Science, innovation and civilization

Who Promotes Universal Basic Income — and Why Does It Matter?

An old idea with new sponsors — and a question that will not go away

There is a question I rarely ask aloud, but which returns to me with stubborn persistence every time I read about artificial intelligence and the labour market: if tomorrow half of what people do at their desks can be taken over by an algorithm, what remains of the social contract we all understood — that work gives purpose, that purpose gives dignity, that dignity gives citizenship? I do not know the answer. What I do know is that there exists a proposal which has circulated for several centuries and which, in recent years, has acquired some surprising sponsors: the Universal Basic Income — or, in its now-ubiquitous acronym, UBI.

This is the story of that idea: who promotes it today, which experiments have tested it, which questions it fails to resolve — and a conceptual rival that frames the problem entirely differently. Not money for everyone, but things for everyone.

An Idea with Deep Roots

Before we discuss Sam Altman or Elon Musk, we need to go further back. The notion of an unconditional income for every member of a community is not an invention of Silicon Valley. It is a political proposal with a biography spanning several centuries.

Thomas Paine, one of the intellectual architects of American independence, proposed in his 1797 pamphlet Agrarian Justice an annual payment to every citizen upon reaching the age of twenty-one, financed through a tax on landed property. Not as charity, but as compensation: the land, Paine argued, had once belonged to everyone, and private property was, in essence, a collective dispossession. Compensation was the debt society owed to those dispossessed.

Several generations later, Milton Friedman — hardly a socialist — proposed the negative income tax: a mechanism by which the state would no longer distribute conditional benefits but would automatically top up the incomes of those falling below a minimum threshold. The logic was administrative efficiency: eliminate bureaucracy and the behavioural traps embedded in the existing welfare architecture. Friedrich Hayek himself noted, in the third volume of Law, Legislation, and Liberty, that "the assurance of a certain minimum income for everyone, or a sort of floor below which nobody need fall even when he is unable to provide for himself, appears not only to be a wholly legitimate protection against a risk common to all, but a necessary part of the Great Society." Hayek, the intellectual patron of economic liberalism.

In 1986, a group of European academics — with Belgian philosopher Philippe Van Parijs at the centre — founded at Louvain the BIEN network (Basic Income European Network, later renamed the Basic Income Earth Network). Van Parijs would become the éminence grise of the academic UBI movement, articulating the argument in terms of real freedom: freedom does not mean merely the absence of constraint. It means the presence of resources without which choice remains a fiction. A poor person is, in a philosophical sense, less free — not because anyone prevents them, but because they lack the means to choose.

Author's note: There is a paradox that haunts me, as a citizen from northern Moldova, one of the poorer regions of Romania: the liberals who most despise the state are invariably the first to demand UBI when they fear social unrest. And the socialists who most love the state are the first to oppose UBI when they realise it might replace their systems of conditional control. An idea in which everyone recognises something of themselves — and no one recognises themselves fully.

Read more: Pamphlet Agrarian Justice an annual payment to every citizen upon reaching the age of twenty-one

Supplement: How Utopian is Guaranteed Minimum Income in the Era of Capitalist-Feudal Algocracy?

The dislocation of labour by AI at a global scale, the concentration of power in platform-fiefdoms, and the suspect promise of minimal redistribution.

From the series "Technology changes tools, not human violence"  Supplements 

Central Thesis

In the context of capitalist-feudal algocracy, a Guaranteed Minimum Income (or Universal Basic Income, UBI) is not a solution to the dislocation of labour by Artificial Intelligence. Rather, it is a mechanism of institutional legitimisation for a system of digital rent extraction, transforming the citizen-worker into a citizen-dependent, and perpetuating structural inequalities under the deceptive guise of solidarity.

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The End of the Hype, The Beginning of the Extraction

We have passed the event horizon of technological optimism. The year is 2026, and the grand promises of Artificial Intelligence as a universal liberator have curdled into a stark, operational reality. The AI revolution is no longer a spectacle of novelty; it is the invisible infrastructure of our daily existence. It is the new electricity, the new logistics, the new governance. But unlike electricity, which democratised light, this infrastructure is designed to centralise power, extract behavioural rent, and systematically dislocate human labour at a scale and velocity previously unimaginable.

In this landscape, the discourse surrounding Universal Basic Income has shifted from the fringes of radical political theory to the boardrooms of Silicon Valley. Tech oligarchs, who are actively engineering the obsolescence of human cognitive and manual labour, have suddenly become the most vocal proponents of UBI. This sudden conversion is not an act of sudden philanthropy. It is a strategic manoeuvre.

This essay posits that UBI, in its current conceptualisation by the tech elite, is a utopian placebo. It is designed to manage the social fallout of mass technological unemployment without altering the underlying architecture of power. By providing a minimal subsistence floor, the algocratic system purchases social peace, neutralises the political threat of a dislocated populace, and legitimises the unprecedented concentration of wealth and computational power in the hands of a few digital feudal lords.

To understand this, we must dissect the anatomy of the system through two intersecting vertical axes: the immutable human drive for control and resource extraction (the Hobbesian-Thucydidean axis), and the looming demographic vacuum that UBI inadvertently manages rather than solves (the Aristotelian axis of horror vacui).

ARTICLE 15: The Luxury of Imperfection: Why "Human Friction" Will Become the Most Expensive Good

Part of CONCLUSIONS: Defense and Human Friction

From the series "Technology changes tools, not human violence" Art 15 of 15 and Supplements

In a world where perfection costs nothing, the only value left is the effort required to be imperfect.

This is not a poetic statement. It is an economic prediction.

For two hundred years, the logic of industrialisation was simple: make things better, faster, cheaper. Remove the friction. Remove the inefficiency. Remove the human. The machine does it better. The machine does it faster. The machine does it cheaper.

And we celebrated. We called it progress. We called it civilisation. We called it freedom from drudgery.

In 2026, we have reached the endpoint of that logic. The machine does everything better, faster, cheaper. It writes better than you. It paints better than you. It composes better than you. It thinks better than you. It optimises better than you.

And now we are left with a question we did not expect: if the machine does everything better, what is left for us?

The answer is not what you think. The answer is not "creativity" or "empathy" or "human connection." Those are abstractions. The answer is concrete, physical, economic: imperfection.

Not imperfection as a flaw. Imperfection as a choice. Imperfection as the visible mark of human effort. Imperfection as the friction that proves a human was here.

And in a world of frictionless perfection, that friction will become the most expensive thing you can buy.

ARTICLE 14: Cognitive Rights: The New Frontier of Human Rights Defense Against Invisible Violence

Part of CONCLUSIONS: Defense and Human Friction

From the series "Technology changes tools, not human violence" Art 14 of 15 and Supplements

For three hundred years, the foundation of human rights has been the belief that your mind is your own.

The Enlightenment established this principle: you have the right to think what you want, to believe what you want, to reason according to your own judgment. The state could control your body. It could imprison you, torture you, kill you. But it could not control your mind. Your thoughts were your sovereign territory.

This principle was enshrined in constitutions, in declarations, in the very concept of human dignity. Freedom of thought. Freedom of conscience. Freedom of belief. These were not just legal rights. They were the foundation of what it means to be human.

That foundation is cracking.

Not because someone is reading your thoughts. Not because the state is imprisoning you for your beliefs. But because algorithms are shaping your thoughts at a level below conscious awareness. They are not controlling what you think. They are controlling how you think. They are not reading your mind. They are optimizing it.

And when your mind is optimized, it is no longer your own.