From left: legislator Ko Ju-chun (葛如鈞), UBI Taiwan chair Jiakuan Su (蘇嘉冠), and standing director Henry Lee / Li Pinyi (李品逸) recording EP350. Image reproduced from the original BIEN report.
A podcast episode is easy to overread. Politicians host guests. Advocates gain an audience. Everyone posts a photograph, and public policy moves on.
EP350 of legislator Ko Ju-chun’s podcast, Dr. Bao Talks with Friends, deserves closer attention because it is part of a bigger trend. Ko has now devoted three episodes to basic income. UBI Taiwan has met with him repeatedly inside the Legislative Yuan. He has discussed the issue with Basic Income Earth Network chair Sarath Davala. His team is now preparing to present its own Universal Basic AI proposal alongside UBI Taiwan at the 2026 BIEN Congress in Toronto.
The important development is therefore not a politician saying something friendly about basic income. It is the creation of a working relationship with a calendar, policy prototypes, and a route into both Taiwan’s legislature and the international basic-income movement.
That matters because Taiwan’s basic-income debate is entering through a door that advocates often overlook. It is not entering mainly through a conventional argument over welfare budgets. It is entering through artificial intelligence, semiconductors, child accounts, financial technology, and the growing gap between Taiwan’s national success and the economic insecurity many people experience at home.
A relationship built across several conversations
Ko is an unusual political interlocutor for a basic-income organization. Before entering the Legislative Yuan as a Kuomintang (KMT) legislator, he worked across technology entrepreneurship, digital media, design, and academia. He approaches UBI from the world of technological transition rather than from Taiwan’s established social-welfare institutions.
UBI Taiwan’s first episode on his program, EP277, introduced unconditional basic income to his audience through Jiakuan Su and Henry Lee. In October 2025, Ko recorded EP313 with BIEN chair Sarath Davala and me, asking whether an idea associated with Europe and North America could develop a distinctly Asian path.
Ko has noted that Taiwan is a digitally connected society of manageable scale, people have now experienced repeated government vouchers and universal cash payments, and the fear surrounding a national cash experiment is falling.
He also made an observation that has become more important with time. Taiwan’s AI and semiconductor economy can produce extraordinary aggregate numbers while young people feel little improvement in wages, housing access, or career security. Ko described how rival parties fought over the NT$10,000 payment and the government ultimately delivered it. Once every major camp has participated in universal cash, the policy is harder to dismiss as the property of one ideology.
An important development is the proposed National Account for children that Ko and others pushed. Taiwan is no longer debating UBI as a distant endpoint, but as something appearing in bits and pieces across multiple policies.
This background changes how the episode should be read. Ko is not endorsing a finished UBI bill. He is doing something more useful at this stage: treating basic income as a legitimate technology-policy question and helping move it between media, parliament, civil society, and international networks.
Taiwan is sitting on the next generation’s oil field
The most memorable line in EP350 came from Henry Lee. Oil shaped the economic and geopolitical order of the last century, he argued. The next century will be built around silicon, artificial intelligence, and compute. Taiwan’s position in advanced semiconductors means that future Taiwanese will be “born on the oil field of the next generation.”
The metaphor works because it contains both pride and danger.
A country can sit above an oil field while most residents own none of it. Resource wealth can finance public institutions and household security, or it can concentrate power around companies, asset owners, and political insiders. The same choice now faces Taiwan. The island supplies a foundation of the global AI economy, yet much of the gain reaches households through channels they do not equally possess: technology salaries, stock ownership, business equity, and property.
This is why the old automation argument was too narrow. Basic-income advocates often warned that robots would eliminate jobs and eventually force the state to replace wages. That prediction created an unnecessary all-or-nothing test. If headline unemployment stayed low, critics could declare the problem imaginary.
AI changes economic power before it creates a dramatic unemployment number. It can erase junior tasks without eliminating an entire occupation. It can allow one experienced worker to do the work once assigned to several newcomers. It can narrow the first rungs of a career ladder, intensify monitoring, and raise output expectations. This is harder to read in the data which makes it even more insidious.
Ko has said that young people may understand AI tools, yet experienced workers can learn those tools faster than a new graduate can acquire years of professional judgment.
That is a different threat from mass joblessness. A society may retain high employment while making entry, mobility, and bargaining power steadily worse. The worker still has a job, but fewer credible alternatives. The graduate still has a degree, but fewer routes to build experience. Productivity rises while the value of being replaceable falls.
Ko has already carried part of this concern into legislation. He has pointed to the labor provisions in Taiwan’s AI Basic Act, which direct government to close skill gaps, support labor participation, protect economic security, and pursue decent work. Those commitments are meaningful, but retraining and job placement still assume that the central task is keeping people employable. Basic income addresses the part a labor statute cannot: whether a person has bargaining power during a transition, enough time to acquire a new skill, and a floor when the available job is damaging or poorly paid.
Taiwan’s AI debate therefore needs to ask two questions at once. Who can use the technology? Who owns the economic leverage it creates?
