Universal Basic Income (UBI) by Salim Ismail SU GLOBAL SUMMIT 2017

14 Aug 2017 · 2 min

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2:11

In this presentation, the speaker argues that within the next two decades technological productivity will advance to the point where traditional paid work becomes unnecessary. This shift demands a new social contract, which the speaker proposes as a universal basic income (UBI) framed as a libertarian, not socialist, solution that could replace many government services. The claim is supported by a workshop of 40 leading experts on the future of work—including Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee, Tony Robbins, Mitch Kapor, and Kevin Kelly—who concluded that 1–2 billion jobs will disappear over the next 20 years, but that new jobs will also emerge because human problems persist. The speaker cites Germany as evidence that automation does not inevitably reduce employment; instead, it can increase jobs through higher efficiency, design thinking, and problem‑solving. The overall message is that the challenge is one of retraining the workforce rather than permanent unemployment.

tricking, we will get to a point where technology is delivering so much productivity to the world that we do not need to work for a living. And we're within 20 years of that.
That's fascinating.
So now then the question becomes, what does the social contract become, right? And this— the universal basic income is the best mechanism. And it's not a socialist structure, it's a libertarian structure. You dismantle government services when you do this. And I'll give you a quick example of India. So we've tracked— about 2 years ago we did a session where we got together 40 of the leading experts in the world on the future of work, future of employment. Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee, Tony Robbins, Mitch Kapor, Kevin Kelly. We did a session of 40 of these people. We said, what does employment look like in 20 years? And we looked at this concept of UBI and so on. And there were 3 basic conclusions that came out of this. Number one is we will lose most of the natural jobs that exist in the world today. About 1 to 2 billion jobs will disappear in the next 20 years. And you remember the Lafrites thought about that, but pull out that. The second point was that, um, because— but we will create many more jobs. We worry about massive unemployment because of technology, right? Let me make it really simple. As long as human beings have problems, we have employment. And we're not running out of problems. We're just changing the problem. So we're not— we don't accept— if you look at places like Germany, in Germany, we've automated all the factories in Germany. Employment has not dropped. It's actually increased because there's so much more work to be done and increased efficiency, design thinking, problem solving, blah, blah, blah. So we have very good evidence that automation doesn't necessarily destroy jobs. And so we can see this revolving— it becomes a journey. It's a retraining issue, not a job loss issue.