An Intelligent Basic Income (IBI) as an answer to the probable Artificial Intelligence Employment Crisis!

➡ Why and how to implement an Intelligent Basic Income (IBI) and not a Universal Basic Income (UBI) to answer the new socioeconomical challenges of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and save the concerned Economy, Populations and Ecology! So we could also call it a Socio Ecological Basic Income (SEBI).

Loss of jobs because of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) paradigm and a recession risk if measures are not taken efficiently? AI is smarter month after month and many jobs are probably going to be less in demand, not because a super AI is going to take initiatives by itself, but because more and more companies are going to integrate it into their daily tasks and will need less people in many trades, like: graphic designing, architecture, engineering, journalism, computer programming, etc. But not as such a surprise many low payed jobs, like those of construction workers, mechanics, street cleaners, nurses, etc. are there to stay because replacing someone who just manipulate information is much easier for an artificial information genius than for it to extract the known how of a manual professions and use this knowledge inside a robot that would cost less! Still not there and it’s lucky! But the probable result of AI everywhere is massive redundancy within high paying jobs, resulting in a huge loss of spending power from a large segment of population, leading to less demand for many products, leading to a sudden recession, leading to more redundancies! Not good, and probably not even good for the environments, because when a lot of people start to despair their actions may become rough on broad scales.

Good News! There is a solution, it’s called Intelligent Basic Income (IBI):

You never heard about the Intelligent Basic Income? Not a surprise, because apparently this document is the first to analyses it.

The concept of an efficient distribution of money to make the world a better place is impeded by many outdated factors, like:

• Old saying like «There is no free lunch» when we are surrounded by free-lunches, especially in the the natural world where most fruits are free (voluntarily given away by trees and plants to improve their reproduction likelihood) until they become privatized, everywhere the air to breathe, the sun light, etc.

• The terrible «Universal Basic Income» UBI where the Universal first word of the concept is an almost guaranteed failure of any full acceptance leading to a manichean form of thinking, it’s either universal or nothing! With proselytes completely convinced and opponents demonizing the concept.

• A partial view of what money is! How the mass of money can logically be increased! Etc.

The Universal Basic Income is inferior to an Intelligent Basic Income:

In short asking too much too soon and also often without knowing where to get the money from and what for? Why give it also to the richest part of the population when they do not need it and are likely to transform it into more pollution rather than real survival needs!

Defining a concept as universal would make it extremely hard to implement it because of the huge scales: everybody gets it, even the richest part of the population who are in most cases so good to avoid taxes and use many more resources than poor people, so giving them a UBI and expecting somehow a non negative impact on the natural environment and on other sides the possibility to tax them harder are illusions.

Universal concepts are hard to discuss because they are extrema (everywhere, everybody) by definition so they aren’t adapted for compromises and subtle adaptations, but a complicated world like ours need to be tuned with care and subtleness.

On the other side the label «Universal» is excellent to write a lot of polemical articles, get on the nerves of some peoples, ask for a votes that cost a lot but had no chances to be accepted, so yes, it was good for newspapers articles, a few politicians and to allow further thinking toward a more subtle implementation, welcome to the IBI’s description.

What’s an Intelligent Basic Income?

The Intelligent part of the IBI concept is also a reaction to the more and more prevalent Artificial Intelligence Paradigms that are very likely to make large population segments redundant in the work force! The population segments need the necessary freedom of mind to reorganize their life and thereby a whole part of society in accordance to their values, that for reasons of sustainability may not be fully aligned with the actual competitive values of the dominant workforce.

• People thinking that at term AI will just create at least the same amount of work places that it took do not get it, because efficient processes are there to solve problems and not to make more problems so humans can jump in and be dominant again on highly interesting tasks! If we want to stay dominant we need to agree between us to have AI processes to work for us, more and more as a public resource, so we can win per design and not through a competition between those who use the AI for them and those who don’t. Of course winning per design would mean to have a better life, more free-time etc. but it should especially mean being more responsible for each other and the general balance of society in the whole environment.

It could also be called an Adaptable Basic Income, because the fundamental idea is an intelligent adaptability for all situations. For example a country could try to avoid a too quick surge in demands by deciding that only its own citizens are eligible, with or without people established in the country for a given number of years. It could also be a powerful tool for democracy, giving citizens more time to participate in democratical processes.

It’s an automatic financial security for an important part of the population otherwise at risk of precarity because of lost jobs and/or just not having enough money to be reasonably comfortable.

It’s not made to force people in or back into the workforce, neither to try to force them to work more, but it should in no case discourage them to work more. Free adult people are considered mature enough to optimize their choices inside their given social context.

