Latest / Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts / Musk and Amodei Converge on Government Checks as AI Job-Loss Fix
Transcript
- 0:00[Host] This is Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts, where the men building the robots just started talking about your rent. Business Insider reported on June tenth that Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei published a policy essay warning that AI job losses may be permanent, and that the answer is government money.
- 0:18[Guest] One day later, Elon Musk wrote that universal high income, via checks issued by the federal government, is the best way to deal with unemployment caused by AI. Two rival AI bosses, same week, same answer. Send everyone a check.
- 0:34[Host] What does the Amodei essay actually say?
- 0:37[Guest] It's called Policy on the AI Exponential. He warns enduring job loss may be an intrinsic property of the technology, his word, not a growing pain, and says long-term income support will likely be necessary, financed by taxing AI companies or through universal capital accounts.
- 0:54[Host] Intrinsic is a heavy word from the guy selling the technology. The jobs don't come back even if everything goes right?
- 1:02[Guest] That's the admission, and it cuts against his own interest. He even wants government power to block frontier models that fail third-party risk assessment, from a lab that built its brand on self-policing.
- 1:15[Host] And Musk's timing. He posted that on the eve of the biggest stock offering in history?
- 1:21[Guest] SpaceX prices its IPO this week, targeting seventy-five billion dollars, the largest ever, and Forbes says at that valuation Musk becomes the world's first trillionaire. So the man profiting most from automation wants Washington to mail checks to the people it displaces.
- 1:37[Host] Is anyone pushing back, or is this consensus now?
- 1:41[Guest] The fight is live. Fox News ran an opinion piece calling universal basic income a disaster for America's future. But notice what nobody argues anymore, that the jobs are safe.
- 1:52[Host] The billionaires say send cash. Does cash actually work? We've run the experiments.
- 1:57[Guest] Finland ran a two-year trial paying unemployed citizens a monthly stipend. The government's own evaluation found people felt happier, but employment barely moved.
- 2:06[Host] What about Sam Altman's study? He funded a big one.
- 2:10[Guest] His OpenResearch trial paid a thousand dollars a month for three years. Stress dropped in year one, then faded, and the researchers concluded cash alone couldn't fix chronic health costs or housing.
- 2:23[Host] Why would the gains fade? Money is money.
- 2:26[Guest] Because housing supply can't expand fast. Building takes years, zoning takes longer, so when everyone gets a check, landlords raise rents and capture it. The cash passes through your hands to whoever owns the scarce stuff.
- 2:40[Host] So Musk's version just runs a bigger pump into the same drain. And the checks come from whoever owns the robots, which feels like the real catch.
- 2:50[Guest] When labor was your bargaining chip, you could withhold it. When robots work and your income is a transfer, it's a gift that can be revoked.
- 3:00[Host] Is there an alternative on the table besides bigger checks?
- 3:04[Guest] Skip the check, provide the thing itself. Forbes counts roughly sixteen million vacant homes in America, enough to house every homeless person many times over. The bottleneck isn't construction capacity, it's a business model that bills you for survival.
- 3:19[Host] Survival as infrastructure, like sidewalks. Nobody bills you for the sidewalk. Patrick Deglon calls that layer the Foundation in Unscarcity, essentials delivered directly so the money can't be intercepted on its way to the landlord.
- 3:33[Guest] And that's the real fork this week. Amodei and Musk want to route survival through a check. Deglon wants to pour it as concrete. For more on direct provision and what replaces the paycheck, head to unscarcity dot ai. The book's on Amazon, the audiobook's on Spotify. This has been Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts.