Britain’s investment minister has revealed there are talks within government about introducing a universal basic income to support workers in industries likely to be wiped out by AI.
Lord Jason Stockwood, who joined the government in September after a career in tech, told the FT he believed that “bumpy” changes to society caused by AI would mean there would have “to be some sort of concessionary arrangement with jobs that go immediately”.
“Undoubtedly we’re going to have to think really carefully about how we soft-land those industries that go away, so some sort of [universal basic income], some sort of life-long mechanism as well so people can retrain,” he said.
UBI is not official government policy [in the UK], but asked if other government colleagues were considering the need for UBI, he replied, “people are definitely talking about it”.
Stockwood said one of his motives for stepping into the job left by Poppy Gustafsson, the former Darktrace chief executive who resigned after less than a year, was ensuring steps were being taken to prepare for the rapid changes to society and the UK workforce.
Stockwood’s comments come in the same week that the chief executive of Anthropic, one of the world’s leading AI companies, warned of “unusually painful” disruption to jobs markets as AI was a “general labour substitute for humans”.
Sadiq Khan, London mayor, also warned this month of a potential “new era of mass unemployment” caused by AI.
Technology secretary Liz Kendall acknowledged on Wednesday that “some jobs will go” as a result of AI, citing initial concerns about entry-level roles in finance and law.
Kendall argued that “more jobs will be created than will go, but I’m not complacent about that”. She added that the government would help people adapt. “We will not leave individuals and communities to cope on their own”.
Stockwood has previously suggested that tech companies could pay a windfall levy to fund UBI payments.
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More to the point. Taxing enough to pay it. Would make the billionaires investing in AI pointless. So such billionaires will never let it happen.
No one is investing in AI for the good of a nation. Just to save money on their own staffing costs.