Starting this week, 120 Germans will receive a form of universal basic income every month for three years.
The volunteers will get monthly payments of €1,200, or about $1,400, as part of a study testing a universal basic income.
The study will compare the experiences of the 120 volunteers with 1,380 people who do not receive the payments. About 140,000 people have helped fund the study through donations. The concept of universal basic income has gained traction in recent years, and Finland tested a form of it in 2017.
Supporters say it would reduce inequality and improve well-being, while opponents argue it would be too expensive and discourage work.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk wants his followers to know he still supports universal basic income, even though he thinks another coronavirus stimulus package from the U.S. government is a bad idea.
In a Twitter thread published early Friday morning, Musk tweeted that any additional stimulus package from Congress is “not in the best interests of the people,” and emphasized the point by pinning the tweet at the top of his Twitter profile.
If you believe the hype, then Artificial Intelligence (AI) is set to change the world in dramatic ways soon. Nay-sayers claim it will lead to, at best, rising unemployment and civil unrest, and at worst, the eradication of humanity. Advocates, on the other hand, are telling us to look forward to a future of leisure and creativity as robots take care of the drudgery and routine.
A third camp – probably the largest – are happy to admit that the forces of change which are at work are too complicated to predict and, for the moment, everything is up in the air. Previous large-scale changes to the way we work (past industrial revolutions) may have been disruptive in the short-term. However, in the long term what happened was a transfer of labor from countryside to cities, and no lasting downfall of society.
However, as author Calum Chace points out in his latest book ‘Artificial Intelligence and the Two Singularities’ this time there’s one big difference. Previous industrial revolutions involved replacing human mechanical skills with tools and machinery. This time it’s our mental functions which are being replaced – particularly our ability to make predictions and decisions. This is something which has never happened before in human history, and no one exactly knows what to expect.
A Canadian province is giving people money with no strings attached—revealing both the appeal and the limitations of the idea.
Dana Bowman, 56, expresses gratitude for fresh produce at least 10 times in the hour and a half we’re having coffee on a frigid spring day in Lindsay, Ontario. Over the many years she scraped by on government disability payments, she tended to stick to frozen vegetables. She’d also save by visiting a food bank or buying marked-down items near or past their sell-by date.
Basic income will be widespread by the 2030s, according to Google futurist and director of engineering Ray Kurzweil.
Kurzweil is known for making seemingly wild predictions. In 2016, he predicted that by 2029, medical technology will add an extra year to human life expectancies on an annual basis.
At Brain Bar Budapest, a large hall that was plastered in dark and leafy plants struggled to hold a sea of attendees. The crowd gathered to watch Steve Fuller, author of Humanity 2.0 and the Auguste Comte Chair in Social Epistemology at Warwick University, debate Zoltán Pogátsa, a Hungarian political economist. The topic at hand? Whether or not Universal Basic Income (UBI) will be the “social security net of the future.”
