Everybody could be wrong. It’s wouldn’t be the first time. Maybe the new technologies will birth plentiful jobs and industries we just can’t yet imagine. Or perhaps we will have to radically think our economy in a climate that favors machine labor over the human kind. 

It’s striking that the worlds of Silicon Valley and Washington D.C. seem almost alternative universes, with a growing number in the former acknowledging that Guaranteed Basic Income may need become a reality, and the latter, represented last night by the GOP debate, in which it’s not even part of the conversation. I believe Marco Rubio spoke up against the minimum-wage hike because it would make “people more expensive than machines,” which glancingly acknowledges the actual world we’re living in, but doesn’t offer any sort of solution. Be poor or automation will make you poorer isn’t the best we can do.

From Kim-Mai Cutler at Techcrunch:

In the face of rising U.S. income inequality and concerns about job loss to automation, some of Silicon Valley’s best-known names including Y Combinator’s Sam Altman have spoken up in favor of a universal basic income that would give people a baseline standard of living in an economy that may not be able to produce enough decently compensated work for everyone.

A mix of technologists, policy wonks and creatives are trying to kickstart a bigger movement around that idea this coming weekend with a Basic Income Createathon.

“Everyone in the country having jobs is not going to make sense anymore because we’re going to have computers and robots doing what we’re doing most of what we’re doing today,” said Jim Pugh, who got a Ph.D in distributed robotics before he worked on the original 2008 Obama campaign. “If you accept that as a premise, what we need to do as a society is not made up of small changes. It’s actually a fairly radical change and basic income seems to be an elegant solution for doing that.”

A basic income is a kind of Social Security system where all citizens or residents get an unconditional amount of money on top of whatever their wages are from elsewhere. It assumes that, above this minimum level of income, people will still be motivated to work for more money or on more meaningful projects. …

Pugh said the point of the Createathon is to build energy for a broader political movement that will advocate for universal basic income and push for small pilots to test the idea out in the United States.

To be fair, not everyone prominent in the tech industry agrees with the premise that there won’t be enough jobs for everyone.•