Part Two

If we hadn’t innovated in the past with respect to our social policy, we would have no Canada Pension Plan. We would have no Employment Insurance. We would have no Guaranteed Income Supplement. These safety nets of our present were unaffordable in our past according to their critics at the time.

Often, what we say is unaffordable is because of a current favouritism to one or multiple sectors of the economy. When we revaluate distribution of income, what seemed impossible or unaffordable begins to look like one giant step forward for humankind.

Every brilliant new idea is frightening at first. Like when the first horse saw the first locomotive. And how could we do without trains now?

A horse, a horse, a kingdom for a horse: why we need our social safety nets 

We would have had a dramatically more devastating financial crisis if we had not had these and other social safety nets that acted to maintain an economy that you and I are all part of. Since we say past is prologue, we had better learn from our past. The future becomes the present quickly.

Einstein taught us that time is relative. Where will the next Einstein come from?

During the great depression, unemployment was more than 25 per cent in Canada. In some cities, it was 50 percent. Without our safety nets, things would have been worse. We’re still facing the after effects. Today, some studies show that the rise of the machines will eliminate more than 50 per cent of our jobs. Imagine a crisis born out of a crisis we still haven’t dealt with.

When we talk about not having enough money now, what will we talk about then, when we have less money than now, and more unemployment, a smaller middle class, and, worst of all, a much bigger precariat?

We need to do the right thing now.

Design different 

Years ago a commercial presented us a machine, and that commercial asked us to ‘think different’ about a machine (and conceptually, about ourselves). Now, that we have designed machines to soon think differently, so differently that they are learning to think not only as fast as us but even faster, it’s also time for us to think about the design of a better society.

And then, to design it.

That’s exactly what the basic income movement is working toward.

It’s really up to us whether the rise of the machines is a revolution in human existence for the better or for the worse. If there was one thing we learned about the ‘iron horse’, it was that this new ‘horse’ didn’t wait for the future. The future was already there, and it would not be shod by a blacksmith. It would run on steel wheels and rails and carry cargo and human beings. It still does.

Rutger Bregman, in a recent CBC interview, said:

“They [mainstream media and government] ignored the idea. It all happened on a local level … If you look at progress in history or equal rights for men and women or the civil rights movement or the arrival of democracy, progress always starts on the periphery and then moves to the centre … you’re always at the beginning regarded as unreasonable, unrealistic and your ideas are regarded as unaffordable… Every milestone in civilization starts that way …”

Recently, the IMF has said this about basic income:

“We have implicitly assumed so far that income from capital remains highly unequally distributed. But the increase in overall output per person implies that everyone could be better off if income from capital is redistributed. The advantages of a basic income financed by capital taxation become obvious.”

In the future, unless we are designing a society for the betterment of machines, we have to think about what driverless machines are for. If the machines that drive us will soon be driverless, then we should work hard to design into the outcome of their increased productivity the ability to carry our society.

That is a machine worthy of invention. That is innovation.

Driven to design the betterment of the human being

In the end, as always, it will be our minds that make our world a better place for every man, woman and child. That’s why we are driven to design the machines in the first place, not for the betterment of the machines, but for the betterment of the human beings.

To do less will lead us to social, moral and economic bankruptcy.

With every decision we make, we improve or degrade our future in a way that will have great effect. We will determine our future, whether we design a solution like a basic income guarantee, or we let the status quo put us out to pasture. If we are to spend a new future out to pasture, let it be by our own design, where we have focused on re-framing our worth while benefiting the many. Let’s harness all our human creativity to create a better world because soon the machines will work and think and dream of sheep.

Today, as the world struggles toward political and economic answers to great problems, we have yet to implement workable solutions in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Automation and the rise of economic disparity since the crisis is painting a picture in tones and hues of gross inequality.

If the new revolution is all about automation, then how can we make technology serve us rather than enslave us? With the rise of populism, it’s clear that people are feeling disenfranchised. Many critics point to populism as a reactionary, if misguided, response to the adjustments brought on by our technology. These critics issue warnings that we must change or face a dim future.

The bad news

Vinod Khosla predicts “labour will be devalued relative to capital and even more so relative to ideas and machine learning technology.” People who have earned their living through physical work will find themselves in a difficult situation. Some estimates say that half our current jobs will disappear.

