A recent Andreessen Horowitz a16z podcast features a great chat with management professor Thomas Davenport and Harvard Business Review editor Julia Kirby, authors of the new book Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines.

Listen to the whole thing, but I wanted to highlight a portion that concerned whether the automation “threat” — such as it is — demands serious consideration of universal basic income. (Here, by the way, is a great note on UBI from my AEI colleague Michael Strain.) From the podcast:

Sonal Chokshi: Some people argue that having a universal basic income can change the way we think about work, because if you don’t have to worry about basic necessities and survival, you can then think about work as this creative act — which is then why they tend to link it to this notion of automation and creativity. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Julia Kirby: Right, the link that people make with universal basic income is a really depressing link, and it’s a damaging way of thinking about things.

Chokshi: Why is that? I think that will be pretty controversial for some of our listeners who are pro- that link.

Kirby: Of course the reason people make the link is that people believe that automation means that there will be much much less for humans to do and that somehow we have to provide for human livelihood because jobs just won’t do it anymore. We just kind of reject that premise, and that’s fundamentally what our book is about. In fact there are lots of ways that humans are still going to be able to and be required to add value to what computers do in the workplace, and so we don’t at all see no need in the future for human employment, that all work can be given over to smart machines.

If you reject that premise, then you don’t have to think so hard about how you provide for people’s lives, and livelihoods, so that’s why it’s unnecessary. Why I actually think it’s a damaging way to think about things is that it denies the fact that work is really important to people. It’s really part of the human condition. Being part of something bigger than yourself, allying your efforts with other people’s, being compensated for your efforts — this is all really important to identity formation and a sense of being worthwhile.

It’s easy to say, “Oh, we would all just have the level of self-discipline required to do all that if our pay wasn’t contingent on it, or if there were no link between effort and reward in the world.” But that’s just not simply what we ever have seen. What we know is that we appreciate not only the source of income but the source of structure in our lives. The structure, the meaning that it gives to us… work is a good thing to have.

Thomas Davenport: Even dogs like work. Some dog trainers that I’ve had for my dog put these little saddles on the dogs because they like to know they have something important to do and carry around. We do believe it’s certainly possible there will be some job loss on the margins, but because of this belief in the importance of work for meaning, for lifestyle, we’d argue for guaranteed work that would be compensated rather than for guaranteed income alone, and as Julia suggests, there haven’t been a whole lot of experiments around the world — we’ll probably see one in Switzerland in a couple of weeks where there’s going to be a vote on guaranteed basic income up to $2500. But in the experiments thus far, instead of doing highly meaningful activities, people just watch more TV, and I don’t think that’s a terribly satisfying life, to spend our days watching television.

Chokshi: Totally throw off our productivity numbers too, which is apparently a big deal. I think that’s a great point to me on the UBI topic, that incentives are totally misaligned. That’s why to me the insurance angle is really interesting, similar to your point on guaranteed work, because incentives are more aligned with how people are driven. I would say though that this notion that “that’s how we’ve always done it, that’s how we find meaning in work,” I do think technology can surprise us and we don’t know how our lives will be as more of it is automated. We could actually find ourselves very surprised by how the nature of work changes.

Davenport: I think it’ll be really interesting if Switzerland votes this in because we’ll have one of the world’s largest experiments on what people do when they can live at least at a very low level without having to work. It’ll be interesting to see the desire to pursue work and to see what people decide to do in their “leisure” time.

Chockshi: It will be an interesting case study, and just like with any case study, we are thinking of countries that are smaller and more homogenous, and then I’m thinking of places that are more heterogeneous, diverse, like the US or India, or China, with these traditions and layers; it’ll be super interesting to see how this plays out into other regions.