With the ever-increasing amount of automated services, the valuable use of robotics and the prospect of an AI driven world - it’s no surprise that those thinking about the future are concerned about the displacement of jobs and what the idea of ‘work’ will mean for the masses going forward.

Society has typically allowed for people with varying degrees of skill sets to find some sort of work, whether that be working in a factory, flipping burgers or practicing medicine. However, as the jobs that can be automated do actually become automated, how do we bring everyone along with us in to the future of work?

There is a growing argument for governments to introduce a Universal Basic Income - where the state gives every resident a certain amount, every month, to live on. Whether that be $500, or $2000, it’s not clear yet. However, there are many who believe that this is the future.

As you can imagine this is not an easy prospect for many to adjust to. For starters, there is plenty of stigma in the western world around government welfare systems - the idea of ‘handing out cash for free’ is very frowned upon. Not only this, but every system in our societies are geared around the prospect of traditional ‘work’, with money being the end prize.

However, Universal Basic Income doesn’t mean people don’t work either. It just means that everyone starts at the same base level, then you have the prospect to work and earn money on top of that. And there are a number of trials already taking place in places like California and Sweden.

These ideas formed the basis for a very interesting discussion at Europe’s largest start-up conference this week, Slush, held in Helsinki this week.

Albert Wenger, managing partner at Union Square Ventures, kicked off the discussion by pointing out how Universal Basic Income could differ from other welfare programmes that currently exist around the globe. He believes that a base income for everyone, could in fact incentivise people to try new entrepreneurial ideas. In fact, the panel discussing the idea said that it could be viewed as ‘seed money for the people’.

Wenger said:

A lot of the existing welfare programmes all around the world have this weird structure where they start to create a disincentive to work because if you start to work then you lose all your benefits. So you face this cliff. One thing that people often don’t understand with basic income is that it doesn’t prevent you from working. Every dollar you earn is a dollar on top of your basic income. So it doesn’t have that same weird cliff structure. There are certain types of labour supply that require you to take risk - so if you want to become an independent provider of educational services, or counselling services, you need to be able to sustain some fluctuations in your income. Basic income will enable a lot of people to be supplying entrepreneurial labour. Many of these efforts are going to be where we are going to want a human and not a machine - if I want to go and talk to someone about a problem I am having, I’m probably going to want to talk to a human and not a machine.

Wenger went on to say that if you look at the history of labour, people often perceive the use of unions as bad because they increased the cost of labour. However, he said that because of this it meant that places like Europe invested in machines to automate jobs, whereas places like India had lots of cheap labour to fill those roles. He argued that this meant people had the opportunity to focus their careers elsewhere, in more valuable things. Wenger said:

So one reason to give people a walkaway option of driving a truck or flipping burgers is because those are areas that we can and should automate. Then there are other areas like coaching, education and childcare that we don’t want to automate, even if we could. So if we have cheap labour in some places, we will tie humans up in activities that aren’t great human activities to begin with.

Changing our view of work

Roope Mokka, CEO of Demos Effect Sweden, a management consultancy firm that has a ‘mission to change the way companies do business’, agreed with Wenger and said that there are plenty of jobs that should be automated. He believes that jobs that do not require human intervention, ones that are “degrading to have human intervention”, should be automated so those people can focus on other work that “adds value”.

However, Mokka rightly pointed out that the western world has a concept of work that doesn’t currently align with the idea of a universal basic income. He said:

However, the problem is that work is the primary way that people relate to a society. That is a conversation that we haven’t had yet, and that’s a fundamental conversation. Basic income is of course one tool in the box through which we can renew the whole concept of work and how people relate to society. Now, I don’t think our vision is ready there yet. Our vision at the moment is let robots do the dirty work and give the displaced people basic income. There’s something missing there. How do you then relate to society if you’re not working? We might be buying that, but I don’t think the majority of people will be buying that. If you look at the political climate nowadays, it’s very much driven by populism that feeds from these types of ideas - that we will have robots or the Chinese to replace US workers. Basic income is a must, it has to happen. However, at the same time, as we work on that, we should be thinking about how people relate to a society where there isn’t any factory jobs, service jobs.

Mokka added that the introduction of a universal basic income could be viewed as “creating a new operating system” for the whole of society - that’s the scale of change we are talking about.

Wenger agreed and said that we have spent the last 200 years establishing a narrative around how important work is to peoples’ identity, where it is woven into every part of our culture and the education system - the latter being something that needs fixing if this is going to work. He said:

The education system is very heavily skewed towards equipping people for work, as opposed to getting people to appreciate art or knowledge for its own sake. We have woven this so deeply into the fabric of society, that undoing that will not happen in a month or a year.

Joining the pair on stage was Matt Krisiloff, director at Y Combinator Research, which is involved in some of the trials taking place around universal basic income. He said that particularly in a US context, the idea of giving people cash for nothing is highly stigmatised for a large portion of the population. And he suggested that if it is going to be introduced, it may need to be introduced slowly. Krisiloff said:

We could see something that approximates basic income much sooner, with a much smaller amount of money. I think if we shift the conversation to something like that…we are going to give the most needy type of people $1,000 a month, that really lays out the piping for large scale basic income the way that people think about it.

This is a fundamental shift

Wenger added that Universal Basic Income should be viewed as the United States’ new

The word we haven’t talked about yet is freedom. It fundamentally frees people up to be completely free about how they allocate their time. It was pointed out that you’re going to run out of land at some point, so what are you going to give people then to be free? To me some framing around this being about freedom, and individual freedom, is central to this idea.

fundamental for freedom. He explained that in the early history of the US land was the currency for freedom. Your ‘seed money’ was a plot of land and then that plot of land would enable you to live freely from the aristocracies that were fled from in Europe. Wenger said:

Mokka agreed and said that in his experience people are surprisingly unworried about what people on a universal basic income will do with their time. He said:

It’s more like a framing issue - now that I have this money, how can I use my freedom? It’s one thing to have it, it’s another to use it somehow. There needs to be some kind of forum for that. In the same sense, if you invest in a company, they’re going to report what they have done with their product, but you’re not going to make them be quantitative about how they report.

However, Wenger said that he wouldn’t like to see governments prescribing how people should spend their time - and that shifting to a universal basic income will be a fundamental shift for society. Wenger added:

I would not like a government programme that says ‘now you need to work here, or there’. Because I think historically government has been a very bad allocator of peoples’ time. Something we haven’t talked about yet, is that it’s dangerous in my mind to see basic income as some kind of panacea that’s going to solve all problems. When we went into the industrial age we changed almost everything about how we live. We went from living in villages and working on farms, to living in cities and working in factories. We went from large extending families to nuclear families, or living by ourselves. We didn’t have forming schooling, then we did. We changed lots of things around. We need to recognise that the change we are going through now is as big as that transition. Education needs to change fairly fundamentally along with this change. There’s a lot of accompanying social and policy changes that need to happen at the same time.

My take

It’s important to think about this now as a possibility for the future of work before we find ourselves in a situation where there are huge parts of society without a job and no money. As the panelists above highlighted, the hardest part of this is going to be shifting society to a place where a basic income is considered ‘acceptable’. And then there are questions about what an increase in people earning will do to things like property prices and pressure on cities. Also, a universal basic income may be used by some governments as an excuse to cut investment in other services, such as health and education - that shouldn’t be the aim. Then there is the economics of it all that need to be figured out…

We will be following the trials closely.