Can ChatGPT Create Universal Basic Income With UBC?
2020 US Presidential Candidate Andrew Yang, during his run, proposed something called “The Freedom Dividend”, which was a nice and shiny form of universal basic income. According to Yang, the threats of automation were so high, that it necessitated a UBI of $1000 per month for every American adult over the age of 18. At the time, the idea was not universally accepted.
And now, with the golden age of AI being underway, in 2024, is it time to reconsider an initiative like that?
Now, UBI’s not a new idea, it’s been proposed for a while that everyone should receive a regular and unconditional sum of money to ensure a basic standard of living. There have been a couple of pilot programs here and there, but it may not have been done on a mass scale. Maybe, not exactly UBI, but a variation of it.
OpenAI CEO Samuel Altman certainly thinks so.
In May 2024, during a podcast, Altman remarked that he’s not a big fan of how the government has handled most policies designed to help poor people, adding that giving people money may not help solve all problems or make people happy, but it could solve some problems. Altman, also, floated an idea that he termed “Universal Basic Compute”.
And “compute” is the computational power needed to run AI models, which is?the use of CPUs and GPUs to execute the calculations required by AI models. So, Altman is imagining a future where there’s a GPT-7, which is a much more advanced version of GPT-3 or GPT-4 or GPT-4o. According to the UBC idea, everyone would get a share of computational resources, like access to a GPT-7.
Maybe, people would use their allocated compute to do tasks, like analyze data or learn or run an AI-driven business or?people could sell their compute shares to others or donate them for scientific purposes, like to a cancer research facility. So, it’s a way to democratize access to AI resources. Altman may believe that everyone with a share of AI would be benefitted and?the units of compute could be distributed through, maybe, a digital platform. It may require physical hardware and cloud infrastructure for the computations and software platforms to manage the distribution and usage of compute units. So, there could be a marketplace for AI resources.
The essence of the argument is that AI is going to become a much much bigger deal for productivity and innovation, something as valuable as time or traditional currency. Does that mean that?AI would be a central pillar of human progress, then? Could this benefit India with a population of close to 1.5 billion having a significant rural population and a digital divide? And with UBI, could currency be devalued if improperly managed? Maybe, the allocation of compute units may not impact monetary supply or contribute to inflation.
And would companies, like OpenAI or Meta or Google lead the way to bridge the digital divide in India and push forth UBC? With the rise of cloud services, distributing AI compute resources could become easier. With the widespread use of UPI in India, could Indians have a learning curve with UBC software as well? Could a marketplace for compute units be regulated to prevent market manipulation and make sure there’s fair pricing? But, it may also mean that traditional access to generative AI may go away then and only with a slice of compute, one would be able to access Gen AI. If a slice of compute would become a currency, that means there would need to be scarcity.
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So, for UBC to be a big deal, that means companies, like OpenAI, would have to scale back access to generative AI. Would this be creating a problem, then, to create a solution?
This may even remind you of the Hollywood movie “In Time”, which?showed a dystopian future, where time is a currency, creating a divide between the rich and the poor. People earn and spend time on everyday needs, which means the wealthy live forever and the poor struggle to get by. So, basically, life gets commoditized. Is it cool to do the same with AI computing units? Also, should AI be a right or a privilege? Is this commodifying and commercializing tech that, maybe, ought to be leveraged for the common good? Or should AI companies have commercial interests? Are we due for a tech-driven utopia or dystopia?
How will you have a stake in the digital economy?
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