This isn’t only true of older more experienced workers, it’s true of millennials as well. Many think the official unemployment rate is double what’s reported. In Canada, millennials and workers over 55, at 34 and 16 percent of the unemployed, account for a staggering 50 percent of unemployment. And that’s the official rate.

Think this is a made-in-North America problem? A recent study demonstrates flat or falling incomes in 25 advanced economies. Only two per cent of those populations were downwardly mobile between 1993 and 2005. A staggering 70 percent of households incomes fell (in real terms) between 2005 and 2014.

Lee Drutman and Yascha Mounk have written that elites with “considerable resources, and their dwindling need for … human labour … are likely to co-opt the democratic process to serve their own ends in an even more radical way than they do now …” Drutman and Mounk suggest that elites may “dispense with the pretense of democracy altogether.”

Should we see the disappearance of the middle class, what is the likelihood of the survival of democratic institutions? Barrington Moore predicted, direly: “no bourgeois, no democracy.”

In the wake of the financial crisis

Since the financial crisis, the tone of discussions regarding societal inequality and the masses of wealth that have concentrated in the hands of the one percent have reached an urgent pitch. Clearly, there are those in the one percent that understand the profound dangers of societal inequality.

Progressive thinkers (including some billionaires like Warren Buffett and Bill Gates) have gone on record saying that we need to preserve the middle class and assist the precariat through some form of financial redistribution.

Drutman and Mounk write that “the more elites have to lose from redistribution, the more aggressively they will try to block any such effort” [of redistribution]. The writers feel not everyone in the one per cent is as enlightened as Buffett or Gates.

Meanwhile, robots continue to whir away in factories worldwide, the soundtrack to the potential for a gloomy future dystopia.

Generating hope through change

If society is to benefit from the change brought on by automation and machine learning, we have to engage in some intelligent political and economic thought to sustain democracy and our economy. Basic income and its inherent income redistribution could generate real hope.

Populism is on the rise. People are looking for change. Societal prosperity and democracy itself will depend on our political and economic response to the rise of the machines and this severe effect on our workforce.

Some opponents to basic income cite a negative effect on the workforce and an increased reliance on redistribution as negatives. The statistics below show that much of our society already depends on income redistribution. As our society ages, we will either redistribute more, better, with less stigma, or we will sink under the weight of a greater proportion of our retirees and population as a whole in the precariat.

According to the government’s own data:

• Government transfers account for 41.1 percent of the total income for Canadians aged 65 years and older
• The 10 percent of Canadians with the lowest family after-tax incomes, received 67.5 percent of their income through government transfers
• 70 percent of Canadians receive some kind of government transfer payment
• Over half (56.7 percent) of  investment income goes to Canadians in the top decile

The above statistics reinforce the point that government transfers are not new. But are we doing our best to redistribute income to the most needy? While interesting policy alternatives like the new Canada Child Benefit have been implemented, the need for its implementation, and the naming of it as a form of basic income supports the need for a more expansive form of basic income that would apply to more people.

Over the last few decades, tax rates have decreased. Regulation has been slack. Use of automation has accelerated. The tipping point was the financial crisis and through a combination of groupthink, poor thinking and outright greed, we created this crisis — and technology is accelerating it.

On any given day, if you simply Google “automation” on Google News, you’ll find hundreds of hits providing automated solutions. The bottom line is: automated solutions mean the replacement of human solutions. Some careful research and forward thinking shows that the replacement of traditional “human solutions” will be exponential. 

What humans still do better than machines

Great political and economic answers to seemingly insurmountable problems require what humans do better than machines: great humanist thinking.

Warren Buffett said earlier this year that prosperity “should not be penury for the unfortunate”. Buffett is an optimist. He notes that in 1900 40 percent of the U.S. workforce were farmers. Today, through productivity and innovation, only two percent of that same workforce are farmers. Employing such productivity gains from technology in a redistribution of wealth through a basic income would be the most positive response to income disparity.

The problem with the efficiencies generated by a stream-lined gig-based economy? Productivity eliminates people from the equation. Fewer people with income, less tax collected. What we have to ask ourselves is: if automation is unavoidable what kind of society do we want our increased productivity to produce? One of greater disparity or one of increased income distribution with more people raised out of poverty? 

