Photo credit to: Basic Income Asia Pacific.
Zhang Chao and Gan Lin, high school seniors from the Chinese province of Zhejiang and founders of UBIForALL (Association for the Promotion of Universal Basic Income) recommend establishing a Universal Basic Income (UBI) city in an “undeveloped” area in China. Their prime motivation is to promote, research and develop literature on basic income, intended to be implemented within the Chinese (mainland) reality.
They wrote in August, shortly after having released UBIForALL on the 18th of July 2017: “I’m fully convinced that UBI will take its seat finally (…) so we either accept the UBI completely or suspend the process of UBI.”
The plan for these UBI cities involves buying inexpensive land, funded by governments, wealthy individuals, or unions, and possibly taxes on robots. It also suggests building infrastructure with volunteers and populating the city with UBICERS, who would be receiving the UBI and a special education in order to eliminate poverty and give a new sense of direction and purpose. Using high tech services such as driverless cars and other innovations for sustainable work, the city would avoid the inevitable crisis, when human beings, due to unemployment, are turned into members of an “useless class”.
“UBIC is a big social experiment both in psychology, economy, technology and the promotion of UBI”, Zhao and Gan conclude.
The vision of UBIC is to promote UBI process of the whole world. In fact, we designed it because we think that the economic right of BI is not just for people in the richer areas. And even not for China. we believe the nature of UBI lies in globalization and automation. So we have to consider the laggards of golobalization and automotion. The automation mentioned today has approached a singularity, even not requiring the comprehensively mature artificial intelligence, The useless class will emerge definitely, taking a majority of human beings. This is a crisis undoubtedly. However, the useless class, faced with the globalization at present, do not appear in developed countries alone. On the contrary, people in poor areas will be divided into useless class by the modern world faster to a larger degree, and such a crisis will be more profound.If we do not envisage this fact, the world will be more unfair and unjust with More terror. It is not a single country or area’s duty to realize UBI, but the world should design and implement the UBI scheme jointly in the perspective of globalization and full automation.For the reasons above, we have designed the UBIC plan: inexpensive manpower, material resources and land in underdeveloped areas are used to construct UBIC to enable the qualified people to be UBICERS, who are allowed to lead good lives without taking any work. Of course, this is just a simplified description.This plan may promote the globalization and full automation, speed up the world’s UBI from all grounds, help the poor areas to keep up with UBI, and facilitate the human beings preparing the upcoming post-human era. UBIC is a reality-oriented idea not a groundless tale.
Interesting – not many people have a vision for the whole world – but of course we (World Basic Income) agree with you!