Sarah Beth Spraggins
It’s hard to avoid the constant prophecies of doom about how AI is going to take our jobs – with some of these already being borne out. However, AI leaders such as Elon Musk have declared that the population will be supported by Universal Basic Income (UBI) instead, in which the government will financially support everyone through the huge revenues produced by AI. “Universal HIGH INCOME via checks issued by the Federal government is the best way to deal with unemployment caused by AI,” Musk posted on X earlier this year.
Musk imagines that we wouldn’t be unemployed but rather liberated – UBI would allow us to live without the mundane tasks of everyday life, like making PowerPoint presentations, writing emails or finding synergies in our deliverables. We’d be pensioned off to enjoy endless leisure time, to pursue our own interests rather than pesky career development.
I wouldn’t be so sure. While many of us look forward to vacations and retirement, history shows us that humans like to be busy, and we’re unhappy when we can’t be or when this busywork is meaningless.
To demonstrate this we need only look back to the 1950s and 1960s, when Betty Friedan wrote about “the problem that has no name.” Middle-class housewives, with their husbands out working to support the family and their homes now full of modern labor-saving appliances, had virtually unlimited free time. However, we now know that many of these women were desperately unhappy without a sense of purpose, with high rates of depression and alcoholism. Endless leisure time had created a void that all the modcons and activity groups in the world can’t fix. It would probably affect men in the same way. Already, research shows that male unemployment is linked to rising rates of suicide and substance abuse, and while this cannot be untangled from the pressure on men to be the breadwinner, it seems simplistic to say this is the only factor (and it seems too early to tell whether this cultural pressure would vanish once everyone is relying on UBI).
