The ‘AI Plus UBI’ Formula
Proposals for a universal basic income (UBI) as a transitionary component of an anti-capitalist programme have been discussed for many years (and supported by one of the authors of this book). One conclusion of these debates is that UBI’s political valence, whether as a permanent strike fund for labour or a streamlining of neoliberal welfare austerity, depends on the terms under which it might be instituted, e.g., generous or stingy, with or without a dismantling of other social benefits. The more basic issue, however, is that, introduced within capital, UBI does not disturb the ownership of the means of production, and in some ways endorses it, as a manifestation of the munificent largesse of the ruling class, offered within the context of an otherwise fully commodified economy (Clarke 2017). These issues have been recently highlighted by a sudden wave of enthusiasm for UBI among Silicon Valley capitalists, who are advancing the idea specifically as an antidote to the unemployment and precarity likely to be caused by AI. Facebook founder Chris Hughes (2018), venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, and web guru Tim O’Reilly, among other Silicon Valley luminaries, support UBI as the ‘social vaccine of the 21st century’; the tech incubator Y Combinator is running a basic income research programme in Oakland; and tech entrepreneur Dan Yang has announced an independent US presidential candidacy on a platform that includes a form of basic income (Ghaffrey 2018; Ito 2018). These proposals tend to envisage UBI, often at a fairly low subsistence level, as an addition to an otherwise nakedly laissez-faire market order. As several observers (Filoux 2018; Sadowski 2018; Rushkoff 2018) have remarked, these proposals do not challenge the right of capital to direct AI development, reaping billions, and do not disrupt the vast income inequalities, either between capitalists and workers (or non-workers), or between elite professional high-tech employees and menial workers. And while UBI is promoted as an aid to entrepreneurialism, in reality it would probably require supplementation by forms of precarious work, in that respect actually subsidizing AI-driven gig-economy ventures such as Uber, Mechanical Turk or Figure Eight. Further, UBI makes no provision for other public supports, which might make the free time supported by UBI something other than a miserable penury. In this form, UBI figures as a holding pen for what Harari, whose gloomy futurism is favoured by many Silicon Valley capitalists, ruthlessly characterizes as a ‘useless class’ (2016: 379). This is certainly not the UBI that left accelerationists and postcapitalists want, but it is likely the type of UBI they would get under the auspices of AI-capital. In this regard we agree with the point made by Alex Gourevitch and Lucas Stanczyk (2018): a basic income of some sort might be an important part of a mode of production beyond capital, but it is not a prelude to it – rather, a trap waylaying its emergence.
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