What kind of a society do we want?

We can’t act like Luddites and retreat from technology. We need to employ technology to benefit our whole society. We need to provide the necessities of life to people facing a more precarious world — a world that will have less opportunity for fewer people under our traditional concept of work. Technology is creating great wealth, but that wealth under current economic design is finding its way to fewer and fewer hands.

Basic income is the vehicle of redistribution we want. And it is the vehicle of redistribution we need. 

— John Rondina has worked in multiple sectors including financial services, education, communications, and non-profit. A basic income advocate, he is concerned about how technology and automation will affect and impact individuals and the global economy.

We are at the dawn of a new era of technology without parallel in history. Along with it, concern is rising that automation of all kinds, being developed at exponential rates, will displace labour on an unprecedented scale.

For example, a 2013 study out of Oxford University predicted that automation will cause 47 percent of the jobs in the U.S. to disappear within 20 years. We are talking about not only the work that’s been called “the dull, dirty, and dangerous,” which some believe should be handled by robots. Rather, we are talking about work of creative skill too, or requiring significant analytical power.

Our machines can now write prose, with a prediction that by 2030, 90 percent of journalistic writing will be done by computers. Our machines can compose music. They can even do things as delicate as administering anaesthesia or performing unassisted surgery.

As writes Martin Ford, author of the 2015 book Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future: “The machines are coming for the high-wage, high-skill jobs as well….Automation is blind to the colour of your collar.”

Technological unemployment is not just about the elimination of jobs completely, but also about the elimination of tasks within jobs that might yet remain, giving rise to the question of what if anything will replace that task time. A report published last November by the McKinsey Global Institute found that 45 percent of 2000 distinct types of work activities, across 800 occupations, “could be automated, affecting workers in a wide variety of roles. For example, up to 20 percent of the activities of a chief executive could be automated, such as analyzing operations data and reviewing status reports.

For a short and sobering look at technological unemployment, watch the acclaimed video Humans Need Not Apply, available on YouTube. Suffice it to say: should vast job loss due to automation come to pass, the conversations being had today about Basic Income may be of a much different flavour. And indeed, one is seeing some technology experts recommending Basic Income as public policy, as does Martin Ford in his book.

Basic Income involves a regular, reliable distribution of money from government to people to help ensure total income sufficient to meet common, basic needs. The distribution is made without regard for whether recipients have paid labour or not, though total income can be factored as to whether a person receives Basic Income.

One analyst has gone as far to say that “all robot labour should be nationalized and put in the public sector, and all citizens should receive a basic stipend from it. Then, if robots make an automobile, the profits will not go solely to a corporation that owns the robots, but rather to all the citizens. It wouldn’t be practical anyway for the robots to be making things for unemployed, penniless humans.”

In a world in which in which the richest one percent have wealth greater than the remaining 99 percent, we can never accept that Basic Income is an unaffordable proposition. Indeed, as the great economist John Kenneth Galbraith said: “A rich country…must give everybody the assurance of a basic income. This can be afforded and would be a major source of social tranquility….Let us always keep in mind that nothing so denies liberty as a total absence of money.”

— Rob Rainer is an advocate living in the Ottawa area, who volunteers his time with the Basic Income Canada Network.

Benns: From your perspective as an entrepreneur, why is the concept of a basic income guarantee useful to society?

Schmidt: Basic income is all about voice. Some people want more while some people want less. By guaranteeing everyone has the absolute minimum you can guarantee, as a nation that the basic needs of life are met. It’s a win-win for the market and those who are in the market. It’s a fundamental improvement on capitalism and even democracy, because everyone now has a minimum amount of voice.

As an entrepreneur basic income could come to reflect a new society. The people that want more can create more without as much risk. There will always be sizable risk when you’re innovating. It wouldn’t be called innovation if there wasn’t. Here’s the thing; people will always want to live their dreams. Basic income removes the minimum requirements to live. As a serial entrepreneur you’re worried about so many things, but imagine if you have to worry about putting food on the table or paying your rent at the same time, I think these are distractions that inhibit some of the greatest creative minds.

Benns: Do you see automation as a real threat to traditional jobs? If so – and more and more people end up having difficulty finding work — how can we still find a way to make a difference in society? What might still need doing?

