Universal Basic Income: Will Humans Become Lazy Or Will We Continue To Stay Employed
Many assistant programs are now being sold in the market such as Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri and Sound Hound, that have come about to make our lives better and easier, and a few other startups that are still trying to make their way into the market.
There are so many programs these days that help you figure out what you want to do, whether it is travelling, eating out at restaurants, sorting out your emails, managing your home or even controlling your remote devices. A lot of these are very commonly sold in the market, such as Alterra is a program that will help you figure out what country you want to travel to for your next vacation. Luka is a program that helps you figure out what places to eat out at when you want to make plans. Findo is a program that will help you find your emails, files, tickets, notes and other personal documents in your cloud and mailboxes. Cubic Robotics is also a smart program that is like an intelligent butler for managing your home. And last but not least, Realty Editor can be used to control physical objects like lighting devices, technology, vehicles all from the comfort of your Smartphone.
There have been many rumors that workers who are currently employed at the White House will eventually get replaced by AI. These employees will all be those who get paid at an hourly wage of less than $20 which means that 350 million employees would end up losing their jobs.
Due to this major issue, a solution came up with for this problem, the universal basic income (UBI). According to the UBI policy, everyone in the country will be entitled to a fixed amount of money distributed by the government regardless of their earning and job status. Finland has initiated this test by giving each individual a 2 year trial period where they will get $600 a month as their basic income.
The only drawback to this solution known as UBI is that people will start to lose their motivation to work because they will already be earning a basic income each month, regardless of their job status and employment. This would then be a reasonable analysis if money was the only motivation to keep people working, but this isn’t true.
If we take a look at the Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, we can determine that people have 5 different levels of needs all of which are motivators. The UBI would only be fulfilling the most basic physiological needs. The rest of the needs in the pyramid such as safety, belonging, esteem and self actualization would still keep people motivated to work.
So the questions is, will we become lazy and unmotivated if AI robots take over our jobs and we get UBI from the government? The answer would be no. UBI will just simply put each individual on the same level, those who want to work will work, those who don’t, will have to make do with the money they are getting from their UBI. But this would in turn end up leading to a decrease in unemployment because people will be working towards their needs and requirements that the UBI won’t be able to fulfill.