The previous point is very important because some people may be in a situation where they should be able to avoid work just because they decide so! A few example on how this could be implicitly justified:

• Maybe they realize that their job get against their moral values and may hurt other people, therefore they should not have forced choices like hurting people they don’t know with their jobs to avoid hurting people they know (Eg.: family) because they don’t have enough money to care for them.
• Maybe they have far better things to do than working in their professional field, maybe they are in a unique position to help a family member, and once again they should not be forced to choose between two losing possibilities that are working and have enough money but not have enough time or not working and then have enough time but not enough money.
• Etc.

It’s not made to suppress basic financial/social help often in place in western societies and associated with many expensive controls and duties, but to allow a free choice between the standard and the new system, offering the full normal freedom of possible activities for those who chose the new system and also offering the advantage of free choice to those who stay inside the old system. A free choice not actual in most standard financial/social help paradigms, but free choices are extremely important to optimize efficiencies of learning paradigms, both sides from the equation (teachers & sudents, or coaches & apprentices) benefit from free choices because of the general improvement in motivation coming naturally with free choice or almost free choice (some people could choose to stay inside the standard system because they get a bit more money, even if they get less freedom, but at the end it’s still quite a free choice if the «mercantile» benefit difference is not too large).

It’s meant to be more efficient than most non insurances based social welfare we can see in many different countries, more efficient because the right to be helped would be only calculated on the level of life, incomes, fortunes, information being transparent for tax departments, and if it's not transparent enough, maybe it’s time to improve the art of collecting taxes information.

Only adults should probably get it in case of needs, so the logic to leave other sort of social help available, especially because complicated personal cases may need specific adapted cares.

💸💸 How to finance it ?

• It’s probably not too expensive because many people on the RBI could come directly from diverse social services (*💸) on the "same" budget, so in many cases it could become a State interesting shift with less to pay in exchange for more freedom and also less work to control these people.
• Numerous ways on the top on standard taxes could help to fund a RBI, for example a world wide Tobin Tax would work well to bring in some money while diminishing expensive computations to exchange stocks automatically just 1/10 of a second before a competitor. In a parallel dynamic a world wide Tobin Tax encourages long term stock investments, which means choosing and encouraging companies that are stable and resilient.
• (*💸) Strange to think that some rich countries still do not have a generalization of social services to help people who become broke for different reasons, especially knowing the effect of homelessness on the people directly concerned and their neighbors.

It’s not for the richest segments of our society, because of the advantage of maintaining a reasonable scale and also because of ecological consideration, the IBI is seen here as an aid to avoid poverty and not an aid to just consume more which too often means more pollution.

People benefiting from it are selected in part automatically with information from the tax system or they can apply through a quick formal procedure.

It’s parent to the negative tax idea but not completely in the sense that people will get it monthly and will have a right to it on the 1st day of their subscription, even if they never paid taxes or worked before.

📈 Working more should always mean getting more, in other words every dollar a person earn should make him/her richer, even if getting at the same time an IBI. For that it’s extremely important to have a smooth adaptation of the financial help, no jumps or sudden decrease what so ever for the help function, so let’s say the Base of IBI for a Zero personal income person is B₀, the help should for example decrease linearly until someone gets a personal income of N*B₀ and the values of the help in between for a given independent income (I) can be adapted linearly, therefore we have the RBI function: f(I) = B₀ - (B₀/(N*B₀₎)*I = B₀ – (1/N)*I and the total income is : I + B₀ – (1/N)*I (and when I is above N*B₀ there is just no more help, of course we could decrease it a bit faster toward the end, so people who don’t absolutely need it won’t impede the system, but it’s dangerous because it would quickly mean that working more would imply loosing too quickly some help, so it could be a motivation to work less which is of course what most system do not want.

And the relation with the taxable wealth? Suggestion : the actual or theoretical income of the wealth could simply be added to the standard income to calculate the IBI to which the person is entitled.

Supplementary explanations for the linear function: f(I)= B₀-(B₀/(N*B₀₎)*I described above : The value N is a number that should be equal to 2 or larger, and 4 would probably be a practical psychological optimum, because we have to see that if N is smaller than 2 it’s equivalent for the space of income benefiting of the IBI to be taxed at more than 50% (exactly (100/N)%) for every dollars earned within that space, it’s a large tax and it could well be psychologically too much for some people to motivate them out of the assisted span. When we have N=3 we get a tax of 33.33...% during that assisted span of earning, which is much more acceptable.

