Latest / Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts / Silicon Valley's Answer to AI Job Loss Is a Check. The New York Times Spent a Year Watching One Land, and It Bought Diapers, Laundry and a Day at Six Flags

Transcript

Silicon Valley's Answer to AI Job Loss Is a Check. The New York Times Spent a Year Watching One Land, and It Bought Diapers, Laundry and a Day at Six Flags · Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts

• 0:00
  [Host] This is Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts, the show where Silicon Valley's fix for your job finally came with a receipt. The New York Times just spent more than a year following people in Bay Area guaranteed-income programs, the cash fix Elon Musk and other tech leaders keep offering for the jobs AI takes.
• 0:18
  [Guest] The receipt is in the headline. A year of free money bought softer diapers, clean laundry, and a trip to Six Flags.
• 0:25
  [Host] That sounds like a decent year. Who got the money?
• 0:29
  [Guest] The Times opens on Mikole Weeks, a single mother who cleans houses part time in Santa Cruz. Nearly two years ago she got a phone call saying she'd been picked for a program paying thirteen hundred and thirty dollars a month for one year, no strings attached.
• 0:45
  [Host] In Santa Cruz that doesn't pay for a life. It pays for the gap between a month that works and a month that doesn't.
• 0:53
  [Guest] She told the Times it felt like another chance to turn her life around. Then comes the sentence the whole piece hangs on. It did not turn out to be quite that simple.
• 1:04
  [Host] Who's paying for these programs? This isn't the government.
• 1:07
  [Guest] Mostly Google. The Times says it has quietly funded six of them, part of a fifty-million-dollar gift to Bay Area nonprofits, pitched as a way to keep people from ending up homeless.
• 1:18
  [Host] Six programs, paid for by one company's gift. That's a rounding error next to the layoffs it's supposed to answer.
• 1:25
  [Guest] And they can't grow. The Times notes state and federal tax law caps how long a program can run and how much it can pay. The experiment is legally built to stay small and to stop.
• 1:37
  [Host] Meanwhile the men selling the idea talk much bigger. What's Musk promising?
• 1:42
  [Guest] Two weeks ago he stood beside the president at the White House and said by far the most likely outcome is an age of abundance where we don't have just universal basic income, we have universal high income.
• 1:55
  [Host] And what's the Bezos version?
• 1:56
  [Guest] Last week he told Fox News that productivity from AI means some people will decide they can support a family working three days a week, and that the hard part is going to be hiring.
• 2:08
  [Host] Hiring is the hard part? Amazon just cut thirty thousand office jobs.
• 2:12
  [Guest] Fortune put those side by side. The corporate roles gone since last fall, against the two hundred billion dollars Amazon is spending this year, mostly on data centers. The three-day week is the forecast. The layoffs are the weather.
• 2:26
  [Host] Fine, say the check actually arrives. What do we know about what a check does?
• 2:31
  [Guest] The best American evidence is the cash study Sam Altman paid for, three years of unconditional money to low-income adults in Texas and Illinois. The money went where you'd guess, groceries and rent. Recipients worked an hour or two less a week.
• 2:45
  [Host] So nobody quit to sit on the couch.
• 2:48
  [Guest] A few hours went to the couch, honestly, not to school or a better job. But the bigger result is what didn't move.
• 2:56
  [Host] Like what?
• 2:57
  [Guest] Stress and food security improved in year one, then faded. By the end there was no change in physical health and no better job. The check fixed the month. It never touched the job.
• 3:08
  [Host] That's where I keep snagging. The check is sold as the answer to losing your job, and it was tested in a world where the jobs still exist.
• 3:18
  [Guest] That's the test no pilot can run. A check is a floor, and every floor poured so far sits on money from somewhere else: taxes on wages in Europe, a Google gift in the Bay Area, Sam Altman's own fortune in Texas. The floor holds because somebody above it is still earning.
• 3:36
  [Host] So Bezos wants to tax the short week to pay for the days a machine took?
• 3:41
  [Guest] Or Musk's version, where the government just issues the money and trusts the robots to outrun it. Either way the floor rests on the paycheck the same men are removing, and nobody in a Google pilot can test what happens when it's gone.
• 3:56
  [Host] Is anyone in tech saying no to the check at all?
• 4:00
  [Guest] Sridhar Vembu, who founded the Indian software company Zoho, wrote on X on Monday that basic income is an unimaginative and dystopian vision. His objection isn't the size of the check, it's who holds the checkbook: the idea assumes a few people own all the machinery and governments pay off everyone else.
• 4:17
  [Host] Then where does he want the money to go instead?
• 4:21
  [Guest] To work machines can't do, raising kids, caring for aging parents, restoring nature. Whether that pays is a different fight, but he's asking the question the diapers and the Six Flags trip can't answer. What's under the floor?
• 4:34
  [Host] Then what does a floor look like that doesn't sit on a paycheck?
• 4:38
  [Guest] The one Patrick Deglon draws in Unscarcity isn't paid out at all, it's built. Housing, food, care and power run as infrastructure, free at the point of use, so survival stops depending on a wage the machines are busy removing. That's why he calls it the Foundation and not a benefit. For more on what holds a floor up once the wage under it is gone, head to unscarcity dot ai. The book is on Amazon, the audiobook is on Spotify. This has been Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts.