The futurist vision behind AI and UBI assumes that once material scarcity is reduced, human flourishing will naturally follow.
I am not convinced that is true.
Human beings do not merely need resources. They need meaning, responsibility, contribution, structure, and purpose. Throughout history, work has provided far more than income. It has provided identity, discipline, social connection, competence, and a sense of usefulness.
Even if AI eventually creates enough abundance to support some form of universal income, that does not answer the deeper question of what people are supposed to do with themselves afterward.
And even before we reach that philosophical problem, there is the practical reality that large-scale systems require enormous coordination between governments, corporations, financial institutions, and voters who rarely agree on anything for very long.
In theory, UBI sounds simple:
“Just distribute the wealth generated by automation.”
In practice, that requires herding more cats than humanity has ever successfully herded before.
The Source
I recently watched this Vishen Lakhiani video:
He attended one of Peter Diamandis’ events and got permission to share the vision presented.
The vision as simplistic as I can make it is that AI and robotics will automate most human functions and drive the cost of production very low. The human work week will will be reduced to one or two days. Through consolidating government programs like Medicare and Social Security, they’ll be able to provide a UBI (Universal Basic Income) to everybody of $3000 a month, but the cost of everything will be so low we’ll all live prosperously on that amount.
The Expanse.
I’ve read all nine Expanse novels and seen all six seasons of the show that SyFy killed after three seasons (because they’d rather make room for ghosts and wrestling) but Amazon rescued the show and produced three more seasons. In The Expanse universe, most of humanity is on a welfare known as “Basic”. Some people win a lottery and are able to leave the planet and work jobs in space, but this isn’t available to most. That’s what this makes me think of, and I do not desire that kind of existence.
The Reality
I think some of the predictions are accurate, specifically about the disruption AI will cause, and maybe even some of the prosperity and leisure it will provide. Some jobs will be automated away and some will change. Others will remain unaffected (trades). I have no dispute with the technical part of things.
AI will also likely create new jobs that nobody sees coming. For instance, somebody will have to set the policies AI follows along with guardrails. Much like the car eliminated buggy whip manufacturers but created jobs for mechanics, AI will follow a similar path.
One prediction I am genuinely excited about is AI doctors.
Imagine never having to sit in a waiting room again because no doctor on Earth can consistently honor appointment times. Then the doctor finally comes in, already thinking about the next twenty patients while trying to document everything in real time. If you forgot an important question or need time to process the answer, you are often stuck waiting until the next appointment.
An AI doctor changes that dynamic completely.
You could access it at any time. You could walk away from the conversation, think about the information, research something, and come back later to continue. You could even challenge it:
“But Dave Asprey says…”
That part actually excites me.
Not because I think AI should fully replace human doctors, but because it could finally give patients something modern healthcare rarely provides: time, attention, and continuity of thought.
As for the work week, I don’t think we’ll see much reduction anytime soon, and UBI will probably remain a dream of tech utopians a lot longer than they predict.
Too Many Cats To Herd
One reason I remain skeptical of UBI timelines is that they assume institutions adapt rationally and efficiently.
My own experience says otherwise.
I’ve believed for years that the modern work model is largely obsolete for knowledge work. We still expect people to wake up, drive to a building, sit in assigned spaces for eight or nine hours, and then drive home, even when much of the work could be done more flexibly and often more effectively elsewhere.
Yet despite years of studies, experiments, and real-world examples, many organizations continue pushing for centralized in-person work because institutions resist change long after the original conditions that created them disappear.
The same applies to work hours themselves. Much of our modern schedule is still inherited from industrial-era assumptions built around factories and physical labor. Knowledge work does not function the same way. Ideas do not arrive on command between 8 AM and 5 PM.
If organizations struggle this much to modernize remote work policies, I have a hard time believing they will smoothly coordinate a complete restructuring of labor, entitlement systems, taxation, and wealth distribution across society.
That is an entirely different level of complexity.
The Cats That Will Never Be Herded
As soon as I heard the part about combining Social Security and Medicare, I knew this is not going to happen. Large bureaucratic systems tend to accumulate overlapping programs, administrative layers, and competing incentives over time. Streamlining them sounds simple in theory, but in practice every program develops constituencies, dependencies, political protections, and institutional inertia.
That makes large-scale simplification extraordinarily difficult.
This plan also assumes robotics and automation will drive prices to the floor. But we’re seeing how much money it takes to build and run a data center. Communities are fighting against data centers because of the noise and increases in water and electric costs. Nobody wants that. There is a plan to put a data center across the street from my neighborhood. Screw that. Build it in a desert somewhere. I already have to run brown noise at night to cover highway and construction noise that keeps me awake. I don’t need infrasound and that constant low frequency hum.
We’re also seeing a lot of businesses scale back from using AI because of token cost or the realization that some things require a human in the loop.
Once the AI bubble pops, funding for data centers will dry up. I don’t think this timeline is going to be as fast and sure as they assume.
Then you have to trust the Federal Reserve not to inflate the currency away. Even if we hit a point where $3000 a month leads to a prosperous existence, that will change within a few years as the dollar loses more value due to constant printing. I sure don’t trust a government, or even a billionaire tech bro, to decide how much I should have to live on.
Money Isn’t the Meaning of Life
We all need money to survive. Modern life is expensive, and every adult understands the endless list of obligations required simply to exist:
- housing
- transportation
- insurance
- utilities
- food
- healthcare
- taxes
But human beings do not live on consumption alone.
Work provides more than income. It provides structure, responsibility, competence, discipline, social connection, and a sense that we are contributing something meaningful beyond ourselves.
That is one reason retirement is often psychologically difficult, especially for men. Many people imagine endless leisure will naturally produce happiness, only to discover that entertainment is not the same thing as purpose.
The futurist vision of AI and UBI often assumes that once material needs are met, human flourishing automatically follows.
I suspect reality is more complicated.
A civilization can subsidize income. It is much harder to subsidize meaning.
And if AI eventually reduces the economic need for large amounts of human labor, the real crisis may not be financial at all. It may be existential.
What happens when millions of people no longer believe they are needed?
