People Prefer Jobs to UBI

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What to Know: People Want Jobs, Not UBI

Chief executives warn that artificial intelligence may soon be able to perform many of the duties that white-collar workers currently carry out as part of their roles — and could lead to the highest unemployment rates recorded in living memory.

Universal basic income is frequently promoted as a partial solution to that type of crisis: a guaranteed regular payment from the government to all citizens to make up for lost wages.

But a new global survey, which collected responses from more than 1,000 people across 60 countries, points to widespread skepticism about UBI. When offered a hypothetical choice between guaranteed jobs or guaranteed income, 52% of respondents stated they would rather live in a world where employment is guaranteed. Only 39% said they would prefer guaranteed income, while 9% reported no preference.

“This should be a wake-up call for everyone working in AI that the public is not sharing in the successes of this technology,” says Gina Neff, executive director of the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy at the University of Cambridge, who was not part of the research. “People have more faith in their ability to improve their circumstances through work than they do that the AI economy will deliver a good, steady income for them.”

The survey — shared exclusively with TIME ahead of its public release on Tuesday — was carried out by the Windfall Trust and the Collective Intelligence Project, two nonprofits that stated their goal is “to kickstart conversations about how we can all make sure the benefits of the widely predicted ‘AI boom’ reach the people who need them most.”

The survey also found that 40% of respondents believed their job was likely to be automated within 10 years, while only 21% thought their job should be automated over that same period.

The results “highlight how central work has long been to organizing our societies, how we find meaning, build connections, define our purpose, and structure our daily lives — all of these things center around formal paid employment,” Neff says. “One question this survey raises is, if the AI transition ends up reducing the number of available jobs, we will need to figure out how people will access that sense of purpose instead.”

Who to Know: Walter Goodwin

Chip manufacturer Nvidia has a staggering 55.8% profit margin, according to the company’s financial reports, meaning that for every dollar of revenue it brings in, $0.55 is pure profit. That figure is among the highest across all industries, and as a result, a growing number of competitors are lining up to challenge its market position.

One of those competitors is Fractile: a UK-based chipmaker that expects to send its first chip into production later this year. Fractile is operating on the premise that the more data an AI model can process while running, the more capable it will be. The company says it has completely redesigned a specialized inference chip from scratch to have roughly 100 times more on-chip memory than rival offerings, while also delivering faster speeds at a lower cost.

Fractile’s CEO, Walter Goodwin, argues that Nvidia is facing an “innovator’s dilemma” — a concept describing how large firms can become trapped in inefficient operating patterns, leaving them open to disruption by smaller, more agile startups. Nvidia’s proprietary software is widely described as its competitive moat. “But moats can hold you inside just as much as they keep others out,” Goodwin tells TIME. He argues that Nvidia is required to keep its chips compatible with older generations of products, which stops the company from making the structural memory changes he says are needed to unlock better performance.

Fractile’s upcoming chip is “the only solution, in our view, to this challenge of running large, long-context models much, much faster,” Goodwin says.

Nvidia, naturally, rejects the claim that it faces an innovator’s dilemma. “Workload requirements are evolving constantly,” CEO Jensen Huang said during an analyst call in January. “Nvidia is always the right choice for every use case, because we are flexible… We excel at almost everything.”

AI in Action

Dozens of civil society groups signed an open letter published on Tuesday urging Meta to abandon its plan to add facial recognition functionality to its AI-powered Ray-Ban smart glasses.

“Integrating facial recognition into Meta’s smart glasses is a dangerous and reckless plan that will harm both users and the general public, even people who do not use Meta products,” the letter reads. “This move will put everyone at risk, and will specifically provide new tools to scammers, blackmailers, stalkers, child abusers and authoritarian regimes.”

What We’re Reading

The Decadelong Feud Shaping the Future of AI, by Keach Hagey in the Wall Street Journal

Read it for the insider account of the long-running rift between Sam Altman and Dario Amodei. Stick around for charming details like this: “When they lived together in a group house, Dario, Daniela [Amodei] and [Holden] Karnofsky shared both a deep commitment to AI safety and a love of playful, whimsical moments. Daniela was so fond of her stuffed animal collection that Karnofsky proposed to her with a short film where the dolls came to life. Dario wore a panda costume to the couple’s costume party-themed wedding.”