In my last piece, I asked where HR goes when HR disappears. It’s really a question that applies to all of us when agents do more of the work. My answer is that we need to build a floor to even have this conversation in a responsible and ethical way.
Universal Basic Income (UBI) could be that floor. It’s a regular payment to every adult with no strings attached. Once that foundation exists, the bigger questions around what we pay people for and what social programs still need to exist can be sorted out, hopefully with a bunch of smart HR people helping to solve those problems.
I’ll be upfront. I chair the board of the ITSA Foundation, which works on implementing universal basic income, and I’m a founding signatory of the AI Pledge for Humanity. I’ve also spent more than two decades in HR, and I know how much of work runs on the fear of losing a paycheck. Now that you know my biases, I think you need to get up to speed on UBI as much as you need to talk about AI agents.
Let’s Define UBI
Universal Basic Income is a regular cash payment from the government to every adult, with no work requirement. It goes to individuals, not households, and it doesn’t stop when you get a job. It’s a floor. It can cover the basics, like rent and groceries, but nobody tells you how to spend it. And you still work for everything above it.
UBI, as I define it, is truly universal and unconditional. It’s tax-free and goes to everyone, rich and poor, every month, with no end date and no application. Nobody has to prove they’re poor enough to deserve it. We all have skin in the game, and we all deserve to be a part of a program that takes care of others. Don’t want your UBI? You can give it away, spend it on others who need it, or simply donate it to a charity like you might with your regular income.
What the Evidence Says
There’s a lot of data now to show that UBI is part of the overall solution. UBIdata, a hub that tracks these experiments, lists 30 of them in six countries, from Finland’s national trial to a program right here in Durham, North Carolina. The American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, counts at least 122 guaranteed income pilots in 33 states and DC since 2017.
Depending on what you measure, the results range from modest to impressive. Some studies show better health and lower stress. In the largest U.S. study, people who got $1,000 a month for three years worked about 1.3 fewer hours a week. Some took more time to find a job, or took a lower-paying job that meant more to them. Critics call that a problem, time on our feet is a lousy measure of morality and contributions to society. The better metric is the positive impact on the soul and psyche.
What We Should Pay People For
If agents (and eventually robots run by agents) handle more of the paid work, we shouldn’t ask people to punish themselves by toiling. We should ask them to make meaning, be helpful, and solve other problems. My list starts with supporting activities like caregiving and teaching, public service (the subject of my last piece), and the hard problems nobody has solved yet, not even agents, like fighting cancer, building better batteries, and removing microplastics from our environments.
Some people who went into careers like technology and even HR did it for the passion. Others did it for the money. Shouldn’t we allow people to do what they’re naturally good at and, also, have time for family, hobbies, or simply staring off into space and recovering from working?
People should do work because it matters and because the work itself is beautiful. Right now, too many people do it in spite of the pay, or skip it because of the pay. The UBI model changes that math, and it changes humanity.
Paying for It
The IMF has argued since 2024 that governments should tax capital more as labor’s share of income shrinks. Economists who study state budgets expect AI to shift income from paychecks to capital, so that’s where the money will be. And as I wrote in my second piece, a token tax won’t close the gap.
What’s likely is that corporations will hold on to more and more of the money in our world. But any time someone suggests sharing those gains, somebody calls it socialism. I’d call it maintenance. If the paycheck stops funding the country, and if a salary stops supporting a family, something else has to.
There are a lot of brilliant people who think UBI is doable, even in disruptive times. Martin Luther King Jr. called for a guaranteed income in 1967. This summer, Bernie Sanders introduced a bill to put half the stock of the largest AI companies into a public fund that pays Americans. OpenAI has proposed its own public wealth fund, and Sam Altman paid for the largest U.S. study of unconditional cash. A New York lawmaker running for Congress wants an AI Dividend that pays out if AI wipes out jobs.
Even Anthropic’s CEO has called UBI better than nothing, though he says he’d rather build a world where everyone can contribute. I’d argue UBI is how you build that world, because it gives everyone room to contribute without grinding for a smaller and smaller paycheck.
This Work Is Hard and We Need You
UBI is expensive. A real national program would cost more than anything we’ve tried, even if we folded in or ended some existing social and welfare programs, and I won’t pretend otherwise.
And there’s a question I can’t answer yet. If nobody is technically forced to work, how do you get people excited about the hard, unglamorous work that keeps a society running? I’m not even talking about those frontline jobs like working at Walgreens overnight or cleaning a hotel room. We can flip the math and pay people more, and there are people (like me!) who might want those suddenly well-paying jobs with clear hours and no career pressure that offer a reliable stream of income on top of UBI.
But how do you get someone to spend a career on improving battery chemistry or redefining ethical marketing when they don’t need $185,000 a year and their retirement isn’t tied to a job?
I don’t know yet, and I don’t think anyone does. I just don’t think we get there by replacing people with agents, depleting our state and local tax coffers, and then telling people to be plumbers.
I’m betting that we need humans, supported by UBI and educated on liberal arts and humanities and philosophy and religion and psychology with a basic understanding of economics and math, to solve a very human problem.
And I think one of them is you.
Sign the Pledge
If this series made you uneasy, good. Do something with it. Read and sign the AI Pledge for Humanity.