Universal basic income …

… or universal high income?

Let me bring your awareness to a very subtle, yet very interesting change in wording that Elon Musk recently [1] adopted: He switched from promoting “universal basic income” to talking about “universal high income”.

You can have very different opinions on Elon but regardless of any personal point of view, I think it is very worthwhile to pay attention to Elon’s narratives due to

a) his immense financial power and network that allows him to promote his own agenda.

b) his breath and depth of insight of what is going on at the forefront of technology development.

So what could be the context of this change in narrative and what could we read in-between the lines?

I suspect that a main trigger for switching the word “basic” to “high” is to address the growing fears of people being replaced at their workplace by AGI and robotics.

Expecting a universal high income in the “post-AGI” era leaves a lot of room for fantasy about what “high” could mean but if a billionaire like Elon uses the word “high”, it must truly be a very high standard of living to be expected.

In contrast, the term universal “basic” income (UBI) is by now connected to a relatively low standard of living for somebody in a developed economy. For instance, in the UBI trials in the late 2010s monthly payments to participants were set below €1,000 a month. Given the latest spikes in inflation, €1,000 a month would not even cover the rent for a reasonable apartment in many European cities, not even talking about metropoles like London, Paris, or major cities in the US. While €1,000 was still edgy but maybe “OKish” in the late 2010s, many people remember how reluctant governments are to adjust such numbers to inflation. There are many prominent examples of this, maybe the minimum wage in the US, or the income at which the top tax rate is applied in Germany (or other European countries) being two very prominent ones. 

Further, it was argued by several people that the social security system as it exists today for instance in Germany (called Hartz IV, Arbeitslosengeld “ALG-II” or Grundsicherung) is already a sort of UBI. Living in Germany, normally you don’t want to be associated with receiving this kind of money – on the hand side because you are considered to undermine the general work ethos (“you can work but you don’t want to –> shame on you!”) but also because the standard of living that you can afford receiving ALG-II is probably not the one that most people in developed economies aspire to.

Henceforth, imagining that you are left with a relatively poor standard of living after your economic contribution is taken over and reduced by AGI is not very inspiring.

Thus, this seemingly very subtle and small change of words can create a very strong and far-reaching change in the public perception of what we can expect in the mid-term future. I have the impression that Elon made this switch very consciously in order to start to move the public sentiment from default negative to default positive. As the future that awaits us is often shaped by our thoughts and imaginations first and only afterwards by our actions, I believe that creating a positive and hopeful outlook on the future is a good thing.

Nevertheless, it is not an unreasonable question to ask why he decided to do so. Is it a typical Elon-style PR stunt to affect the market prices of stocks or other assets? In connection with this change of narrative, I do not recall a particular price spike of TSLA or other assets that I would intuitively connect to Elon but maybe I have not dug deep enough.

However, my impression is rather that what Elon expresses is a combination of his aspiration and what he is seeing on the way to deployment several iterations before it is rolled out. I perceive that his aspiration is driven by the intergalactic society as imagined and described by Iain Banks in his science fiction books. Elon recalls him a couple of times during interviews and even named SpaceX’s ships after ships in Iain’s books.

In Iain’s books, a society is imagined where humans co-exist peacefully with conscious superintelligent beings that were created initially by humans. As a consequence, humanity is liberated from all the scarcity that is responsible for most of its suffering as we know it today.

My interpretation of Elon’s change in narrative is that behind the scenes he begins to see the materialization of the ideas and technologies that are needed to propel us to this future, and that they are not that far away anymore. Indeed, this might be an over-speculative interpretation regarding the change of one particular word but it gives me a quite positive outlook on our mid-term future; for each of us individually and for all of us as a species. 

 

[1] As far as I can see from applying a bit of google search, it seems that he has adopted this new narrative as of mid-May 2024.