How We Can Deliver a Universal Basic Income Right Now and Save Ourselves from the Robots (Without Waiting for Congress)
The robots are coming for your job. Artificial intelligence isn’t just disruptive — it’s the next industrial revolution. It will open new frontiers that nobody can currently imagine, but in the short term it means today’s jobs are under threat across the working spectrum. From blue-collar professions like taxi drivers and factory workers, to white-collar ones like doctors, nothing is safe from the rise of the robots.
It all starts with cars. Tech writers like Zack Kanter say self-driving cars could slay more than 10 million jobs by 2025. The reason is super simple. Driverless cars have built-in advantages that humans just can’t compete with. Ever. In a very short time they’ll advance to the point where they dramatically surpass the crash and safety records of even the most cautious and careful drivers. Elon Musk suggested that it may even become illegal for people to get behind the wheel because their accident rates will soar versus the machines.
But that’s so far away, you think. Except it’s not.
The future is coming faster than anyone thinks. Just the other day, a driverless eighteen-wheeler delivered 50,000 cans of Budweiser down the Colorado freeway.
The commercial sector might be the first and hardest hit. Almost 3 million people drive commercial vehicles today. Eliminate the driver and trucks can carry more cargo. That means more products delivered faster, something no profit-hungry company can resist. Driverless trucks also don’t need time off, vacations, sick leave, maternity or paternity leave. They can drive all day and night with no need to stop except for refueling or for maintenance breakdowns. Even if humans could somehow compete with this who would want to?
Car companies are racing to capture this burgeoning market. Almost every major manufacturer from Mercedes to Toyota is working on driverless cars and trucks. Uber wants to replace its fleet of people with intelligent machines. And if Uber and Lyft can get a car to you in two minutes, why buy one at all? Cars are the second most expensive investment for most families, after rent or buying a house, but they’re used a measly 3% of the time, making them 1,000-pound paperweights of tied up money.
Cars currently support tens of millions of jobs, from drivers to mechanics to detailers. But no matter how you cut it, the future is driverless. What happens to all those people?
And that’s just cars. AI, robots and automation are poised to remake almost every major market. Already IBM’s Watson, famous for trouncing the best players on Jeopardy, is becoming the best doctor in the world. At Facebook, intelligent agents are already better at tagging images than people. Researchers are finding new uses for smart machines every day. No jobs will be untouched by AI. Even the ones that aren’t replaced by automation will be assisted and augmented by it. President Obama recently said “My successor will govern a world transformed by artificial intelligence.”
But there’s still some hope. As Silicon Valley investor Chris Dixon notes in his article, Eleven Reasons to be Excited about the Future, “It is much easier to imagine jobs that will go away than new jobs that will be created. Today millions of people work as app developers, ride-sharing drivers, drone operators, and social media marketers — jobs that didn’t exist and would have been difficult to even imagine ten years ago.” Still, even if there are new kinds of jobs just over the horizon, that’s small comfort to those losing their job today.
So what’s a society about to be disrupted to do?
A growing contingent of people across the political spectrum see a universal basic income (UBI) as the answer to the “robot problem.”
The idea isn’t new, going back as far as Thomas Paine in the 1700s, but it’s gained new life with the rise of the machines, bringing together a group of strange bedfellows who rarely seem to agree on anything else, from socialist-leaning liberals to arch-conservatives to libertarians. Finland is planning a UBI experiment, and Switzerland is voting on it next year. A recent article in the classically conservative Wall Street Journal called UBI “an idea whose time has finally come.”
The real question is whether UBI has any chance of passing in our increasingly polarized country?
Will Trump and Congress be able to “govern” at all? Across America, divisions are growing between the rich and the poor, rural folks and the city dwellers, with cynical politicians inflaming those differences to keep their stranglehold on power. Old ways of life are dying out or under threat as society changes. Washington can barely agree on simple things like how much money to spend on roads and bridges. Their chances of finding any middle ground on complex and divisive issues like gun control and climate change are about zero. With this kind of toxic dynamic, it’s hard to imagine Congress coming together and passing a UBI.
But what if we don’t have to wait for Congress to get off their asses and deliver a UBI? What if we could create it ourselves, right now?
I created a new open-source distributed application platform initiative called Cicada to do just that.
Like Bitcoin and Ethereum, it uses cryptocurrency to deliver new wealth. But unlike those projects, which force users to buy into their system before they can do anything, the Cicada platform pays you a universal basic income to run it.
It does that through a new twist on how cryptocurrencies work. To understand the twist you just have to know a little something about how Bitcoin works. Bitcoin uses miners to release new coins into the ecosystem. Mining keeps the network secure by stopping cheaters from spending their money twice. The miners do this by racing each other to solve a math problem. The winner get a reward for doing that: newly minted coins. This is like the gold rush in the old west. Back then, miners made money by digging it out of the ground. Today miners create money out of thin air by winning the race to solve the math problem first. This releases new money into the economy at a steady rate and keeps the miners hungry to participate by appealing to their greed and profit motive.
Now on the other side of the Bitcoin ecosystem, regular folks can participate in the Bitcoin network by creating a wallet and buying or trading for some bitcoins but only miners can win newly created coins. That’s because with Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, mining and wallets are completely separate. Only miners get paid and only after massive personal investments in specialized hardware. Everyone else has to trade existing money for bitcoins. Miners get the new money.
So why not become a miner yourself? That’s the way to get money of thin air, right? Unfortunately, Bitcoin is now dominated by a small group of miners with lots of money, hardware and resources. You can’t compete. If you wanted to set up your own miner, you have little to no chance to getting a dime back because competition is so fierce. The big miners get all the new coins, much like the banks do today.
Cryptocurrencies were supposed to make money more democratized but the opposite has happened. It’s more centralized than ever.
But Cicada flips the idea of mining on its head. Everyone on the network is a miner and nobody can have more than one miner.
Miners are drafted randomly to keep the network running smoothly. You might be walking along, getting coffee and your phone gets called on to secure the network for a few minutes. After that it goes right back to sleep. As a reward, you might win new coins for doing nothing but having the application on your phone. Simple right?
Because everyone is eventually drafted, everyone gets paid, in essence creating a UBI right now. That’s a true democratization of money! And I think it can change the world.
But I can’t do it alone. I need your help. Come check out the project and the whitepaper outlining its unique architecture. If you’re a great coder, come code the future. If you can’t code, no worries. You can also sign up for the beta and be one of the first people on the planet to get a real UBI. Or maybe you’re just a systems architecture guru and you have some ideas to expand the project? We need you too. We need everyone.
Together we can take back our world.
Let’s not wait for a Congress that doesn’t give a shit about anyone but themselves to do something we need right now. We can do it without them. As always, it’s up to the people to save ourselves.
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