According to the Blood in the Machine newsletter, a nonprofit program aimed at relieving the financial hardships of people negatively impacted by AI is issuing payments as of this week. The program is being called the AI Dividend.
For the moment, the small program reportedly involves somewhere between 25 and 50 people receiving $1,000 per month.
AI-related layoffs, along with other negative impacts of AI on jobs, are touchy topics right now. Epic Games, for instance, took pains to say that when it laid off over 1,000 people, the move was not a play to replace workers with AI. At the same time, replacing workers with AI is such a buzzy concept on Wall Street that the concept of “AI washing” layoffs—coined by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman himself—is now in the zeitgeist, referring to the practice of laying off workers to save money for non-AI reasons but then retrofitting an AI explanation onto the strategy as a way of pleasing shareholders.
The very idea of an “AI dividend” is bound to chafe some AI critics as well. Altman has supported the idea of universal basic income (UBI)—the general term for no-strings-attached payments to cover people’s core needs—as a remedy for potential societal damage wrought by the proliferation of AI. He has even funded at least one experiment into the effects of UBI. Altman’s main rival, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, has called UBI “better than nothing,” but also said he would prefer a society where “everyone can contribute.”
Two groups have teamed up on this recent basic income project: What We Will, a general advocacy group for AI-impacted workers, and more the basic income-focused AI Commons Project—itself a subsidiary of the Fund for Guaranteed Income. The organizers told Merchant they hope to expand from $300,000 in funding quickly, with the goal of distributing $3 million by the end of the year with the help of the big AI companies.
Leave a comment