The topic of UBI has yet again gained traction after Elon Musk floated what he calls “Universal High Income”.
“Universal HIGH INCOME via checks issued by the Federal government is the best way to deal with unemployment caused by AI,” Musk said in a post on his own X platform shortly after midnight Friday morning.
The proposal, which is still pinned to the top of his X account, rebuffed the idea that such payments would be inflationary.
“AI/robotics will produce goods & services far in excess of the increase in the money supply, so there will not be inflation,” he wrote.
My view about AI has always been that, “Not much changes in terms of employment.” The “nothing ever happens” chud meme is the correct one here. No mass job loss, or hundreds of millions of people rendered destitute. Wealth inequality keeps widening. Elite individuals and institutions remain powerful and influential. No post-scarcity. Social status remains scarce and competition fierce.
The argument that AI will cause catastrophic job loss while simultaneously generating enough productivity and prosperity to fund a UBI, has no clear economic or historical precedent. This would imply that companies are generating enormous profits while choosing not to hire, or that workers displaced by AI are unable to find new employment.
There is no historical example of technological progress causing a broad and sustained deterioration in living standards and poverty. To entertain the hypothetical, the closest historical examples that come to mind is the discovery of gold in the Americas leading to hyperinflation in Spain, or the discovery of phosphate mines in Nauru leading to expansion, and subsequent poverty after the fortune was squandered.
The oft-expressed fear–or quiet hope–that AI will cause widespread layoffs in white-collar jobs has yet to be borne out by the evidence, despite being a constant refrain among the chattering classes since late 2022, when AI first entered the public consciousness. This scenario has given the David Brooks-types lots to write about, but repetition does not make something true.
Mass joblessness could happen, but the arguments put forth are not that convincing. One argument is that it’s possible AI may cross a threshold in its capabilities where millions of jobs could vanish so suddenly that society is unprepared. So there is an inflection point where AI automates a small percentage of jobs, to suddenly the majority of them.
This amounts to shifting the burden to skeptics to prove that the inflection point cannot happen, which of course is not possible. Even if this were true, there are many jobs that are seemingly immune to AI, such as the service sector or manual labor. There are not that many middle-management or office jobs, and this scenario assumes that these people are unable to find jobs elsewhere in an economy that is otherwise growing due to AI-led productivity gains. I am just not buying it.
On the topic of UBI, there won’t be any UBI except for small trial runs which are never scaled up in any meaningful way. There have been many preliminary trial runs of UBI, but the idea of of a national UBI is a bridge too far.
But whether UBI could work–to put it bluntly–not in America. There already exist enough social programs that effectively act as a sort of UBI. For a UBI to work on a national level requires a high trust, cohesive, and compliant society, which is the opposite of the US. It’s the same reason why single payer healthcare cannot work. It’s like, it’s hard to think of an example of a worse or more unsuitable country for UBI than America.
Americans like the idea of being self-sufficient, even when they aren’t (e.g. Social Security, Medicaid). It’s in their culture. This is why the reaction to Elon’s suggestion so overwhelmingly negative–his tweet being ‘ratioed’ (46k mostly-critical replies vs 195k “likes”), with highly-upvoted disagreeable replies such as:
Handing people a check isn't going to solve the crisis of meaning and the spiritual void in people's lives.
What will people *do* all day?
Shop? Scroll another feed?
From where and what will they derive meaning?
They aren't starting families. Most of them reject God.…
— Andrew Torba (@BasedTorba) April 17, 2026
The anti-UBI arguments tend to be the same tired points. The tweet above asks, “What will people *do* all day? …Shop? Scroll another feed?” As if they don’t already do that without a UBI? No one is expecting people on UBI to suddenly become scholars or to find the meaning of life. It’s more about a stopgap measure to handling technological unemployment due to AI, or placating the masses from revolting. Even if UBI is unworkable, at least those are pro-UBI arguments that do not amount to lazy strawmen.
An idea I think is more viable is “universal basic work” (UBW). Anyone who is competent who wants a job, will be provided one–with minimal to no interviews, credentialism, background checks, or other pre-employment screening. You show up with a valid ID, fill out a form, and you have a job that same day. This is how it used to be in America for much of the 20th century, until the screening got out of control.
The catch is that the gap between the economic value generated by the employee and their wages is covered by the government and reimbursed to the participating firm, placing the system somewhere between a UBI and traditional employment. So under UBW, if someone is paid $20/hour and only produces $10/hour of value, the firm would be paid the difference. This would be less of a taxpayer burden than a full-blown UBI.