Reproduced with permission from Global Views Monthly. Original article: https://www.gvm.com.tw/article/128971
In the discourse on AI replacing human labor, there is not only panic but also hope. Technology leaders often refer to this hope as “Universal Basic Income” (UBI). But what is it like to have a basic income in Taiwan? Could this be the answer to an automated future?
An income of nearly NT$30,000 per month, sustained for a year, simply falling from the sky without having to do anything? This is not a scam, but the real experience of a Taiwanese person receiving “Unconditional Basic Income” (UBI).
Early on November 25, 2024, Yiyin (pseudonym), a 38-year-old graphic designer in the manufacturing industry, arrived at the office as usual and opened her inbox. She saw an email from “UBI4ALL” congratulating her on becoming the seventh lottery winner, who would receive a monthly cash prize of 800 euros.
“At that moment, I couldn’t believe it; I thought I was being scammed,” Yi-Ying told Global Views (《遠見》). It wasn’t until she verified her identity with the UBI4ALL team via video call and received the first prize money deposited within ten days that she confirmed it was real. The reaction from her family and partner also shifted from suspicion to asking: “Where can I register?”
About a year ago, Yi-Ying accidentally scrolled to a post introducing UBI on Facebook and followed the link at the end of the article to the UBI4ALL official website. She explained, “What we learned growing up is that you only get money if you work, no gain without effort. So, when I heard this concept, I was quite surprised, but also very drawn to it.”
When basic needs are unconditionally guaranteed, what do people do? When discussing this windfall with relatives and friends, many responded with “travel or fun.” Yi-Ying was not surprised by this. “Everyone has been working for survival for a long time, without the chance to ponder what they truly want to do if survival is no longer a worry. I am still in the process of exploration myself.”
What is “True” Basic Income?
According to the five core characteristics defined by the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN):
- 1. Periodic: it is paid at regular intervals (for example, every month), not as a one-off grant.
- 2. Cash payment: it is paid in an appropriate medium of exchange, allowing those who receive it to decide what they spend it on. It is not, therefore, paid either in kind (such as food or services) or in vouchers dedicated to a specific use.
- 3. Individual: it is paid on an individual basis—and not, for instance, to households.
- 4. Universal: it is paid to all.
- 5. Unconditional: it is paid without means test and without a requirement to work or to demonstrate willingness-to-work.
Basic Sustenance Should Be a Universal Human Right
Supporting this freedom of self-discovery is the original motivation driving Helwig Fenner, the founder of UBI4ALL. Fenner, based far away in Germany, teaches German and drama for his day job and has been promoting the organization’s affairs on a non-paid, part-time basis for over five years. He says UBI is the best concept he knows for simultaneously guaranteeing the two core human needs: “security” and “freedom.”
UBI4ALL is open to global participation, but its nature is extremely grassroots. All funding comes from small donations from ordinary citizens. When funds accumulate to 9,600 euros, a lottery is launched to sponsor one registered person to experience life with unconditional, regular cash support.
Currently, 90% of registered participants are located in Europe. Taiwan has about 3,300 registrants, accounting for only 7%, and only nine people are regular donors. Yi-Ying is UBI4ALL’s first, and so far only, winner outside of Europe.
UBI4ALL believes that basic sustenance should be a universal human right. By raising funds through a lottery, they help more people encounter and discuss the concept of UBI, which assists its practical implementation. Fenner understands the vast financial and operational challenges ahead, “but as a UBI advocate, I believe anything is possible. I believe there is enough money; it just needs to be distributed in a better way.”
In the traditional framework, UBI is issued by the government to all citizens. However, as a guerrilla-style advocacy organization, UBI4ALL also tries more creative models. For example, they once collaborated with a small German supermarket chain to convert consumer cashback into UBI lottery funds, allowing consumers to join the monthly draw with their receipts. “People buy daily necessities at the supermarket every day,” Fenner stated. “Compared to tying customers down with cashback, I believe businesses also have a responsibility to give back to society.”
UBI4ALL has drawn nine winners to date, and each video verification of a winner’s identity strengthens the team’s conviction. “Seeing the happiness and sense of freedom they feel is a very moving moment.” Fenner mentioned that Yi-Ying shared she took a weaving class, something she had wanted to do for a long time but never got around to. “These kinds of small stories are wonderful.”
Fenner believes that Taiwan is a highly digitized, democratic island, where controlling the movement of people is easier than in open-bordered EU countries, making it perhaps more suitable for a unique pilot project combining cryptocurrency. Facing what appears to be a polarized society, he remains optimistic, expecting that the rightward-tilting pendulum of the past decade may soon swing back, allowing liberal arguments to make a comeback.
Technological Progress Drives the Resurgence of UBI
The concept of Unconditional Basic Income may seem radical, yet its rudimentary forms have existed for hundreds of years, having surfaced several times in national-level discussions. Prehistoric human communities had practices of common land and shared food, while modern proposals for cash-based basic survival rights can be traced back to the 18th century.
For instance, American Founding Father Thomas Paine, in his 1797 publication Agrarian Justice, proposed a universal distribution plan supported by land tax. Paine’s basic idea was that land was originally commonly owned by all humanity. Those who privatized land, thereby depriving others of the right to farm or hunt freely, should pay compensation. He considered this “justice,” not “charity.”
