One of the criticisms leveled against Universal Basic Income is that it is too big a change. But if anything it is not enough of a change. Why? Because it is just one part that needs to change and human societies are systems of interlocking parts. That means many other parts will need to change also. Importantly we have already changed everything about how humanity lives twice already.

In the transition from the Forager Age to the Agrarian Age, humanity went from migratory to sedentary, from promiscuous to monogamous, from flat societies to hierarchical ones, from animism to the great world religions. In the transition from the Agrarian Age to the Industrial Age, humanity went from living in the country to living in the cities, from large extended families to nuclear or no families, from the importance of commons to the predominance of private property, from making and growing things to selling labor, from the Great Chain of Being to the Protestant Work Ethic (and similar changes to religion in other parts of the world).

We have in fact changed everything twice already. First after we invented agriculture and second after we invented science (with the Enlightenment) and along with it industry. Now we have digital technologies with their unique characteristics of zero marginal cost and universality (meaning machines that can compute anything a human can compute). And we have he capability to change our own genome. These are changes in technology as profound as agriculture and science.

So the right expectation is that we will be changing everything. And Basic Income will just be one part of that change. I don’t claim to know what all the others are, but in my book World After Capital, I focus on two other important changes: who controls information and computation (going from centralized systems to empowering the edge) and how we react to an information super saturated environment (going from highly emotional to more rational).

None of these changes will happen by themselves through some form of historical or technological determinism. It is human choice and agency that has moved us from one age to the next and we once again face a great transition.