If AI causes widespread job losses, is a Universal Basic Income the solution?

This week the federal government’s much-anticipated, and just as hyped, Economic Reform Roundtable has gotten underway. Central to the agenda is how to boost national productivity — which is, roughly speaking, a way of measuring the resources needed both to produce certain goods and to be able to afford to buy certain goods.

Put simply: greater efficiency leads to greater affordability and higher living standards. When the same amount of time, labour, investment and raw materials (‘inputs’) need to be expended in order to produce an even greater number of goods and services (‘outputs’), the inputs become more valuable even as the outputs become more affordable, leading to lower working hours and relatively higher standards of living.

By contrast, anything that impedes efficiency reduces productivity. Unsurprisingly, then, the need to reduce regulation emerged as a central theme in the lead-up to the productivity roundtable — whether that means reforming environmental laws that slow down the housing approval process or reducing constraints on the development and deployment of artificial intelligence.

However you cut it, AI is central to our current national conversation about productivity, efficiency and standards of living. And yet, even as AI represents a key to “unlocking productivity”, it also presents an imminent threat to employment itself. Modelling by Goldman Sachs found that, while AI could drive a 7 per cent boost in global GDP by 2030, this would likely come at the expense of 300 million full-time jobs worldwide.

In other words, AI is the latest, and most severe, expression of what John Maynard Keynes termed, a century ago in “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” (1930), “technological unemployment” — by which he meant “unemployment due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can kind new uses of labour”. AI is technology that will produce entire areas of economic activity where human labour is either wholly redundant or greatly reduced, leading to a paradoxical situation where the economy is thriving and unemployment is high.

It’s perhaps not surprising that the possibility of a Universal Basic Income (UBI) is being mooted — including by the pioneers, purveyors and prophets of AI themselves — as a necessary remedy to the radical disruption of humanity’s relationship to work that is likely to transpire between now and 2030. What are the merits of such a proposal? Could this function as a radical alternative to our current system of conditional welfare, relying as it does on moralisation of work itself?