Universal Basic AI answers only the first question
Ko’s most original contribution to this debate is Universal Basic AI. His team is developing the idea further as UBAI: AI Coin, a public entitlement that would allow each person to obtain a baseline amount of high-quality AI service or compute. The proposal draws a useful distinction between financial inequality and intelligence inequality. If premium models, specialized agents, and reliable compute become prerequisites for education, work, healthcare, and participation, unequal access will reproduce class advantage.
A worker without AI access may soon resemble an office employee who cannot use basic software. A student with a strong private tutor-model may compound an advantage over a student limited to a weak free tier. A small organization may be locked out of capabilities that a large company treats as ordinary infrastructure.
Taiwan should build a capability floor: affordable access to strong models, local-language systems, compute, training, privacy protection, and a meaningful ability to move one’s data and work between providers.
Yet access alone can become a sophisticated way of adapting people to an unequal economy. Giving everyone a better tool does not determine who captures the value produced with it.
Lee posed the question well during the episode: will human–AI cooperation become universal, or will it become elite? He sketched a deliberately uncomfortable future in which a small group controls the most powerful productive systems while most people use AI to discuss their feelings, analyze horoscopes, or watch synthetic short dramas. The point was not contempt for ordinary uses. It was that access to an interface can coexist with exclusion from ownership, revenue, and decision-making.
The distinction is simple. Universal Basic AI distributes productive capability. Basic income distributes independent purchasing power. A public wealth dividend distributes ownership income. Each instrument solves a different problem.
Compute credits cannot pay rent. A model subscription does not cover childcare during retraining. An AI tutor cannot give a worker the financial room to leave an abusive job. In fact, equal access to AI could intensify competition if every worker is expected to produce more while firms retain the savings.
Taiwan should pursue a dual dividend: a capability dividend that guarantees access to the tools of the AI economy, and an economic dividend that gives every person a direct share of the prosperity built around those tools. One without the other leaves the social contract incomplete.
The family experiment made the argument concrete
EP350 also returned to UBI Taiwan’s two-year basic-income experiment with a single mother and her son. The participant received NT$10,000 per month. The amount did not transform her into a different person or remove every difficulty from her life. It changed the margin within which she could make decisions.
She bought her son a desk. Their diet included more protein and vegetables during a period when he was moving from sixth grade into junior high school. She left a high-pressure, unstable sales job for steadier hours. That gave them more shared dinners, homework time, and weekends together. The experiment later overlapped with a cancer diagnosis and an interruption in work, turning the payment into one of the few predictable parts of an otherwise unstable period.
The contrast with targeted welfare was revealing. Her application for low-income support took over two months, and compensation that included performance bonuses complicated the eligibility review. A system designed to identify need became another uncertainty imposed on a person already managing work, care, illness, and bureaucracy.
This is why people care about basic income even when the national debate sounds abstract. Cash can buy food and furniture, but its deeper effect is on time and the sequence of choices. It can let a parent change jobs before a crisis becomes unbearable. It can keep a health diagnosis from immediately becoming an income emergency. It can replace some of the mental calculation that consumes every day when a household has no margin for error.
The strongest evidence from a single-family experiment is not a claim that one story proves a national policy. It is a clearer view of what conventional indicators miss. Employment status does not tell us whether a parent can eat dinner with a child. Household income does not show how much uncertainty, delay, and humiliation the welfare system imposes. A payment can matter because it changes the problems a person has enough capacity to solve.
Su and Lee discuss AI access, economic security, the family experiment, child policy, and Taiwan’s route toward basic income on EP350. Image reproduced from the original BIEN report.
Child accounts reveal the difference between money now and ownership later
The episode’s discussion of the proposed 0-to-18 growth allowance and Taiwan Future Account was also more important than a debate over whether either policy deserves the UBI label.
A basic income has five defining features: it is periodic, cash, individual, universal, and unconditional. A payment limited by age is not universal across the whole population. A locked investment account is an asset rather than current income. A one-time deposit is not periodic. These distinctions should remain clear.
Still, Taiwan’s child-policy debate is assembling two parts of an income-and-ownership system.
A monthly child allowance addresses present liquidity. Families can use it for food, rent, school expenses, transport, or care. A future account builds capital that a young adult can use for education, a business, or another major transition. The policies answer different time horizons.
Taiwan should resist the temptation to choose between them. A child cannot eat compound interest, and a family facing this month’s bills should not have to wait until age eighteen for help. At the same time, current cash alone does little to correct the gulf in inherited assets that shapes adulthood. The stronger design combines accessible support now with protected capital later.
Lee connected this to low fertility in unusually human terms: “When survival pressure occupies all of a person’s mental energy, marriage and having children stop being life choices and become unreachable luxuries.”
That reaches beyond the standard claim that a subsidy might raise the birth rate. Young people care because Taiwan often treats marriage, housing, care, and children as private decisions while structuring the economy so that only households with family wealth can approach those decisions with confidence. Cash does not create a spouse, a home, or time. It can reduce the penalty for trying to build a life without inherited security.
