About The Episode
This week we quickly look at how tech is dealing with the coronavirus but mainly focus on Universal Basic Income as a solution to job automation
Transcript
As most people are talking about the coronavirus or COVID-19 and it is certainly on the news enough I thought it would be interesting to look at how the world of technology is reacting to this pandemic on the first part of the podcast where we look at recent relevant technology news.
Tech news Update
Alibaba AI can detect the coronavirus
First off, as one of the main issues is actually detecting the coronavirus, it was interesting to read about Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce website, developing an AI system that can detect the virus within 20 seconds and with 96% accuracy. The problem is that this is done by examining scans of patient’s chests rather than having a much faster applications. However, it does completely beat the normal time of 15 minutes which is what a human needs to examine the 300+ images. It is already being used in over 100 hospitals across China along with other rival AI systems and thousands of infected people have already been diagnosed thanks to the speed of the AI systems.
Again in China there is a robot called Thor-1 that is remotely controlled and can disinfect a 10,000m^2 area in an hour. Although I’ve talked of autonomous guided vehicles being used in hospitals already, Many Chinese hospitals are increasing the deployment of these robots to deliver medicine, communicate with patients, and support nurses in various ways to reduce human contact. More disturbing however are the uses of drones that spray disinfectant from the sky but also patrol public areas to notify officials of whether people are walking around without masks and violating other quarantine rules.
Finally like me, perhaps you have recently had a conference canceled due to the threat of spreading the infection? Well, there is a surge in conferences now being held in virtual rooms and accessible through VR headsets. One example was a Educators in VR Summit which included 100 hours of content and 150 speakers. 6000 people joined over 6 days. The event took 14,000 cars off the road for a week and saved attendees a combined 24 million kilometers of travel. I’ve been thinking that VR could and perhaps even should replace face to face meetings for a while, and perhaps now due to the coronavirus scare a surge in this application might happen.
Anyways, I think it’s clear to see that in a pandemic where human contact leads to constant spread of a virus, our technological tools can become invaluable in helping to deal with the problem….however some are right to argue that it is through technology like planes, that allows the virus to also spread so quickly..
What is UBI?
As mentioned last week, today’s episode will look at the solutions proposed to the automation of jobs or technological unemployment. Though there are some solutions, no other solution has gained so much traction in the public consciousness compared to Universal Basic Income (UBI), so today’s episode will focus exclusively on this, while next week will look at the criticisms raised against it as well as the alternatives to UBI.
UBI can be most simply understood as an unconditional monthly income that is given to individuals whether they work or not, hence the unconditional part of it. It takes many forms, like a partial income, as part of a welfare system, or even as a negative income tax as proposed by the neoliberal economist Milton Friedman. But overall its main goal is to allow individuals and families to provide for their basic needs, which is why it is such a strong fit to the idea of automation because if humans are replaced by technology, the ability to trade one’s labour for income, and one’s ability to survive is ultimately stopped.
UBI is also a highly debated subject with some arguing it should be added to the social systems already in place (like healthcare), whereas others argue all social systems should be replaced by it if it is to be implemented at all. Though a bit out of scope for this episode I plan to have perhaps two future episodes where each side can be fully described as I think both typically have valid points.
Though perhaps most popularised recently by Andrew Yang, the recently withdrawn US democratic presidential candidate, who spent months talking about his Freedom Dividend, UBI has been around as an idea as far back as the 1500’s though presented in works of fiction. The idea was discussed since then by various intellectuals and public speakers such as Thomas Paine and even Martin Luther King Jr, but it wasn’t until the 1960s and 70s that actual pilot projects were implemented in the USA and Canada to test what the impacts would be. Since then, the idea has gained momentum especially in Europe as fears of automation and AI continue while supplemented with more and more examples of the successful projects across the world. So let’s look at a few of these examples to get a sense of what UBI actually does.
