But we actually don’t have to wait for these. When I first started looking into UBI, I was shocked to discover just how much evidence there already was for those seeking it. There’s already so much we know.

Here are just some of the many observations that have struck me the most, collected from a variety of pilots and studies from the United States, Canada, India, Namibia, and Lebanon.

Crime went down 42%. Illegal hunting aka poaching went down 95%. Hospitalization rates decreased 8.5%. Birth weights improved due to better maternal nutrition. Consumption of fresh fruits and vegetables went up. Consumption of alcohol and other temptation goods went down. Personalities improved such that kids were more honest and worked better together. School attendance increased and grades improved. Teen pregnancy rates went down. Frequency of people being personally offended by each other went down. Trust increased. Savings went up and debt went down. Entrepreneurship quadrupled in one place and was three times higher than control groups in another. Recipients worked more hours, and earned more additional income. And disproportionately positive effects overall were seen among women, the elderly, and the disabled… in other words, the traditionally marginalized.

Some of these results have been observed once, some multiple times. Increased entrepreneurship for example seems to be a common effect of giving people UBI, for I think three main reasons: more capital, more customers, and more risk-taking.

Fear of risk leading to catastrophic failure prevents far too much innovation. When a New York Times reporter asked him how he felt about failing 700 times, Thomas Edison responded, “I have not failed 700 times. I have not failed once. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”

UBI transforms failure from an existential risk to an opportunity to learn what doesn’t work. Failure is not a bad thing. Failure is how we learn. Failure is how we innovate. What’s bad is when we arrange things so that failure is life-threatening instead of life-instructing.

Now, another common result of providing basic income is healthier babies, and this is a particularly profound finding. For those familiar with epigenetics, where environments can turn off and on genes in the womb, the implications of babies born healthier should knock you back to consider the generational effects.

For example, a high risk for obesity can be the product of starvation in the womb, as babies are consequently programmed to store more calories. So consider the implication of generations of kids growing up finding it much harder to become obese.

Also consider just how much societies with basic income will save in the form of reduced expenditures on crime, poor health, and lost productivity whose costs along with many others, actually exceed the cost of implementing UBI. Functioning as a social vaccine, UBI is an ounce of prevention instead of a pound of cure.

Then there’s also what I call the “Einstein Cost”, which is the cost to all of society if even one new Einstein is out there right now, not being the next Einstein, thanks to being too busy simply surviving day by day working multiple pointless jobs a machine could do.

If we step back and look at the big picture, it’s not adopting UBI that costs too much!

What we’re really seeing here when it comes to observed effects of basic income is essentially Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs in action. Everyone has basic needs, and when those needs are covered, people then pursue higher order needs.

I believe our higher needs are even more important to us than our basic needs. Suicide is an action not often taken by someone who is starving. It’s an action taken by those who feel there may just be nothing else to life than just not starving. Basic income, by starting everyone higher up Maslow’s hierarchy, makes it far more possible for everyone to climb to the top instead of getting stuck at the bottom. Life is not meant to be a treadmill to nowhere. Life is meant to be a constant journey.

Those who think basic income in any way inhibits work are therefore missing three key understandings.

The first is that intrinsic motivation is far more powerful than extrinsic motivation. That is, what we do because we simply want to, for internal reasons like autonomy, mastery, and purpose, we do with much more engagement than what we do for external rewards.

In fact, external rewards have been shown to even inhibit work that requires creativity, and studies have also shown that just being given the option to refuse a task, increases engagement with that task. Fully voluntary work is far more motivating than forced work.

The second key understanding is just how much non-universal, conditional welfare systems disincentivize work. No one sees higher marginal tax rates than people on welfare — no one. As someone on welfare earns income, they lose their benefits. The result is the reality of people being barely better off accepting employment, or even becoming far worse off.

