The idea of basic income has been appearing among the tech-bro elite a lot lately. Mega-investor and Netscape creator Marc Andreessen recently told New York magazine that he considers it a very interesting idea, and Sam Altman of the boutique incubator Y Combinator calls its implementation an obvious conclusion. Albert Wenger, a New York–based venture capitalist at Union Square Ventures, has been blogging about basic income since 2013. Hes worried about the clever apps his company is funding, which do things like teach languages and hail cars, displacing jobs with every download. We are at the beginning of the time where machines will do a lot of the things humans have traditionally done, Wenger told me in October. How do you avoid a massive bifurcation of society into those who have wealth and those who dont? He has proposed holding a basic-income experiment in the dystopian fantasyland of Detroit. Singularity University is a kind of seminary in Silicon Valley where the metaphysical conviction that machines are, or soon will be, essentially superior to human beings is nourished among those involved in profiting from that eventuality. Last June, the institutions co-founder and chairman, Peter Diamandis, a space-tourism executive, convened a gathering of fellow industry luminaries to discuss the conundrum of technology-driven unemployment. Tell me something that you think robots cannot do, and I will tell you a time frame in which they can actually do it, a young Italian entrepreneur named Federico Pistono challenged me. Among other accomplishments, Pistono has written a book called Robots Will Steal Your Job, but Thats OK. At the Singularity meeting he was the chief proponent of basic income. He cited recent experiments in India that showed promise for combating poverty among people the tech economy has left behind. Diamandis later reported having been amazed by the potential. One might not expect such enthusiasm for no-strings-attached money in a room full of libertarian-leaning investors. But for entrepreneurial sorts like these, welfare doesnt necessarily require a welfare state. One of the attendees at the Singularity meeting was HowStuffWorks founder Marshall Brain, who had outlined his vision for basic income in a novella published on his website called Manna. The book tells the story of a man who loses his fast-food job to software, only to find salvation in a basic-income utopia carved out of the Australian Outback by a visionary startup CEO. There, basic income means people have the free time to tinker with the kinds of projects that might be worthy of venture capital, creating the society of rogue entrepreneurs that tech culture has in mind. Waldman refers to basic income as VC for the people.
Posted on: Wed, 07 Jan 2015 07:19:33 +0000
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