UBI examples
Mincome in Canada
As mentioned, Mincome was a UBI project in Canada during the 1970’s that actually ran for 5 years. It remains not only one of the first but also one of the longest large scale projects to date. It’s real goal was to find if a guaranteed income would disincentive recipients to work.
It occurred across various areas in the province of Manitoba but an entire third of a small town Dauphin actually qualified for the subsidy.
The program guaranteed a family’s annual income would never fall below a basic amount. For a family of four, that was about about $16,000 in today’s Canadian dollars. If they did earn some money, the Mincome check kept coming, just at a reduced rate. So, for example, if they earned ten dollars extra, their Mincome check would go down by $5. So working was still rewarded. Unfortunately, a conservative political party came to power in 1979 and stopped the project without having the data of the 3000+ people analysed. It wasn’t until 2008, with the renewed interest in UBI that the information was unboxed and looked at.
Though there was no direct evidence of causal relations between income support and health outcomes the claimed results showed a number of beneficial things:
- Most people receiving the subsidy kept working, but did reduce the amount of work slightly in favour of spending more time with family
- Teenage boys however did stop working, as their families no longer needed another breadwinner.
- Hospitalisations fell by an apparent 8.5%, including for mental health, work-related injuries, and emergency room visits.
India UBI
As a Canadian, I heard of the mincome experiment before many other UBI projects. I was quite interested when I read that a pilot project had also occurred in India as the culture but also level of expenses are quite different compared to Canada.
In 2011 and 2012 two separate programs were undertaken in an underdeveloped state in central India. The first program is more interesting as 20 very similar villages were selected to receive the stipend. In those villages that were selected everyone was given roughly a third of a monthly income for a low income family with zero restrictions, they could essentially spend the money on whatever they wanted.
The results showed quite some improvements for those that were given the stipend:
- Better food security and lower rates of malnutrition in female children were found
- Lower rates of illness, more consistent medical treatment, and more consistent medicine intake
- Productivity rates increased, as children in recipient villages had higher rates of school attendance
- Higher rates of labor and work, especially in self- employed contexts
- No evidence of higher alcohol consumption, alcohol consumption actually decreased
- Households with cash grants were three times more likely to open a new business or take on a new production activity than households that did not receive the cash transfer. These households also decreased their indebtedness and increased their savings
What is interesting here is that the participants knew that the experiment would only last a single year. This is perhaps one of the more difficult things to deal with in these experiments. How can the results be seen to be completely valid when participants know that the income is temporary. This has actually been an argument in favour of UBI as those that argue for UBI claim that the results of all experiments are actually conservative and that if UBI were implemented on a permanent long term basis, the benefits would far surpass what we see in these short term experiments.
Long term payments made in Alaska
Compared to India, Alaska has been paying a partial basic income to all its residents since 1982. Through the Alaska Permanent Fund was created in 1976 through the massive amount of wealth generated from the oil mining of North America’s largest oil field. Some 650,000 people receive the dividend every year. As the dividend is based on the interest of the fund the amount has fluctuated between 300 and 2000$ given out once per year. Though this is clearly not enough for individuals to survive off of and thus cannot constitute a full UBI programme, there has nevertheless been a number of studies to try to show what the effects are, most interestingly:
- There is a small but positive birthweight effect for low income mothers, which extends into childhood and actually finds that for three year olds the fund helps to reduce obesity.
- Especially for the elderly, poverty has been reduced, yet income inequality has grown for the population as a whole
- Though property crime does decrease following the payment, substance abuse increases.
There are many many other pilots that have been conducted to ascertain the benefits and problems of UBI across the world. No national programme has yet been fully implemented though there was a referendum brought up in Switzerland in 2016 but it did not pass. Overall there are consistent positive findings for the low income individuals and families that receive these payments for health, education, work, crime rates, and even entrepreneurialism. Though this episode focused explicitly on the benefits of some UBI projects, next week we will look at some of the criticisms and alternative solutions that have been presented over time.
