Guaranteed Basic Income: A Fundamental Goal of Humanity

The road to personal freedom.

Guaranteed basic income is money collected by government and distributed to all individuals in a society indiscriminately. The idea is being seriously considered by multiple governments, and pilot programs are being implemented in small communities. Why is the current system changing? Where will the money come from? Who are the people in need of support? These are the questions that I will answer while explaining why guaranteed basic income is a core end-game goal for humanity.

Our means of production are constantly being improved by technology. More goods are produced more quickly at lower costs. Production methods are being ameliorated, optimized, and most importantly, automated. Given enough time, it is inevitable that the production of food, water, energy, etc will become fully automated. Unskilled and skilled labor will be done by machines hosting artificial intelligence. Historically, people have been forced to labor to sustain themselves. We will have the freedom to spend our time and effort the way we choose. This will be one of the greatest enhancements in quality of life we have ever had.

In this automated society, how should the resources be distributed? Should a multi-trillionaire artificial intelligence engineer on the cover of Time Magazine have everything, while everyone else has nothing? Clearly, resources that are automatically produced in a renewable way for no cost should be distributed to individuals free of charge, with the details of exactly what and to whom to be determined.

There is some time frame along which machines displace more and more humans in the workforce. Complete automation does not happen instantaneously. In the meantime, what should we do for people who are displaced from the workforce by machines? We do the best we can with what we’ve got. We appropriate the social nets for the elderly, for the disabled, for the out-of-work, and we enhance them to suit our current condition. Taxes are the tool we use to take wealth generated by a machine and put it in the hands of a human.

This is not science-fiction. It’s real, and it’s happening right now. Machines are becoming more effective and economical than people. We must not allow this changing of the guard to take place at our expense for the benefit of a wealthy few. We have recognized the dynamic challenge and are trying to address it the best way it can be addressed at this point in time. The experiments in guaranteed basic income are underway.