalized a certain capitalist logic whereby if it's productive and lucrative according to a capitalist logic, it is somehow virtuous and meaningful, and forms of work which aren't rewarded by market mechanisms are somehow not really important, as if raising children or doing volunteer work or- 

[00:34:06] Héctor Pérez-Urbina: Second 

class, right?

Women have been saying this for 

many years, right? Just like raising children is hard and it's hard work and it's com- super important, right? And even though a lot of peoples would still consider it not a job or, or in a different class, right? I started thinking about this value and precisely what you said.

I had this experience because I quit my job recently, right? And I thought it was going to be great because I would have leisure time, right? But it wasn't, it actually was not great, right? I had some sort of identity crisis, and I felt worthless, and I felt shame. And I was like, I was, it was re- difficult to relate to people back in my home co- country, right?

It's just what are you doing? You're doing ... What are you doing if you're not producing? Precisely. If you're not producing, what are you doing? Especially as a man, especially as a Latino man. There's a lot of stuff there. And yeah, precisely that. In this question of UBI Not only do should we have to make the, to make it available, but we should also prepare the population to value all other sorts of activities so that they actually find that, that meaning and that purpose in other things, right?

That is crucial, and that is s- that is my point. Thank you for articulating it, because I had to go through that, and it's not fun, right? And that's what it, what I'm saying, that leisure on its own, it's not enough. You need to, I need to construct a whole narrative to tell myself that what I was doing, exploring options and doing, thinking carefully what I'm gonna do and blah blah blah, even though I'm making no money, that is work because it's hard, because it's taking all my day and my concentration and my thinking, right?

And it is valuable. It, it's even more valuable, right? So but that conversation, that narrative needs to be built, and if that were to be given as some sort of a preparation or some sort of material to people g- going through these sort of proc- through these processes, it would be much better. Because a lot of people would actually not have the space or the privilege to give themselves time to think carefully, and they may just dis- you know, get to despair and hopelessness and, and other awful things.

[00:36:21] Joe Williams: Yeah, absolutely. Working class people from socially conservative backgrounds have this belief that your work is an indication of your moral worth almost, and if you're not being productive according to that logic, and especially there's a gender dimension to this too in terms of women and their work not being valued because it's not paid, doing the central, the vital job of raising the next generation and ensuring the survival of young children.

And then from the man's perspective, there's this kind of if you're not making a lot of money, if you're not providing and so on, you're a kind of failure and so on. So it affects men and women in different ways, in similar ways, but in different versions of that same thing. So yeah, and I can relate to some aspects of what you were saying in terms of I'm a translator and my work really dropped off second half of last year, and I've been struggling with exactly that sense of identity crisis, of, of s- of doubt, of feelings of lo- lower self-worth and so on, which is part of my motivation for making these programs as well because it's encourage you to reflect on

It's not a reflection on my moral worth that the market is not rewarding the kind of skills and the kind of background that I have. Just because I'm not, not very ... My skills aren't particularly relevant or attractive to the current job climate, I'm internalizing some of those beliefs and some of those kind of attitudes and some of those values as if they're a kind of ob- a universal objective.

So this is kind of part of the conversation that needs to go on. If we're going to have a conversation about implementing UBI, we have to have a corresponding complimenting conversation about work and its kind of ... And its functioning, producing meaning and configuring identity and so on. And we're gonna have to update some of those ideas and help people adapt to some of those new ways of thinking about work and new ways of thinking about volunteer work and child- raising children and all this kind of stuff.

So you can't really have implement UBI, I don't feel, without this kind of broader kind of narrative, this broader questioning of certain narratives because otherwise it just doesn't make sense to certain e- existing logics. It just feels like totally, uh, unviable and undesirable according to various criteria.

[00:38:25] Héctor Pérez-Urbina: Exactly. And again, you're now on the other side. The h- the, the road to hell is paved w- with good intentions, right? So yeah, U- UBI could be a great intention, but if not done properly or i- if not taking these things into account, it could be a disaster, right? So yeah, there, there's a lot to be said, but yeah, it's a fascinating topic for sure.

[00:38:45] Joe Williams: So it was clear that the discussion around UBI in the context of AI-driven economic disruption was by no means a purely economic equation, and instead demanded synthesizing across a range of perspectives It was therefore unsurprising that UBI was becoming a hotly debated topic, with a diverse range of actors making the case both for and against its social and moral utility with reference to various economic and ethical arguments.

