The tumult in between

The two answers people reach for are both answers to the end state. Universal basic income is the money-focused one: if the economy produces enough, pay everyone a floor. Basic access to goods and services is the resource-focused one: if things become nearly free, guarantee the things rather than the money. Each has its advocates and each frightens a lot of people, and neither says anything about the interval. The question is older than AI: Theodor Hertzka’s Freeland and Das soziale Problem, which I have read, are a nineteenth-century design for a society where access to land and capital is guaranteed rather than earned, and the distance between the book and any attempt to live it is the interval I mean.

The interval is the part I cannot see through. If AI really does lead to something like a post-scarcity economy, where most things are virtually free, the jobs go first and the abundance comes later, and in between there is a stretch where people lose their livelihoods at scale with nothing yet in place, and no shared view of where the collective ship is steering. That stretch will be chaotic, and I do not know how long it is. The move to the city says such intervals end well; it does not say they are short. The most constructive response to it I have heard is citizen entrepreneurs.

References

• Basic Income Earth Network, About basic income: the definition and the main arguments, from the people who have made the case longest.