The most extreme examples are those with disabilities who must prove they are “unfit to work” (which ends up excluding around 80% of people with some form of disability) and who then face losing 100% of their disability income for earning additional income. Basically, welfare is a system where governments pay bureaucrats to make sure people don’t work, and to punish them if they do by removing their benefits. It’s also all about making decisions for people, instead of letting them make their own decisions. Welfare agencies destroy agency.

The third key understanding of how UBI enables more work is the recognition of unpaid work as perhaps the most valuable work of all. In the US, the amount of unpaid care work alone is estimated at $700 billion per year, or 4.3% of GDP, and it’s done by almost one-third of the population, mostly women, about 1.2 billion hours every week, the equivalent of about 30.5 million full-time care aides. What would happen to the economy if all unpaid care workers went on strike? What about other kinds of unpaid work?

If someone with a basic income quits their minimum wage job to instead develop software for the open source community or dedicate themselves to scientific research, is society worse off? If someone quits their job as a telemarketer to raise their kids instead of outsourcing that care work to others, is society worse off? Why is it only considered work if you care for someone else’s kid and not your own?

We must come to understand that work and jobs are different. Not all work is a job. Not all work is meaningful. Not all jobs are meaningful. Not all jobs are work. And the pursuit of jobs, work, and meaning are all better enabled when one’s basic needs are met.

In fact, I myself have a basic income. Ever since January of 2016, I start each month with $1,000 as my income floor. It’s crowdfunded via Patreon, and I would not be here right now without it. It enables me to pursue the work I consider most meaningful, which is researching, writing, and speaking about basic income.

The biggest understanding I’ve gained from my basic income is a sense of security. Until I had security, I had no idea how little of it I had prior. It was just a word with a definition. Now I FEEL it. Knowing every month I’ll be able to cover my basic needs is a sense of freedom I can’t properly convey to those who don’t already have that freedom.

Basic income has also increased my resilience to disaster. I crossed paths with a tornado last year, and I was able to cover that unexpected expense to my car. Imagine how much of a difference UBI would make to all victims of events like floods, fires, and hurricanes? Is UBI perhaps even justified by climate change alone?

I’ve also begun to think differently about things like intellectual property, and even money itself. What I write, I write for people to read. The more people who read what I write the better. So why would I choose to publish behind a paywall?

This makes me wonder, is it possible that with UBI, the open source movement will massively expand? If you’re no longer forced to sell your work to live, will more of you freely provide your work? Is it possible that GitHub pull requests would multiply overnight, or that wikis of all kinds would see even more pages expanded and created?

Basically, basic income allows everyone to say “YES” to what we otherwise might have to say no to in order to survive. On the flip side however, it also allows everyone to say “NO” to what we might otherwise have no other choice but to say “yes” to.

This in turn means UBI could also negate the need for minimum wages. If everyone has the ability to refuse to work for what’s considered too low a wage, wages must increase to attract people to do those jobs. It’s also about more than jobs. Think about how many women, and men too, are in abusive relationships simply because they can’t afford to leave them, or even how much speech is left unexpressed, in fear of losing one’s present job, or being denied a future job.

Is it even possible, that rights like freedom of expression don’t truly exist without economic rights? Does a lack of basic income even infringe on citizenship itself by making people prioritize jobs over voting, where that second or even third shift at work has greater priority than being an informed and engaged citizen?

At this point, perhaps you’re thinking that no matter how good of an idea UBI is, and how affordable it is, and how much new and valuable work people will do, perhaps even for free, that people simply don’t deserve it.

Well, here’s the thing. First, no one created our natural resources. No one created the land. People only ever called dibs on it many centuries ago. The Earth belongs to all of us equally. This was essentially the argument of Thomas Paine who said “It is a position not to be controverted that the earth, in its natural, uncultivated state was, and ever would have continued to be, the common property of the human race… Every proprietor, therefore, of cultivated lands, owes to the community a ground-rent for the land which he holds; and it is from this ground-rent that the fund proposed in this plan is to issue.” This is even the logic behind the annual Alaska dividend and also provides strong support for ideas like land value tax dividends, and carbon tax dividends.