Schmidt: Of course, jobs that are less cognitively complex and more physically laborious are disappearing. That’s a fact and they will continue to disappear. Just to be clear, I think it’s a great thing. Automation makes us happier, we just need to make sure our economy catches up. Basic income is a step in the right direction because it allows society to become more creative. Some of society’s best work is done in our free time and comprises the things we love to do, like contributing to Wikipedia or answering questions on Stack Overflow. Lots of disbelievers feel like society will become lazy with a universal basic income. I think the economy will become more efficient. If people are only given the bare minimum some will want more and some will be comfortable with just enough — and that’s okay.

Enhanced capitalism, or capitalism 2.0 in my view, will be based on a more democratized economy. Things like the multiplier effect will have a monumental impact on a nation’s bottom line. The Institute for Policy Studies reported that:

“Every extra dollar going into the pockets of low-wage workers, standard economic multiplier models tell us, adds about $1.21 to the national economy. Every extra dollar going into the pockets of a high-income American, by contrast, only adds about 39 cents to the GDP.”

Fundamentally, this means that dispersion of wealth makes our economy stronger and laziness is not what we should be focused on.

Benns: In the U.S., Robert Reich believes there should be a patent tax. He wonders if giving every citizen a share of the profits from all patents and trademarks that government protects for an extended time (say 20 years) might help fund a basic minimum income for everyone. They still benefit from the protection length of time and people benefit from this new way we could redistribute profits. As an entrepreneur, what are your thoughts on this?

Schmidt: There are lots of creative ways to distribute wealth. This is one of the many ideas that seem promising or at least worth a shot, but at the end of the day we need to start experimenting. As a quick retort, I think companies should pay the people instead of politicians to keep things out of the public domain. That just seems like the right thing to do. While I don’t think this is the only solution it’s definitely a potential source for a resource-based wealth fund.

Benns: What’s the big picture take-away about basic income, in your mind?

Schmidt: My perspective is simple. I believe that we are moving toward an entrepreneurial society as a whole. Big and small businesses flourish the best in neutral economic climates. I think things like basic income slightly de-risk starting a business for some people and can overall increase a nation’s economic prosperity. This is mostly fueled by my optimism in the people. The strongest retort I’ve heard concerning basic income is that it promotes laziness. I think there will be people that abuse any system, but if the right stipend for the right locality can be found it can be beneficial on many levels.

I feel like as a nation Canada is extremely progressive. Areas like Waterloo, Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver have created innovation hubs and the next major innovation (as a society) is in public policy that increases a nation’s ‘happiness.’ This is giving the people more so they can build more.

Benns: What is the connection between automation and basic income? Why should we be considering this social policy change based on automation trends — hasn’t this always been predicted and yet we still seem to have jobs?

Vertolli: The short answer is that the belief that “we still seem to have jobs” is a misleading perception held by people whose jobs have yet to get significantly affected. This means it is held by people in the middle-class range with medium-difficulty jobs that require one to think. The problem is systems like AlphaGo, Google’s Artificial Intelligence that just beat the world champion at Go, demonstrate that even these tasks can now be learned by sufficiently powerful AIs.

To put it even more bluntly, I could probably replace most of the staff in the head office of most companies with a single tech or small team. And, I could do that using simple automation in most cases. More complex cases require more complex techniques, but we now have those. This would have a significant initial cost, and I expect that is one of the major contemporary deterrents. However, companies like Google and McDonald’s don’t have this problem and they set market trends.

Unless everyone except highly specialized experts and CEOs (and most CEOs are probably replaceable with automation) wants to be unemployed, they best start thinking of solutions as soon as possible. Basic income is one obvious option that already has evidence in its favour.

Benns: Should we be thinking about the nature of work differently, in the context of basic income? In what way?

Vertolli: I think there are three major reasons why people work and each of them contribute differently to what work means. The first and most obvious one is to meet basic needs, such as food and shelter. The second major reason is for what I would call quality of life. This includes the purchasing of anything non-essential, such as a new smart-phone. Third, and finally, work is something that occupies people’s time. If the meaning of work is going to evolve, I expect it will evolve along one of these lines or at least based on one of them.

