by Daniele Fabbri | May 19, 2019 | News
Credit picture: CC(Andrew Newton)
Nobel Laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz speaks about inequality, automation, and Universal Basic Income (UBI) in a conversation at the New York Stock Exchange.
The economist says that, as many people fear, it is entirely plausible that the problem of inequality will get worse if countermeasures are not undertaken. Although he recognizes that a single program such as UBI may offer some advantages, he is not a big fan of the idea. Instead, he thinks that the main responsibility a society has is to provide everybody with a job (a Job Guarantee).
Stiglitz states that if jobs with decent salaries were available, the need for UBI wouldn’t exist, even though some social programs to protect the needy would be needed. But in his opinion many people find dignity in their job, and so the focus of the attention should be to make the labour market work properly.
A goal that could become more and more difficult to attain as technology advances, with machines threatening an ever-increasing number of professions. As automation proceeds, the risk is that inequalities will increase, as a result of growing unemployment and AI undermining the very basis of the market.
Artificial Intelligence (AI), Stiglitz states, makes it possible to alter the functioning of the market economy, making everybody pay a different price, appropriating consumer surplus and adding it to the profit of the wealthiest, thus further polarizing the distribution of wealth.
The solution should be, in the economist view, twofold: on the one hand, the economy has lost its balance because workers lost their bargaining power, and thus it should be reestablished. On the other hand, the core of innovation is government funded research and government funded education, but too little of the proceeds go to the public, and a better system of sharing the benefits need to be designed.
While Stiglitz states he is not a big supporter of UBI, what he proposes in order to reduce inequality is what UBI itself is designed to do: provide workers with bargaining power and redistribute the wealth of society in a more equal manner.
More information at:
Andrew Davis, “Joseph Stiglitz weighs in on Universal Basic Income and the future of work“, CNBC, May 5th 2019
by Andre Coelho | Jul 7, 2018 | News
Muhammad Yunus. Picture credit to: Yunus negócios sociais (Brazil)
Muhammad Yunus, the 2006 Peace Nobel Prize laureate and founder of the Grameen Bank, is very concerned about artificial intelligence (AI). His fear revolves around the prospects of generalized unemployment, as machines replace most of traditionally human tasks.
Yunus also, like a few other economists, including Nobel Prize winners, has reached the conclusion that one of the downsides of AI is the devaluation of the human being, in relation to machines. This, he argues, will take away the ability of many people, even more than today, to care for their own basic needs. Hence, Yunus concludes, a universal basic income must be implemented now, before artificially intelligent algorithms start treating human beings as if they were “cockroaches”.
He also calls for legislation which can circumscribe AI’s intervention in society, recalling that guidelines exist for many other aspects of our reality, such as medicine, food, engineering, and so on. That would not be a deterrent to the development of novel AI applications, but only the introduction of safety mechanisms that would prevent AI creations from killing people, or making decisions for them abusively, for instance. If humans have created these technologies, then humans can, and should, direct them to socially positive goals, such as healthcare.
According to Muhammad Yunus, basic income will be an important means to bring out the natural entrepreneur in every human being. Humans can and will do many things, given the right conditions. Yunus is convinced, and his Grameen Bank stands out as proof, that people need not be “mercenaries of the whole system”, and that schools should create “life ready” young people, rather than “job ready” ones.
More information at:
Sangeetha Chengappa, “It is time to introduce Universal Basic Income, says Nobel Peace laureate Muhammad Yunu”, The Hindu Business Line, July 2nd 2018
Kate McFarland, “SCOTLAND, UK: Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz cautions again Basic Income during BBC interview”, Basic Income News, November 8th 2017
Kate McFarland, “Nobel Laureate Economist Augus Deaton endorses basic income”, Basic Income News, May 18th 2016
by Hilde Latour | Jun 15, 2018 | News
Picture: Deep Dog at the Beach by Botgirl Questi, 2014, CC-BY-NC 2.0
On June 6th 2018, Trent McConaghy, founder of Ocean Protocol and BigchainDB states in his article “Nature 2.0, The Cradle of Civilization Gets an Upgrade”, that a combination of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Blockchain can result in a future of abundance. Profits from self-owning machines can pay for a Universal Basic Income (UBI), according to this expert in the field of automation.
A Blockchain is a database with new characteristics compared to traditional databases, as McConaghy explains:
- “It’s decentralized — no single entity owns or controls it. There’s no single point of failure
- It’s immutable — once you’ve written into it, it’s there for good. (unless intentionally changed)
- And it has assets – you own something if you have the private key. “
Furthermore, Blockchains can not only be used for data storage, but also for processing data and communications. Blockchains, like Bitcoin, can be seen as information-centric Public Utility Networks (PUNs), states McConaghy, and “as “trust machines” these minimize the human trust (in banks) needed to operate. In doing so, these allow ever larger organizations of people to interact without trust issues arising. McConaghy says that the most important characteristic of blockchains is “incentives”. According to him, “a person can design a network that gets people to do stuff, by rewarding them with tokens.”
