As a futurist I support Andrew Yang for 2020 as the pace of technological change becomes vertical. America will need UBI in the interim. There’s no question about it.
We are in hyper techno capitalism and most Americans are already struggling. UBI is just a short-term solution or a bandaid but we need all the cushion we can get to bounce back into the roaring 2020s as retraining, upskilling and changing attitudes trigger a revolution. It’s naive to think that this revolution will happen overnight and that the market will sort itself out in no time however. It can sort itself out with proper cushion however and changing attitudes toward a redefinition of work and society.
UBI can enable a cushion for Americans to invest more in themselves and join the emerging digital economy and entrepreneurial revolution.
Most current firms will be wiped out in the next 1 or 2 years. After all predictions of the technological singularity still vary but Futurist Gerd Leonhard predicts that it will occur by 2023. According to a Dell Technologies Report 85% of Jobs that will exist in 2030 have not been invented yet and according to Kai-Fu Lee, author of AI Superpowers, 50% of Current Jobs (those that focus on IQ instead of EQ) will be wiped out by Artificial Intelligence (and that’s not counting other exponential technologies such as Quantum Computing) by 2030.
Now I think there are going to be rapid cycles and waves of created and destroyed jobs in the interim and we got to surf the waves really rapidly and carefully or be swept away to shore. But I do think that new jobs that we can’t possibly imagine will be created by convergence in Digital Avatars, 5G, Blockchain and Remote Working Technologies and other exponential technologies.
Nonetheless that’s no time at all to prepare. Alot of people worry about short-term recession threats. But the biggest threat is the macro picture of the technological, demographic, socioeconomic and political tsunami that America is facing.