To be honest, I think few people in modern Euro-American nations have had to deal with the first reason for a while. A minimum wage job can provide for a single person who lives simply easily enough. I should know. I have been a university student for nine years. And, with increasing automation, I hope that this will generalize to other nations that have been impoverished by our success more often than not. Thus, this reason is not really a good candidate for how we think of work.

The second major reason is probably one of the biggest things today and thereby motivates much of what the average, modern Euro-American thinks of work. People like to have nice stuff, myself included. But, if automation takes off the way I expect it to, then the cost of everything is going to rapidly decline. Nice stuff will not have the value that it once did. This means we have at least a couple options to consider here. We can either abandon our current way of thinking in favour of something else or we can try to maintain it. One way we can do the latter is by creating pseudo-scarcity by controlling the rate of production. In other words, we can perpetuate a sense of scarcity in order to drive the economy.

I think this is the best indicator of a complete failure to enter the 21st century, but that is just my opinion. I also think it can’t possibly hold. The tech industry was built on the backs of some of the most anarchistic minds in the world and they are the gate keepers of all that software.

The third reason is the way I think we should go. If we buy the whole nine to five thing, work eats eight hours of the average persons day and I expect it is actually much more. This time is tied both to our identity and our sense of accomplishment, which is why there are such negative consequences for people who are out of work for a long time, including the elderly. Thus, the question is, in a world where no one needs to work for necessities or quality of life, how do we occupy ourselves and reward those who benefit society? Or, we should redefine work as a measure of our identity and productivity in the world — not as a means to an end, but as an end in itself. As a fully funded PhD student, I live by this model and it is infinitely more fulfilling in my mind than what most people call ‘work.’

Benns: What do you think people most fear about basic income? Why or why not is this unfounded?

Vertolli: Those of older predilections and times probably still hear communism in it, despite the fact that no contemporary forms of communism have a basic income to my knowledge. I’m not really interested in addressing this issue but it’s there.

Another major reason is that the Boomers worked hard for their money. They are the second kind of work, in that they define themselves through and by that model of work. I can see almost every one of them saying, “You haven’t proven yourself. You don’t deserve nice things.” But, that’s just not true anymore: automation makes this metric moot. The problem is that when you challenge the model you are simultaneously challenging the Boomers’ identities, and they are the ones with all the power, for now.

Those who don’t fall into either of the previous two views probably are more sensitive to the social implications and required infrastructure change of such a move. For example, what happens to welfare and every other social service? What about the social stigma of living off of basic income or having it when others do not in the early stages? Basic income combined with automation will have as great an impact in the 21st century as both world wars did in the 20th. This is and should be terrifying. But, it’s a good kind of pain with an incredibly improved quality of living for all as an outcome.

Benns: The very notion of a basic income guarantee frightens a lot of people, particularly in western societies like Canada and the U.S.  Thinking of employers, how can they be convinced that basic income policy is a good idea? Won’t they be worried about finding people willing to work?

Santens: It’s kind of interesting isn’t it, that the asking of such a question directly implies that employers don’t actually pay workers sufficiently for them to work voluntarily. We all know that’s the case, but we ignore it. The rate employers currently pay for the jobs people don’t want to do is artificially low. It’s low because people have to choose between no money at all, and at least some money. That’s coercion. It’s an imbalance of bargaining power. It’s also a market distortion. Employers have no incentive to pay sufficient wages, so people accept insufficient wages and consider themselves lucky they don’t have to live hungry in a box in an alley somewhere. Because people are willing to accept such low wages to the point they will be the working poor, the government steps in with further market distorting regulations like the minimum wage. But then this wage fixing also affects jobs that people would actually be happy to accept less than the minimum wage in, because that job provides meaning. Perhaps it’s an exciting start-up. Perhaps it’s something requiring few hours. But unfortunately the business can’t afford the mandated wage, thanks to the other employers that refused to pay sufficient wages.

With that said, employers can be convinced basic income is a good idea for a few powerful reasons:

One: A nationally-mandated minimum wage would become optional. Employers that would have to raise their wages because those jobs have so little demand may not be so happy about this, but employers with jobs that have great demand may be, because they could stop giving raises thanks to a basic income indexed to rise with at least the annual rate of inflation, but even better, productivity. Basically, the labour market would be transformed into an actual market, where crap jobs are recognized with good pay, and great jobs are recognized as being intrinsically, not extrinsically motivated.