Next, all of this technology around us has roots in taxpayer dollars because Level 1 R&D, aka basic research, is simply too risky for the private sector to invest in. All of the data around us is also generated by us to the tune of an estimated $2,000 per year on average and growing. And finally everything we create and discover is simply the next link in a kind of generational blockchain that goes all the way back to the very first use of tools at the Dawn of Man.

As Sir Isaac Newton said, he stood on the shoulders of giants. He didn’t do what he did on his own. What Newton did was only possible because of everything done before him by those before him. He inherited the knowledge that he built upon. One can say all of civilization is simply something for nothing. All of it’s inherited.

Economic output per person in the US grew roughly seven-fold over the course of the 20th century from roughly 7,000 to 52,000 in 2017 dollars. If the economic gains of the 20th century continue at the same pace in the 21st century, then by 2100 it’ll be roughly $365,000 per person. A person born at the end of this century will have done absolutely nothing to enable this enormous gain. All of it will exist as a gift from the past, from the accumulation of technological and scientific knowledge received, simply by being born.

Now imagine a UBI is indexed to grow with productivity, and therefore with automation. The more automation, the higher the output, the higher the UBI… Instead of fearing automation, people would want as much automated as possible, to maximize their UBI. Wait? People in the future should be paid six figures simply for being alive? Yes! Because it’s their inheritance!

UBI is our natural inheritance.

UBI is our technological inheritance.

UBI is our return on investment as taxpayers.

UBI is our big data dividend.

In fact, I think understanding UBI as a data dividend will be of increasing importance. Companies like Facebook, Google, and Twitter are worth billions not because of their infrastructure but because of their users, and these users live all over the world. They’re more than citizens. They’re netizens. And they perform uncompensated work with every status update, with every search, and with every tweet. This work is owed what I refer to as a netizen dividend, because it’s owed to those who comprise networks.

We need to recognize what we do online as a form of atomized work — work so small we don’t even see it as work. And we need to see it all around us. Our data generation is omnipresent. Everything we do, and even everything we don’t do, generates data. But only stockholders are financially benefiting from it all.

This needs to change, and everyone here can help make it happen. The answer to how exists to a great degree I think in blockchain development and cryptocurrencies.

Netizen dividends can be built into any cryptocurrency, and some already do. But also take for example the platform Steemit. It’s a kind of hybrid between a blogging platform and Reddit built on a blockchain. People create posts, which are voted up. How many votes they get determine how much Steem the posts earn, which gets divided between the person who created the post, and those who upvoted it. This currency is then exchangeable for other currencies like bitcoin and ethereum, which can in turn be exchanged for traditional currencies.

In this way Steemit’s users are treated as both freelancers and stockholders. There’s no longer any need to follow the old model. Every platform that does anything can follow this same new model built on blockchain technology. And I think the only kind of company that can make Facebook the next MySpace will follow this model and incorporate a netizen dividend into it. Imagine earning multiple streams of income across a dozen different platforms you use, simply for using them.

As a young superhero once learned the hard way, with great power comes great responsibility. Software developers are I think a new kind of hero. The automation of human labor is an incredible boon to all of humankind, but not on its own. Systemic changes must accompany it so that the benefits of automation accrue to everyone.

I cannot stress enough how important it is for the long-term survival of our species, to shift from the idea of conditionally providing charity, to unconditionally distributing prosperity. We are a young species, but in order to become an old species, we’ve got some incredible challenges ahead of us that require long-term thinking.

Climate change is one of our biggest challenges and it very well could be the end of us. To tackle it, we have got to stop only thinking about survival. As long as we’re just worried about the day to day stuff, our minds aren’t free to tackle the big picture. As long as income remains coupled to work, an unemployed coal miner is going to want to keep digging coal. Billions of decisions every day will continue being made for the sake of making it to the next day instead of the next millennium.

