Tesla CEO Elon Musk has made no secret of his robot-powered fantasies for the future. Within the subsequent couple of many years, work shall be optional due to the widespread proliferation of AI and automation, he has predicted. Gone would be the want for retirement financial savings, as cash shall be irrelevant. Instead, Musk sees a world of robots outnumbering people, offering healthcare and different providers for their natural counterparts.
“With robotics and AI, this is really the path to abundance for all,” he mentioned on the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland earlier this month. “People often talk about solving global poverty, or essentially, how do we make everyone have a very high standard of living? I think the only way to do this is AI and robotics.”
Building on OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s proposed universal basic income, Musk has prompt a universal excessive income, often from the federal government, given unconditionally to people.
He has mentioned little else about what this imaginative and prescient of universal income would appear like, however as AI features momentum within the office, different international leaders are starting to see it as a compelling possibility to handle how automation is disrupting the labor pressure.
UK minister for funding Lord Jason Stockwood instructed the Financial Times this week that the federal government is weighing the introduction of a universal basic income as a means to help staff in industries where AI threatens to displace them. Stockwood, who was appointed to the House of Lords in September 2025, is a longtime tech investor and former CEO of insurance coverage dealer Simply Business.
“Undoubtedly we’re going to have to think really carefully about how we soft-land those industries that go away, so some sort of UBI, some sort of life-long learning mechanism as well so people can retrain,” he mentioned.
Beyond calling for reskilling staff displaced by AI, Stockwood has beforehand floated the thought of tech firms being taxed so as to fund universal basic income funds.
“I think of the productivity gains and the wealth that AI can create, but we also need to think of the more pernicious and near-term danger that it just embeds inequality and makes a really small cohort of super-wealthy elites even wealthier because they control the capital and the technologies,” he defined.
AI’s adjustments to labor
Predictions in regards to the future of labor within the burgeoning world of automation have significantly various. While some CEOs see AI as including new jobs, others see a full overhaul of work as we all know it. In a weblog publish revealed this previous week, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned AI could have an “unusually painful” influence on the labor market.
“AI isn’t a substitute for specific human jobs but rather a general labor substitute for humans,” he wrote.
Massive headcount reductions are already occurring on the planet of tech. Amazon confirmed on Wednesday 16,000 company job cuts, piling onto an extra 14,000 layoffs in October 2025, although the corporate beforehand mentioned the reductions weren’t about AI. Morgan Stanley famous in a report earlier this week that AI-related job cuts are hitting Britain the toughest, with 8% internet job losses over the past 12 months.
Could universal basic income actually work?
Universal basic income isn’t unparalleled, and 163 packages piloting the social service, together with 41 energetic packages, have been run within the U.S. alone, in accordance to the Stanford Basic Income Lab. Altman, along with his personal curiosities in regards to the efficacy of the funds, helped finance a sequence of experiments on basic universal income from his OpenResearch venture, starting in 2020.
The outcomes of those pilots recommend that offering people, often low-income ones, with a sequence of constant funds ends in higher spending on basic wants and spending on others, with members persevering with to maintain jobs.
Ioana Marinescu, an economist and affiliate professor of public coverage on the University of Pennsylvania, mentioned universal basic income might be a pragmatic resolution to addressing AI job displacement, particularly given the uncertainties round how many individuals will lose their job due to AI, and for how lengthy they are going to be out of work.
For many with out a job proper now, they depend on unemployment insurance coverage advantages, that are contingent upon a person having a observe report of earlier employment, she mentioned. For individuals out of work for a very long time or missing a lengthy checklist of prior jobs—particularly Gen Z, who could also be notably weak to their jobs being automated—these advantages aren’t assured. Therefore, having an unconditional sequence of funds from universal basic income could be an efficient security internet for unemployed people, Marinescu instructed Fortune.
One constructive facet impact of taxing tech firms and different companies benefitting from AI could be that it will sluggish the adoption of AI within the office, in accordance to Marinescu. That also needs to lower the chance of mass layoffs or displacement, giving staff a probability to discover jobs elsewhere.
But there’s dangers related to rolling out a universal basic income coverage, too, Marinescu prompt. When given these funds, low-income people are solely modestly ready to enhance spending in contrast to higher-income individuals, as many are saddled with debt or different poverty traps. Moreover, as tech billionaires get richer, there’s a probability they could be much less interested by parting with their ballooning wealth—even maybe universal basic income advocates like Altman and Musk.
“Essentially, I’m worried that people who benefit from AI, after the fact, are going to say, ‘Well, why do we have to pay for all these people’s problems?’” Marinescu mentioned. “But right now, we don’t yet know exactly who wins, who loses.”
