Elon Musk: Automation Will Force Governments to Introduce Universal Basic Income – Futurism

In Brief

Recently, Elon Musk had the chance to share his thoughts onuniversal basic income (UBI)at the World Government Summit in Dubai. At the Summit,Musk had the opportunity to talk about the future, and the challenges the world will face in the next hundred years including artificial intelligence (AI), automation, and the job displacement expected to come with it.

When asked about the challenges civilization is set to face in the near future,Musk began,deep artificial intelligence, or artificial general intelligence, where you can have artificial intelligence that is much smarter than the smartest human on Earth. This is a dangerous situation.

I think we need to be very careful in how we adopt artificial intelligence and that we make sure that researchers dont get carried away. Sometimes what will happen is a scientist will get so engrossed in their work that they dont really realize the ramifications of what theyre doing.

Musk also relayed concerns thatautonomous technology will impact jobs. Twenty years is a short period of time to have something like 12-15 percent of the workforce be unemployed, he said, pointing out the extent of how automation will disrupt car-based transportation.

Displacement due to automation isnt just limited to transportation. Musk argues that the government must introduce a UBI program in order to compensate for this. I dont think were going to have a choice, he said. I think its going to be necessary. There will be fewer and fewer jobs that a robot cannot do better.

Musk believes, however, that the issue goes deeper:

As the UBI discussion continues, various nations and institutions have already begun their own pilot programs to test the model. In a couple of years or less, there might be enough data from these experiments for us to consider just how effective a solution to unemployment UBI is.

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Elon Musk: Automation Will Force Governments to Introduce Universal Basic Income - Futurism