I was interested to know how powerful tech elites, the people with the most to gain from AI's implementation, stood on UBI as a policy measure to protect people from the economic, social, and psychological impacts of job displacement and how their positions may reflect certain value systems and worldviews.

Hector, whose research deals precisely with tech elite discourse and narrative, had the following to say 

[00:39:42] Héctor Pérez-Urbina: Here, this topic is one where there is a significant divide, right? We have people like Vinod Khosla and Amodei advocating for UBI or UBDI-like mechanisms, right? They see it as a response to a po- for the potential AI to cause mayhem, massive dislocation and job disruption in labor markets, right?

So basically, the idea is that when an AFAI takes over your job, you shouldn't worry because you will have some sort of safety net, and they talk about this leisure time or some sort of you, you will be able to do whatever you always wanted to do, and they speak in these terms. That is the first position.

And the second position is very vocally and strongly advocated for Marc Andreessen. So he, he dislikes, hates the idea of UBI. Uh, he says it's a detrimental expansion of state power. He thinks that that would make people zoo animals, according of the state to be farmed by the state, controlled. But he also, not only does he reject the idea, but he also doesn't think that it's going to happen because he thinks that technology, AI in particular as well, is going to broaden the scope of what humans can productively do.

So these are two fundamentally different positions, right? One is assuming that at some point AI will render human activity not productive or not valub- valuable economically speaking, whereas Andreessen says, "No, that's just not the case. It will create more opportunities for us to do something that it is valuable that, that can...

That we can make money out of." Um, and yeah, these are very different positions. I think for people like Khosla that Am- like Amodei that a- they say that UBI is a good idea, they use it as a way to respond to concerns that, that the power and all this beautiful i- this, all this wealth that is going to be produced by AI could be concentrated in a few elites such as themselves, right?

And but they do say that the choice to make it not so is not a technology's choice. It's a societal choice, right? So interestingly, in this particular case, they do acknowledge the power and the value and the role of society, right? Of governance and, and stuff like that in order to basically make it. And as we said, Marc Andreessen is basically just dismissing the idea altogether, saying, "I don't like it.

It would be bad, but it won't be the case 

[00:42:29] Joe Williams: So even among tech elites, UBI was a divisive topic with different actors formulating arguments both in favor and against based on differing assumptions regarding the meaning of work and the impact the measure would have on human development. However, even though part of me was enthused to see powerful actors from the tech sector advocating for UBI, it couldn't help but seem that there was a conflict of interests here.

That some of these people's motivations for supporting a UBI may be somewhat dubious, less concerned with affecting a transition to a fairer and more sustainable economic model and more concerned with consolidating their own economic power and seeing UBI primarily as a means of propping up the digital economy and the rampant levels of inequality it engendered.

One of the vital themes that emerged from the course of my conversations with both Andrew and Hector was the need to locate UBI policy proposals in concrete socioeconomic realities and to evaluate their effectiveness in reference to the impacts they would actually have on real people in real places.

This involved engaging critically with arguments both for and against UBI, especially arguments offered by those with a vested interest in the technologies which were contributing to job disruption, economic inequality and environmental degradation to try and unpack their biases and to identify their ideological specificity.

In short, what stories were we being sold around UBI and whose interests did these stories serve and whose values did they reflect? Could UBI do more harm than good if implemented uncritically or undemocratically? And who gets a voice in the conversation about how economic prosperity is distributed and what ends technological innovation should serve?

Essentially, what kind of societies do we want to build? This was clearly not a value-free discussion about purely technocratic solutions to straightforward problems, but rather a complex conversation which inevitably involved a reflection on human values. Join me in the next episode as I begin this stage of the journey, exploring the various narratives around UBI, their limitations, their blind spots and their biases.

[00:44:52] Karen Hao: These companies engage in this narrative that there is this moral or existential race that they are part of. 

[00:45:00] Héctor Pérez-Urbina: I studied something that I call the techno-supremacy doctrine. This is the belief system characterized by an excessive trust in technology's alleged inherent superiority

[00:45:16] Joe Williams: Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, please share and subscribe. This has been Beyond The Paycheck: Reclaiming the Case for UBI in the Age of AI with me, your host, Joe Williams