However, the recent rise in UBI’s profile is closely linked to technological progress. As early as the mainframe era, economists noticed that the computer revolution would affect the labor market. In 1964, over 30 scholars presented The Triple Revolution Memorandum to the U.S. President, pointing out that automation would reduce the demand for human labor and raise skill levels, potentially increasing unemployment. They recommended that the government implement a series of mitigation policies, one of which was “income redistribution.”
If, during the latter half of the 20th century, attention to UBI mostly came from economists, sociologists, and philosophers, then over the past decade, the concept has been strongly promoted by emerging tech leaders. In 2016, Silicon Valley’s focus on UBI reached an unprecedented peak.
That year, AlphaGo defeated professional Go player Lee Se-dol, demonstrating the power of deep learning. Self-driving car technology entered the early market, and the gig economy surged, leading Silicon Valley elites to realize that algorithms might impact the labor market. At that time, Y Combinator, led by Sam Altman, announced funding for a UBI experimental project. Andrew Ng, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and others have successively endorsed UBI, and Bill Gates’s “robot tax,” proposed in 2017, continues to have ripple effects.
Wealth Redistribution is Extremely Difficult
If automation hollows out middle-class income, everything from consumer tech products to streaming subscriptions could be affected, potentially harming the revenue streams of these tech giants. Tech leaders propose a “Universal Basic Income” mechanism, which might be paid for by the government. On the one hand, this positions them as prophets actively preventing social unrest; on the other hand, it also hints at the high potential of their own products.
Lien Hsien-Ming, President of the Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research (CIER), pointed out that Musk, who calls for “universal high income,” uses much of his vast wealth to pursue goals like space exploration and sustainable energy. He acknowledged that great wealth disparity and the concentration of wealth among those who master key technologies are facts, but questioned, “Why should high-income earners take out money to redistribute it to everyone else?”
Recently, agentic AI has deepened anxieties about white-collar workers being replaced, but Lien Hsien-Ming reminded that similar concerns existed when computers and the internet first emerged. In fact, work has shifted toward specialization and complexity, and human jobs have not disappeared.
Lee Hsien-Feng, a retired adjunct professor of economics at National Taiwan University, also noted that many UBI advocates hope to secure funding through tax reform, but the vested interests pose a high wall. Lee Hsien-Feng participated in a “Feasibility Seminar on Promoting Unconditional Basic Income in Taiwan” held by the National Development Council in 2017. Back then, the public was quite unfamiliar with UBI. In recent years, as the tech industry drives stock markets and wealth inequality worsens, calls for social justice have grown louder.
Another possible source of funding for UBI is the administrative cost savings realized by consolidating fragmented social welfare programs. The current social welfare system is far from perfect. Subsidy programs are complex and overlapping, and gaps in the system leave many people with real needs unable to qualify for social assistance. However, the consolidation process would inevitably involve extensive and time-consuming horizontal communication. Lien Hsien-Ming also noted that Taiwan’s social welfare is not as generous as Europe’s, meaning there is relatively less administrative cost to save.
Cultural factors are also not to be overlooked. Lien Hsien-Ming stated directly that the prevailing social sentiment in Taiwan is “wealthy people shouldn’t enjoy these benefits,” and there is not necessarily support for healthy people “getting money without working.” Lee Hsien-Feng believes that starting with a conditional basic income for low- and middle-income individuals might be more feasible. However, promoting financial literacy to enable more people to acquire passive income might be a more practical approach.
Shifting Distribution Models in an AI Economy
Recently, in response to the shortcomings of UBI, the tech community has developed two related “UBC” concepts: “Universal Basic Compute” and “Universal Basic Capital.”
In the past, fear of automation was a major driving force behind UBI, but the current discussion adds a layer of fairness. UBI is seen as a post-hoc remedy that does not truly address the root cause of income inequality, which is that key capital remains controlled by giants.
Proponents of Universal Basic Compute believe that “computing power” is the most important factor of production in the AI era. Everyone should have a fixed quota of computing power that can be used for entrepreneurship, production, or automated tasks. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is a pioneer of this concept. In this vision, all of humanity is integrated into the AI ecosystem, with computing power serving as the currency of the new era.
Universal Basic Capital posits that since AI models are trained using the data and digital footprints of all humanity, the public should rightfully own capital in these AI infrastructure or tech companies. This could involve sharing the capital gains generated by AI with everyone through forms like AI corporate equity, sovereign funds, or universal investment accounts.
These ideas foreshadow the emergence of an “AI economy.” All industries will be reshaped by AI; wealth and productivity may increase, but the relationship with human employment will gradually decouple.
Nine months after winning the lottery, Yi-Ying was laid off. The reason was a sluggish economic environment, but she suspects that the improved capabilities of AI art may have also played a role. “Fortunately, I mostly saved the previous prize money. With the severance pay, I don’t need to worry too much about my current living expenses,” she stated.
Reflecting on the year with basic income support, Yi-Ying felt that her daily life hadn’t changed much, but her mindset was significantly different. “It might be related to my personality; stability is very important to me,” she said. “Although I barely used the prize money, it became a comfort that stopped me from being overly anxious. Having a certain income to maintain life every month, regardless of the circumstances, truly gave me a great sense of security and a sense of deservingness.”
Recently, Yi-Ying, who has found a new job, attended a library lecture to share the concept and her experience with basic income. “Although I couldn’t share it very well because of nervousness, I still hope more people can learn about this; every person who knows is a good thing,” she said. “Everyone should enjoy this kind of freedom from the moment they are born.”