The National Account proposal, under which government would seed investment accounts for children under twelve and the later Taiwan Future Account debate moved that idea into a larger interparty contest. This is how policy change often looks before it receives a coherent name: several parties approach the same insecurity through different instruments, each carrying part of the architecture.
The next step is already being prepared
EP350 is newsworthy partly because Ko’s involvement is continuing.
At the 2026 BIEN Congress in Toronto, UBI Taiwan and Ko’s team are planning a joint Taiwan forum. UBI Taiwan will present a youth basic-income policy framework focused on people aged eighteen to thirty-five. Ko’s team plans to present UBAI: AI Coin, treating access to capable AI as a public entitlement rather than a benefit tied to employment or the ability to pay for premium services.
Putting those proposals in the same session is intellectually useful. Youth basic income asks how people survive transitions. AI Coin asks whether they can access the tools shaping those transitions. The tension between them will expose the question most AI policy avoids: does the state want to make people more competitive inside the current distribution of ownership, or does it also want to change who receives the return?
Ko’s program is also preparing a further conversation with UBI Taiwan and JUJI, the fintech service operated within Gogolook, about a corporate-supported basic-income experiment. The emerging model would connect unconditional cash with a company’s financial-inclusion and social-impact strategy. That deserves a closer look. Corporate sponsorship is not a substitute for a public right, but it could test whether a pilot can generate operational knowledge, public attention, and a repeatable funding relationship instead of ending as a one-off charity project.
UBI Taiwan is meanwhile preparing a delegation for Toronto and working toward an Indo-Pacific basic-income summit in Taiwan for next year. The regional dimension matters. Taiwan’s route is emerging from semiconductor industrial policy, universal cash payments, child accounts, demographic pressure, and digital public infrastructure. South Korea has followed a different path through youth dividends, local currencies, and national electoral politics. Other Asian and Pacific societies may arrive through disaster payments, sovereign funds, rural guarantees, or public technology.
Asia does not need to wait for a Western government to produce a finished model and then copy it. Taiwan can contribute an approach rooted in the developmental state: the public helped build productive capacity, so the public should keep a claim on the return.
The political opening is real. It is also easy to waste.
There is a danger in treating this sequence as a victory. Universal Basic AI can become a voucher for technology companies. A child account can defer support until after the hardest years of caregiving. A sovereign wealth fund can accumulate assets for the state without ever creating an enforceable dividend for the public. A corporate pilot can produce a polished campaign and disappear when the sponsorship cycle ends.
Even the language of inevitability needs discipline. Lee said that he entered UBI Taiwan in 2020 expecting advocacy to be a lifetime cause because implementation seemed so distant. By 2026, he described himself as “hopelessly optimistic” and predicted that some form of UBI could emerge within five to ten years. He added that it may arrive under a different name.
I share the optimism about direction, but institutions do not become inevitable because the need is obvious. They become durable when advocates specify who receives money, how often, from which assets or revenue, through what legal claim, and with which protections against political capture.
The most plausible Taiwan pathway now has four connected parts.
A regular child or youth payment can establish an income floor for a politically visible group. A future account can establish a claim to capital. Universal Basic AI can establish access to high-quality digital capability. A professionally governed technology dividend fund can convert part of Taiwan’s publicly enabled AI wealth into cash paid to individuals.
The links among them matter; the labels are secondary. A future account without present cash leaves families squeezed. AI access without income leaves workers capable but dependent. A public fund without a dividend leaves citizens as spectators. Cash without an asset base remains vulnerable to the annual budget fight.
Taiwan has already shown that it can coordinate public investment, private enterprise, education, infrastructure, and long-term strategy to build an industry the world depends on. The political task is to apply the same seriousness to distribution.
The podcast is evidence of movement because the conversation now has somewhere to go. It leads back into the Legislative Yuan, forward to a joint forum in Toronto, outward to a corporate pilot, and toward a regional summit. Ko’s role is important because he can translate between technology policy and social policy at a moment when Taiwan can no longer afford to keep them separate.
The next generation’s oil field is already producing wealth. The unresolved question is whether people will receive tools to work around it, a savings account for the distant future, or an ownership claim they can feel in their lives now.
Taiwan should build all three and make the ownership claim permanent.
Further listening and source material
Original BIEN report: “How can basic income relieve survival pressure in the AI era?”
EP350: “From Taiwan to the world, why do we need to keep discussing basic income?”
EP277: “Can unconditional basic income really work?”
EP313: “UBI moves from Europe and North America to Asia: Is Taiwan ready?”
Taiwan’s proposed National Account for children
BIEN’s definition of basic income
Disclosure
I am the founder of UBI Taiwan and participated in EP313 with Ko Ju-chun and Sarath Davala. I later interviewed Ko for my doctoral research and have been involved in UBI Taiwan’s discussions with his office. The interpretations and policy recommendations in this article are my own.