Then he takes us a step further and explains that Blockchains can also be designed as a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO), which is a computational process which runs autonomously on a decentralized infrastructure. McConaghy explains: “A DAO is autonomous code that can own stuff.”
Trent also refers that AI and DAO combined can generate value by making and selling art, using Genetic Programming (GP) (as in this example), or Deep Dreams (a twist of Neural Networks). It can be achieved when a computer program ‘orders’ an artwork to be generated, sells it on a digital marketplace for crypto currencies and repeats the process (generating a new artwork). Over time, it accumulates wealth, without any human controlling it, while evolving with its own GP coding.
“This is possible with today’s technology” and AI-DAO’s can get rights using today’s law, McConaghy states. The impact of the combination of AI and DAO is huge because it combines database resources with autonomous decision-making. Making and selling art is only one example, but self-ownership can be done with self-driving cars and even roads, windfarms and energy grids, according to McConaghy. He concludes by stating:
“Many dream of Universal Basic Income (UBI), because it can address worries about job loss in the face of AI, and help more people to chase their dreams and self-actualize. Blockchains make the distribution side straightforward. Anyone that provides some proof of being human (even if imperfect) gets an equal amount of income arriving to the UBI chain. The challenge is how to pay for it. Nature 2.0 gives a solution to this! In short: profits from self-owning machines pay into the UBI chain.”
More information at:
Trent McConaghy, “Nature 2.0: The Cradle of Civilization Gets an Upgrade”, Medium, June 6th 2018
Special thanks to André Coelho for reviewing this article.
by Furui Cheng | Aug 15, 2017 | News
The State Council of China released an Artificial Intelligence (AI) development plan on July 20, 2017, which aims to build a domestic industry worth almost $150 billion and positioning the country to become the world leader in AI by 2030.
There are three steps in the plan. By 2020, the Chinese government expects its companies and research facilities to be at the same level as those in leading countries such as the United States. After another five years it is aiming for a breakthrough in aspects of AI that will drive economic transformation. Then by 2030 China aims to become the world’s premier artificial intelligence innovation center, establishing the key fundamentals for a great economic power.
However, rapid development of AI solutions is not without its drawbacks. In June, Kai-Fu Lee, the chairman and chief executive of one of China’s leading venture capital firms Sinovation Ventures and the president of its Artificial Intelligence Institute, expressed concerns about the downsides of AI, particularly the potential for mass unemployment. He raised basic income as a feasible solution.
According to Kai-Fu, the AI products that now exist are improving faster than most people realize and promise to radically transform our world, not always for the better. They will reshape what work means and how wealth is created, leading to unprecedented economic inequalities and even altering the global balance of power.
He highlighted the challenges brought about by two specific developments: enormous wealth concentrated in relatively few hands and vast numbers of people out of work.
Part of the solution to the loss of jobs will involve educating or retraining people in tasks where AI performs poorly. These include jobs that involve cross-domain thinking such as the work of a trial lawyer, however, retraining displaced workers to perform these highly skilled tasks will not be feasible in most cases. There is more scope for people to occupy lower-paying jobs involving the nuanced human interaction that AI struggles to perform, such as social workers, bartenders and concierges. But here too there is a problem: how many bartenders does society really need?
The solution to the problem of mass unemployment, Kai-Fu suspects, will involve “service jobs of love.” These are jobs that AI cannot do, that society needs and that give people a sense of purpose. Examples include accompanying an older person to visit a doctor, mentoring at an orphanage and serving as a sponsor at Alcoholics Anonymous – or, potentially soon, Virtual Reality Anonymous for those addicted to their parallel lives in computer-generated simulations. In other words, the voluntary service jobs of today may turn into the real jobs of the future. Other voluntary jobs may be more professional and therefore higher-paying, such as compassionate medical service providers who serve as the human interface for AI programs that diagnose cancer. In all cases, people will be able to choose to work fewer hours than they do now.
In order to pay for these jobs, it will be necessary to take advantage of the enormous wealth concentrated in relatively few hands.
Kai-Fu Lee writes:
“It strikes me as unavoidable that large chunks of the money created by AI will have to be transferred to those whose jobs have been displaced. This seems feasible only through Keynesian policies of increased government spending, presumably raised through taxation on wealthy companies.
As for what form that social welfare would take, I would argue for a conditional universal basic income: welfare offered to those who have a financial need, on the condition they either show an effort to receive training or commit to a certain number of hours of “service of love” voluntarism.
To fund this, tax rates will have to be high. The government will not only have to subsidize most people’s lives and work; it will also have to revenue previously collected from employed individuals.”
More information at:
In Chinese:
Guo Fa, “State Council for a new generation of AI to inform development management“, Chinese State Council, July 8th 2017
In English:
Paul Mozur, “Beijing wants AI to be made in China by 2030”, The New York Times, July 20th 2017
Kai-Fu Lee, “The real threat of artificial intelligence”, The New York Times, June 24th 2017
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