Two: Flexibility in hiring and firing should be very interesting to employers. Denmark is considered the best country in the world for business because of its “Flexicurity” system where there is essentially both flexibility and security. The easier the government makes it for people to move from job to job, the easier it can be to fire unwanted labour in favour of wanted labour. Flexicurity has nothing on Unconditional Basic Income. With basic income, there are no forms to fill out. There’s no application process. There’s no gaps in coverage. There’s no getting the wrong amount. Everyone always has basic income. All of this means businesses can be allowed far more flexibility in their staffing decisions, and would thus be far more competitive against inflexible competitors.

Three: The biggest reason of all for businesses to support basic income is about as simple as it gets — customers. More people with more money means more customers with more spending power. Got a business selling furniture? You want people to have basic income. Got a business selling music? You want people with basic income. Got a business selling vacations? You want people to have basic incomes. You get the point. Basic income should sound like ‘cha-ching’ to any owner of a business whose business isn’t built on the economic suffering of others, e.g. payday loan lenders and private prisons.

Benns: Automation is taking away many jobs, but there are vast swaths of jobs that still need filling, such as those in the service sectors. How will they be able to afford to attract people if BI is in place?

Santens: Again, it is up to the employer to offer wages to humans sufficient for humans to noncoercively accept those wages thanks to the actual ability to say no to them. If because of this, the hourly wage of human labour for a job rises from $7 to $20, and the effective cost for a machine to do that job instead is $10, then it now makes far more economic sense to hand that labour over to the process of automation. And this is really the result we all should want because it means on one hand that more people are now free to do meaningful work, and on the other hand it means employees who will work 24 hours a day 7 days a week, who will never strike and who no longer require any benefits of any kind. Machines are the perfect employees. Let’s welcome them so we can move on to bigger and better things, like being human.

Benns: Since this is such a huge shift in thinking, we can assume it won’t happen overnight. What are some first practical steps we can take as a society to implement basic income?

Santens: The biggest barrier to basic income happening tomorrow is that however more frequently it is being mentioned all over the world, across all forms of media, it has not yet reached the point of being known by anything close to even half the population. Everyone knows what minimum wage is. Everyone knows what tax cuts are. Not even close to everyone knows what universal basic income is. So the first practical step is to talk about it. Help get the idea out there. Share article after article. Use sites like this one and basicincome.org and reddit.com/r/basicincome as your resources. Start conversation after conversation. Ask people, “What would you do if enough money showed up in your bank account every month for you to never worry about meeting your basic needs?” Get people thinking how this would impact their lives. If you’re an organization, publicly express your support for the idea, just as in Canada the Canadian Medical Association and Food Banks Canada have. Another practical step is to connect with others who also feel the idea is important. Connect online and also in person. Join a local group. Start one if there isn’t one. Organize a Basic Income Create-A-Thon. Additionally, call your local political representatives on the phone, and tell them you support it. If they have no idea what it is, explain it to them. The more they hear about it, the more they will feel it’s in their best interests to start talking about it themselves. These are all very practical steps. Go for it. The movement needs you.

Benns: Why is the concept of a basic income guarantee so important at this point in our societal development?

Santens: We’re living in a paradox of absurdity, where we’ve created truly incredible levels of technology, growing at exponential rates, and yet we’re not using it to propel our civilization forward. Technology has from the moment the first tool was ever created, been intended to reduce human labour and enable us to do so much more than we ever would without it. And yet here we are working 47 hours a week instead of 40, and working nine hours a day at the office despite not actually working for four of them. We’re encouraging people to work in jobs they hate instead of doing work they love. We’ve increased the risks of failure, putting a counterproductive brake on innovation. We’re increasing inequality, hampering our economies. We’re reducing bargaining power by decreasing the ability to say no. And we’re replacing human workers with technologies that don’t buy anything. None of this makes any sense if our goal is for technology to work for us instead of against us. So let’s do that instead. Let’s leverage technology to free us. Enough fear. Enough poverty. Enough bureaucracy. Enough crap jobs. Enough wasted human potential. Enough is enough. It’s time to remove the brakes and let this civilization fly.