Why the Universal Basic Income is Needed
The move from humans working with computers to computers working without humans is what some are already calling Industry 4.0 — or the fourth industrial revolution. The term was first coined by the German Government to define the implementation of artificial intelligence, big data, and the Internet of Things (IoT) in factories.
It is regarded to be the first revolution where humans are not required anymore. Once computers can talk to each other and automate the assembly line, while artificial intelligence understands issues and learns autonomously, there will be no need for humans (especially their manual labor).
One powerful example of this learning process comes from the electric car maker Tesla. Tesla simply sends out a software update over night, instantly teaching its fleet how to drive themselves with a new self-driving ability. Every single Tesla is now effectively teaching all other Teslas to drive.
Extend this example to the Internet of Things, where any interaction with a connected object has the potential of teaching something to other connected objects. The immense scaling of networked machine learning becomes truly unimaginable, far outpacing the time and effort required to train a human being one by one.
Industry 4.0 Affects All Sectors
The revolution will not be for just factories. Starbucks has already revealed plans to customize menus for every customer using big data and artificial intelligence to understand what you want. Its new CTO, Gerri Martin-Flickinger, explains their ambition as follows:
We detect you’re a loyal customer and you buy about the same thing every day, at about the same time. So as you pull up to the order screen, we show you your order, and the barista welcomes you by name.
Starbucks even has coffee machines that adapt to the brewing standards remotely, for every type of coffee, so that your barista can brew on any machine, anywhere, correctly. Entire sectors from fast food to retail will automate parts of its operations using the data they have already collected.
A significant benefit of this revolution is going to be cheaper workforce (swapping humans for robots) and the advantage to use artificial intelligence in solving complex problems.
Questioning Human Existence
We are approaching a time when machines will be able to outperform humans at almost any task. It is even predicted that artificial intelligence could put half of the world’s population out of a job in the next 30 years, wiping out middle-class jobs. Practically, every worker making less than $20 an hour will eventually lose his job to a machine. This is based on a stunning report to Congress by the White House.
Moshe Vardi, professor of Computer Science at Rice University, told the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS):
I believe that society needs to confront this question before it is upon us: if machines are capable of doing almost any work humans can do, what will humans do? Humanity is about to face perhaps its greatest challenge ever, which is finding meaning in life after the end of ‘in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread’.
Humans are entirely unprepared. These exponential advancements will challenge us as long as we continue to insist upon employment as our primary source of income.
We are heading into a world where a universal basic income will be the only rational and fair way for society to function. Humans will ultimately have to re-assess what they are good at doing, and find a new purpose for themselves while robots take over their jobs.
