From innovation to inequality: the growing call for universal basic income

A prime example of this is the involvement of OpenAI’s Sam Altman in OpenResearch, the architects of a 2020-23 study which gave an unconditional payment of $1000 a month to 3000 citizens of Texas and Illinois. One can be cynical about Silicon Valley’s motives but on this issue it is in agreement with some of its most fervent critics about the profound changes to the workforce that AI will bring about.

As I outlined in my book on UBI released last year, this reflects long-held concerns about the impact of the wider digital economy on labour conditions in the twenty-first century. The advent of global digital networks in the 1990s enabled the rapid scaling-up of business activity from local to global markets. Commentary on the nascent Internet celebrated the opportunities that it afforded to small, innovative companies.

In actuality, the biggest beneficiaries were large corporations. While some of these were the Internet start-ups that characterised this supposedly more equitable economy, the most successful of these (Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, Google, Apple, and Meta) developed monopoly powers even greater than the dominant corporations in pre-Internet societies. These types of companies employ relatively small numbers of people relative to their revenues. Given the range of economic sectors that these large tech companies are involved in, the Silicon Valley model of small numbers of people accruing vast amounts of profit has spread to the wider economy. The shift largely explains why in the period 2000-2015, half of the total increase in global wealth was accrued by the richest 1%.

Alongside the pulling away of the global 1% from everyone else has been a significant diminution in the global workforce from 1991 to 2024. In the latter year, around 62% eligible to work in the global workforce were in employment; by 2024 that had fallen to 58%. These two global trends are important because of the way in which new technologies usually map onto existing economic structures rather than subvert them. In this sense, the exponential growth of advanced generative forms of AI is taking place in a period where inequality, at least insofar as it relates to the global 1%, is increasing dramatically and employment levels are falling.

The amplification of these trends as generative AI becomes more widespread was alluded to in a recent report by American AI pioneer Anthropic which observed that “current usage patterns suggest that the benefits of AI may concentrate in already-rich regions—possibly increasing global economic inequality”. The most likely to be affected in the short-term are entry-level jobs that are particularly exposed to AI. This is a serious issue, as it hampers young people’s capacity to get a foothold in the workforce.

It would, however, be a mistake to assume that generative AI will mainly impact on entry level work. AI has already had considerable impact on the creative industries, a sector that features prominently in our teaching and research in CMCI.

Popular music has often been at the forefront of technological innovation in the creative industries, from developments in sampling and MIDI technology in the 1980s through to the monetisation of streaming in the twenty-first century. But the business model of contemporary music streaming platforms is extremely susceptible to AI-generated music. That is because artists whose music appears on platforms are paid according to the proportion of their downloads that represent every single stream on each platform. AI songs not only accrue revenue for those who produce them, but they also inflate the overall number of streams, thus lowering the proportion of revenue that legitimate artists get. The recent news that Spotify removed 75 million such tracks last year illustrates the scale of the problem.

All this explains why an increasing number of commentators advocate a UBI for those who might lose their jobs or see their pay drop in an economy increasingly shaped by generative AI. Any such policy intervention would, though, also need to reckon with the ownership, regulation and business models of the tech companies that dominate this sector.