Even if there is say, a 30% chance that in the next 5 years even 30-40% of white collar jobs get replaced...that feels like a massive shock to high-income countries way of life, and a major shift in the social contract for the generation of kids who have got into massive debt for university courses only to find substantially reduced market opportunities. That requires substantial state action.
Rather than 30%, I would personally guess the chance is much less than 0.01% (1 in 10,000), possibly less than 0.001% (1 in 100,000) or even 0.0001% (1 in 1 million).
I agree with Huw that there’s insufficient evidence to say that AI is causing significant or even measurable unemployment right now, and I’m highly skeptical this will happen anytime soon. Indeed, I’d personally guess there’s a ~95% chance there’s an AI bubble that will pop sometime within the next several years. So far, AI has stubbornly refused to deliver the sort of productivity or automation that has been promised. I think the problem is a fundamental science problem, not something that can be solved with scaling or incremental R&D.
However, let’s imagine a scenario where in a short time, say 5 years, a huge percentage of jobs get automated by AI — automation of white-collar work on a massive scale.[1]
What should governments’ response be right now, before this has started to happen, or at least before there is broad agreement it has started to happen? People often talk about this as a gloomy, worrying outcome. I suppose it could turn out to be, but why should that be the default assumption? It would lead to much faster economic growth than developed countries are used to seeing. It might even be record-breaking, unprecedented economic growth. It would be a massive economic windfall. That’s a good thing.[2]
To be a bit more specific, when people imagine the sort of AI that is capable of automating white-collar work on the scale you’re describing (30-40% of jobs), they also often imagine wildly high rates of GDP growth, ranging from 10% to 30%.[3][4] The level of growth is supposed to be commensurate with the percentage of labour that AI can automate. I don’t know about these specific figures, but the general idea is intuitive.
Surely passing UBI would become much easier once both a) unemployment significantly increased and b) economic growth significantly increased. There would be both a clear problem to address and a windfall of money with which to address it. By analogy, it would have been much harder for governments to pass stimulus bills in January 2020 in anticipation of covid-19. In March 2020, it was much easier, since the emergency was clear. But the covid-19 emergency caused a recession. What if, instead, it had caused an economic boom, and a commensurate increase in government revenues? Surely, then, it would have been even easier to pass stimulus bills.
This is why, even if I accept the AI automation scenario for the sake of argument, I don’t worry about the practical, logistical, or fiscal obstacles to enacting UBI in a hurry. Governments can send cheques to people on short notice, as we saw with covid-19. This would presumably be especially true if the government and the economy overall were experiencing a windfall from AI. The sort of administrative bottlenecks we saw in some places during in covid-19 — those could be solved by AI, since we’re stipulating an unlimited supply of digital white-collar workers. Maybe there are further aspects to implementing UBI that would be more complicated than sending people cheques and that couldn’t be assisted by AI. What would those be?
The typical concerns raised over UBI are that it would be too expensive, that it would be poorly targeted (i.e. it would be more efficient to run means-tested programs), that it would discourage people from working, and that it would reduce economic growth. None of those apply to this scenario.
If there’s more complexity in implementing UBI that I’m not considering, surely in this scenario politicians would quickly become focused on dealing with that complexity, and civil servants (and AI workers) would be assigned to the task. As opposed to something like decarbonizing the economy, UBI seems like it could be implemented relatively quickly and easily, given a sudden emergency that called for it and a sudden windfall of cash. Part of the supposed appeal of UBI is its simplicity relative to means-tested programs like welfare and non-cash-based programs like food stamps and subsidized housing. So, if you’re not satisfied with my answer, maybe you could elaborate on why you think it wouldn’t be so easy to figure out UBI in a hurry.
As mentioned up top, I regard this just as an interesting hypothetical, since I think the chance of this actually happening is below 0.01% (1 in 10,000).
Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that the sort of dire outcomes hypothesized under the heading of AI safety or AI alignment do not occur. Let’s assume that AI is safe and aligned, and that it’s not able to be misused by humans to destroy or take over the world.
Let’s also assume that AI won’t be a monopoly or duopoly or oligopoly but, like today, even open source models that are free to use are a viable alternative to the most cutting-edge proprietary models. We’ll imagine that the pricing power of the AI companies will be put in check by competition from both proprietary and open source models. Sam Altman might become a trillionaire, but only a small fraction of the wealth created by AI will be captured by the AI companies. (As an analogy, think about how much wealth is created by office workers using Windows PCs, and how much of that wealth is captured by Microsoft or by PC manufacturers like HP and Dell, or components manufacturers like Intel.)
I’m putting these other concerns aside in order to focus on labour automation and technological unemployment, since that’s the concern you raised.
The specific worries around AI automation people most commonly cite are about wealth distribution, and about people finding purpose and meaning in their lives if there’s large-scale technological unemployment. I’ll focus on the wealth distribution worry, since the topic is UBI, and your primary concern seems to be economic or material.
Some people are also worried about workers being disempowered if they can be replaced by AI, at the same time that capital owners become much wealthier. If they’re right to worry about that, then maybe it’s important to consider well in advance of it happening. Maybe workers should act while they still have power and leverage. But it’s a bit of a separate topic, I think, from whether to start implementing UBI now. Maybe UBI would be one of a suite of policies workers would want to enact in advance of large-scale AI automation of labour, but what’s to prevent UBI from being repealed after workers are disempowered?
For the sake of this discussion, I’ll assume that workers (or former workers) will remain politically empowered, and healthy democracies will remain healthy.
(Even in the roles where it has produced productivity improvements, such as programming, that doesn’t necessarily imply job loss, as companies could get more ambitious with their existing budgets)
Rather than 30%, I would personally guess the chance is much less than 0.01% (1 in 10,000), possibly less than 0.001% (1 in 100,000) or even 0.0001% (1 in 1 million).