Warning : not considering the IBI decrease as a defacto tax would be a huge mistake with hight risks of debts, demotivation and guaranteed extra administrative work, but let's calculate an IBI tax at the end of the year anyway, considering 100/N= 30% (N=3.33…), so we have the 1st «tax» during the helped span at exactly 30% so there is 70% left, but at the end of the year there is also a tax of let’s say also 30%, so the total apparent tax taking effect at the end of the year on the earned IBI would be 0.7*0.7 = 0.49 so a final package of 49% earned and owned, meaning a global tax of 51% for poor people! Ridiculous! So the IBI must not be subjected to any tax on th etop of the defacto tax happening because the IBI decrease when people start to earn somethingon their own.

So we can also see that these numbers B₀ and N must be chosen very carefully to mitigate the risk of demotivation to earn more and the risk of drying the IBI budget. So to avoid the previously stated inconvenients, the IBI should not be taxable, this would be more realistic because people having just the base B₀ and nothing else will spend it all and never pay taxes anyway, and people in between have already some sort of implicit taxes because their IBI decreases for every more dollars they earn, so not taxing what's coming from the IBI is the most logical solution to simplify the administration and avoid demotivation, and if it's too expensive, it’s easy to just adapt B₀ and N.

Why is it a necessity to have an Intelligent Basic Income?

• The artificial intelligence bloom is likely to force huge crowed of people out of the workforce and we need an efficient way to help them.

• It’s a necessity to amplify and gradually simplify social systems as a way to help the populations, the environment and the economy.

• People who can’t find a place inside a standard competitive environment or just don’t want to be part of it should have the possibilities to care for their own core values who are very often aligned with core values of most members of society, like taking cares of relatives, taking care of the environment, studying, etc.

• Most people think that’s it’s unethical or at least a problem to leave homeless people fend for themselves in the street, but then why is it still very common in some rich countries? An IBI associated with initiatives for cheap apartments could solve huge parts of the homelessness problem and at the same time improve a general sense of security! By the way people living in very difficult conditions can bring back some diseases that were forgotten by extreme lack of hygiene and proximity with rodents, so it's one more area where helping them helps the whole society.

• What if you are against some of the previous ideas concerning an IBI? The intelligent part is made to be discussed intensively, so every country, social system etc. can improve the concept through open discussions, simulations and calculations until they find a solution that suit them, but in any case it’s better to anticipate future AI’s effects on the job market than just care about it when it happens, when social systems get overloaded, when a recession is fully fledged and some people don’t even get enough possibilities to feed themselves.

• If the AI was just going to create more jobs? It’s unlikely straight away because an AI is optimized to do thinks instead of us (Thanks God we can have more holidays! But only with something like an IBI). Even so, it’s possible that suddenly the AI will create more jobs because it’s allowing to deal with larger projects etc., but it’s unlikely to be straight forward, so companies will still have to fire many people, and it’s probably going to be some complicated jobs the AI can’t do by itself or manual jobs redundant office workers are not trained to do, in both cases some serious help is needed and an IBI is an interesting solution.

• What about the common fear: you give them free money and they quickly increase in number bringing their friends in and making even more children so the system collapses? Actually it’s quite the reverse the more security and money people have and the more they are in control of their life the less but better educated children they have. It’s also interesting to see that these parameters are very dependent on the environment structures, for example when women are encouraged to study more they generally have smaller families, so in the lines of avoiding a population explosion, an IBI along with a well thought social environment is probably an excellent idea.

What would be the effect on the workforce of a moratorium on large AI systems training?

Yes it could be implemented and respected for 6 months to echo recent news, some companies would probably keep training their system in secret, maybe all (let’s be realistic especially if these system should not show off during these six month, they will have more time, so training them in secret (a few more hundred million pages integrated) is very possible and likely).

Leaving enough time for large social network to secure their systems so they’ll have proofs of having mainly human users that are for now the only users profitable enough to sprinkled with various adverts. A possible way among others is to insist that new participants or influent (new) participants pay a fee, because if an AI system can probably quickly simulate 10’000 new members on a social network, it’s certainly not profitable if it has to pay a subscription fee for each of them, and AI systems are still not able to generate money out of the blue, but it could happend at some stage if they become too integrated to some banking systems.

And what are companies going to do during this moratorium? They are going to prepare for the huge AI advances that are coming and see how much that will allow them to save on their work force, for example a single office worker could probably do the job of 3 of his colleagues with a cool AI paradigm at his finger tips giving the companies an amazing profit of 75% of expenses on their work force, probably 100 times enough to pay for their AI systems and they’ll be able to keep only the best workers.

Conclusions:
Jobs are not going to be saved long term by moratorium(s) on AI, in fact we really need to broaden or view of AI, tax it well and enjoy it, for example with an Intelligent Basic Income that seem to be a logical answer to the challenges of Artificial Intelligence. Along these changes the increase in available free time could be used to improve the general qualitative part of life instead of the quantitative part, solving at the same time many problems, ecology included!

Published the 22nd April 2023