“All the confident conjecture aside, no one really knows how the revolution in artificial intelligence will play out in the coming decades. Is AI more transformative than the internet? Is it more dangerous than nuclear weapons? Is all of this just ignorance-fueled hype? Depends on who you ask.
The economy has evolved over the past 200 years from agrarian to industrial to service-based.
Automation in general has increased productivity, and technological advances have made workers more efficient and societies much wealthier. Weavers and bank tellers feared for their livelihoods at the time, but the Industrial Revolution led to significantly more hiring in the textile sector, and banks increased employment after ATMs were introduced. We're still waiting for the 15-hour workweek and for people to start retiring by 40 thanks to the proliferation of computers, as some predicted in the 1970s.
The rise of AI has initiated the latest round of anxiety that workers might be supplanted by machines. Dario Amodei, a co-founder of the AI company Anthropic, said last year that advances in artificial intelligence have the potential to replace up to half of the entry-level white-collar workforce and lift the unemployment rate as high as 20% within five years. "Cancer is cured, the economy grows at 10% a year, the budget is balanced -- and 20% of people don't have jobs," he told Axios.
Mr. Amodei knows such talk won't win any popularity contests, which is one reason so many leading Silicon Valley entrepreneurs -- including Tesla's Elon Musk, OpenAI's Sam Altman and Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey -- have promoted "universal basic income" schemes to address concerns that AI will displace human workers. The idea behind UBI is to provide a regular, unrestricted cash benefit. Unlike Medicaid or SNAP benefits, which give poor people access to healthcare and food, UBI programs allow recipients to use the money any way they want, and eligibility doesn't depend on income or employment status.
In recent years more than 150 basic-income pilot programs in 35 states have been initiated. One of the pilots, backed by Mr. Altman, began in 2020 and provided low-income participants in Texas and Illinois with $1,000 a month, while a control group received $50 a month. After three years of payments, researchers found that both groups worked slightly more -- which may have resulted from the pilot's starting during the pandemic and ending as the economy bounced back. But they also found that people who received $1,000 put in fewer hours on the job than people who received $50, suggesting that the higher payments provided a disincentive to work.
Last month, economist Kevin Corinth and Hannah Mayhew of the American Enterprise Institute released a survey of 122 basic-income pilots that took place between 2017 and 2025 in 33 states and the District of Columbia. They reported mixed results. Employment increased in some programs and decreased in others, and the role of the pandemic was difficult to assess.
The pilot programs varied "in their designs, data collection and study quality," and only 30 of them provided employment outcomes. Hence, the authors counsel against sweeping policy conclusions based on the results. Most experiments were small, and the evaluations "rely exclusively on survey data and are thus subject to reporting bias and non-response bias." Yet Mr. Corinth and Ms. Mayhew did find that the larger and more credible studies -- such as the one Mr. Altman backed -- showed that unearned income has a negative impact on a person's willingness to work.
Whatever changes AI has in store for the labor force, it won't change human nature. Giving people money whether they're working or not is unlikely to increase the number of workers or make them more productive. President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty in 1964 launched the modern social safety net that a basic-income guarantee would expand. What followed were decades of well-intentioned but disastrous wealth-redistribution programs promoted by people who believed that divorcing work from pay had no significant downside.
They were wrong. The welfare system attempted to replace family breadwinners, but it turned out that those breadwinners were providing more than money. The result of these government interventions was more broken homes, antisocial behavior and blighted neighborhoods. Programs designed to help people get back on their feet instead became a multigenerational trap.
Tech billionaires looking to burnish their image seem to believe that the work ethic is an expendable feature of a free-market society. It isn't. If basic-income advocates succeed, one of AI's legacies might be forcing future generations to learn these painful lessons all over again.” [1]
1. Upward Mobility: AI Titans Work Hard to Discourage Working. Riley, Jason L. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 25 Mar 2026: A19.
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