We’re all evolved primates. We’ve come a long way, my hairless ape friends, but we’ve got something in our DNA that switched from brilliantly adapting us to our environment, to being an anchor tied to our ankles. It’s called the stress response, or more popularly, the fight-or-flight response.

Back in the day, many thousands of years ago, it was a clever emergency gear where long-term higher-order creative thinking shut down, and we were temporarily enabled to think faster, react quicker, be stronger, move faster, run longer, and think only about survival… those were the humans who survived. It was basically a superpower.

The problem is we don’t live in that same world anymore. We aren’t being chased down by lions or being eaten by wolves while sitting in front of our computers in our air-conditioned offices, and yet our fight-or-flight responses are still being activated. In fact, for far too many, daily existence is no longer anything but fight-or-flight.

The stress response was only ever meant to be used in case of emergency, not be a persistent state. Never ending stress leads not only to all kinds of health issues, but to social issues like displacement aggression and learned helplessness. It rewires our brains to stay stressed, and as a result, our gaze as a species is looking down at our feet, instead of up to the horizon.

Chronic stress is a mind killer. By design, it limits us to short-term thinking. It creates a scarcity of mental resources. It is a tax on the brain, that when lifted, has even been measured as being equivalent to a gain of 14 IQ points. This is because concern about not having enough operates as a kind of software program running in the back of our minds that limits available resources available to be applied elsewhere. Reaching a state of having enough to no longer worry, results in freeing those resources.

With every year that passes, technology is capable of doing more, and at an exponential rate. So let me ask you this. Let’s pretend that tomorrow everyone gets a button-triggered device that would end the world when pressed. How long do you think our world would survive?

Is the answer then to not invent such god-like to us technologies? I don’t think so. Such a technology would really be just another bone of sorts. Our challenge is that as technology advances, we need to advance along with it. We need to become humans who would not press that button.

So how do we do that? Well consider two societies. One society starts everyone at the bottom of Maslow’s pyramid and says, “Good luck, asshole. Every man for himself.” Another society starts everyone at the middle of the pyramid, and says “We care about you, and we trust you. We’re all in this together.” Which society is less likely to press that button? I want us to be that society.

This is why I feel so strongly about UBI. If we’re going to beat climate change, if we’re going to survive future advances in bio-technology, nanotechnology, and general AI… if we’re going to use Elon Musk’s Neuralink to interface with AI and in so doing become a civilization where that button really does exist, we have no choice but to become better. We have to. And we have to do it now, because we needed to do it yesterday.

You all have a responsibility which cannot be ignored. You can’t just automate human labor out of existence without recognizing what else must be done. Technology does not exist in a vacuum and those who understand technology have a responsibility to help steer the ship instead of just praying for a lack of icebergs. The consequences of doing nothing will only get more disastrous, whereas the alternative is a future that has never shined with brighter potential. For the problem is not that jobs are being automated, it’s that we require jobs for income, and for some reason think 40 hours is “full-time.” We must learn to share the wealth, and also share the hours.

Right now is a pivotal moment in human civilization. Which course will you help us take? The one with more fear and anger and insecurity and stress? Or the one with more hope and love and possibility, and above all, more time?

We have the opportunity to forever free humanity from drudgery and toil, but as long as people require money to live, and jobs are the primary way of obtaining money, people will fear automation. Let’s remove that roadblock to human progress. Let’s erase the existential fear of meeting basic needs. No more just surviving. It’s time to start thriving.

There’s also one last thing I’d like you to consider. If it’s true that we all have the right to life, and life cannot be taken from us, does anyone truly have the right to life if what is needed to live is withheld on the condition of being servile?

If living has a price, shouldn’t enough money be unconditionally provided to cover that price, as a fundamental human right?

Think hard about that, because it’s a question I think people mere decades from now are going to look back on and wonder why it was ever even a question at all.

Unconditional basic income is not “free money”. It’s freedom. And freedom belongs to all of us.

It’s time for technology to serve all humankind. Jobs are for machines.

Life is for people.