I agree with Huw that there’s insufficient evidence to say that AI is causing significant or even measurable unemployment right now, and I’m highly skeptical this will happen anytime soon. Indeed, I’d personally guess there’s a ~95% chance there’s an AI bubble that will pop sometime within the next several years. So far, AI has stubbornly refused to deliver the sort of productivity or automation that has been promised. I think the problem is a fundamental science problem, not something that can be solved with scaling or incremental R&D.
However, let’s imagine a scenario where in a short time, say 5 years, a huge percentage of jobs get automated by AI — automation of white-collar work on a massive scale.[1]
What should governments’ response be right now, before this has started to happen, or at least before there is broad agreement it has started to happen? People often talk about this as a gloomy, worrying outcome. I suppose it could turn out to be, but why should that be the default assumption? It would lead to much faster economic growth than developed countries are used to seeing. It might even be record-breaking, unprecedented economic growth. It would be a massive economic windfall. That’s a good thing.[2]
To be a bit more specific, when people imagine the sort of AI that is capable of automating white-collar work on the scale you’re describing (30-40% of jobs), they also often imagine wildly high rates of GDP growth, ranging from 10% to 30%.[3][4] The level of growth is supposed to be commensurate with the percentage of labour that AI can automate. I don’t know about these specific figures, but the general idea is intuitive.
Surely passing UBI would become much easier once both a) unemployment significantly increased and b) economic growth significantly increased. There would be both a clear problem to address and a windfall of money with which to address it. By analogy, it would have been much harder for governments to pass stimulus bills in January 2020 in anticipation of covid-19. In March 2020, it was much easier, since the emergency was clear. But the covid-19 emergency caused a recession. What if, instead, it had caused an economic boom, and a commensurate increase in government revenues? Surely, then, it would have been even easier to pass stimulus bills.
This is why, even if I accept the AI automation scenario for the sake of argument, I don’t worry about the practical, logistical, or fiscal obstacles to enacting UBI in a hurry. Governments can send cheques to people on short notice, as we saw with covid-19. This would presumably be especially true if the government and the economy overall were experiencing a windfall from AI. The sort of administrative bottlenecks we saw in some places during in covid-19 — those could be solved by AI, since we’re stipulating an unlimited supply of digital white-collar workers. Maybe there are further aspects to implementing UBI that would be more complicated than sending people cheques and that couldn’t be assisted by AI. What would those be?
The typical concerns raised over UBI are that it would be too expensive, that it would be poorly targeted (i.e. it would be more efficient to run means-tested programs), that it would discourage people from working, and that it would reduce economic growth. None of those apply to this scenario.
If there’s more complexity in implementing UBI that I’m not considering, surely in this scenario politicians would quickly become focused on dealing with that complexity, and civil servants (and AI workers) would be assigned to the task. As opposed to something like decarbonizing the economy, UBI seems like it could be implemented relatively quickly and easily, given a sudden emergency that called for it and a sudden windfall of cash. Part of the supposed appeal of UBI is its simplicity relative to means-tested programs like welfare and non-cash-based programs like food stamps and subsidized housing. So, if you’re not satisfied with my answer, maybe you could elaborate on why you think it wouldn’t be so easy to figure out UBI in a hurry.
As mentioned up top, I regard this just as an interesting hypothetical, since I think the chance of this actually happening is below 0.01% (1 in 10,000).
Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that the sort of dire outcomes hypothesized under the heading of AI safety or AI alignment do not occur. Let’s assume that AI is safe and aligned, and that it’s not able to be misused by humans to destroy or take over the world.
Let’s also assume that AI won’t be a monopoly or duopoly or oligopoly but, like today, even open source models that are free to use are a viable alternative to the most cutting-edge proprietary models. We’ll imagine that the pricing power of the AI companies will be put in check by competition from both proprietary and open source models. Sam Altman might become a trillionaire, but only a small fraction of the wealth created by AI will be captured by the AI companies. (As an analogy, think about how much wealth is created by office workers using Windows PCs, and how much of that wealth is captured by Microsoft or by PC manufacturers like HP and Dell, or components manufacturers like Intel.)
I’m putting these other concerns aside in order to focus on labour automation and technological unemployment, since that’s the concern you raised.
The specific worries around AI automation people most commonly cite are about wealth distribution, and about people finding purpose and meaning in their lives if there’s large-scale technological unemployment. I’ll focus on the wealth distribution worry, since the topic is UBI, and your primary concern seems to be economic or material.
Some people are also worried about workers being disempowered if they can be replaced by AI, at the same time that capital owners become much wealthier. If they’re right to worry about that, then maybe it’s important to consider well in advance of it happening. Maybe workers should act while they still have power and leverage. But it’s a bit of a separate topic, I think, from whether to start implementing UBI now. Maybe UBI would be one of a suite of policies workers would want to enact in advance of large-scale AI automation of labour, but what’s to prevent UBI from being repealed after workers are disempowered?
For the sake of this discussion, I’ll assume that workers (or former workers) will remain politically empowered, and healthy democracies will remain healthy.
Potlogea, Andrei. “AI and Explosive Growth Redux.” Epoch AI, 20 June 2025, https://epoch.ai/gradient-updates/ai-and-explosive-growth-redux.
Davidson, Tom. “Could Advanced AI Drive Explosive Economic Growth?” Coefficient Giving, 25 June 2021, https://coefficientgiving.org/research/could-advanced-ai-drive-explosive-economic-growth/.
(Even in the roles where it has produced productivity improvements, such as programming, that doesn’t necessarily imply job loss, as companies could get more ambitious with their existing budgets)