For most of modern history, the link between work and income has held. Artificial intelligence is now testing that link in ways no previous technology has, and it is forcing a question we’ve been able to avoid for a long time: if machines do more of the work, who gets paid?

It’s a question we’ve been thinking about at Social Income from the beginning, because the principle behind a universal basic income is the same principle that drives our work in Sierra Leone today. Every person has a claim on the wealth of the society they belong to. That isn’t a new idea, but it’s becoming an urgent one.

The Wealth Explosion is Already Here

A.I. is concentrating wealth at a speed we’ve never seen before. A handful of companies are capturing trillions of dollars in value, and the pace is accelerating. The technology itself is impressive. The question is what kind of economy it’s building underneath us.

The pattern is not new, even if the speed is. The first industrial revolution made the modern world richer than any generation before it, but the wealth pooled at the top for decades. It took labor movements, painful strikes, and eventually the welfare state to spread the gains. Prosperity didn’t arrive on its own. People had to fight for it to be shared.

A.I. raises the same question, only faster, and at a scale that crosses borders. As a recent piece in The Conversation puts it, even the architects of superintelligent A.I. warn that the technology could concentrate wealth among a small number of companies. When the people building the system are saying so out loud, it’s time to listen.

A New Urgency for an Old Idea

In a recent piece in America Magazine, the Jesuit economist Paul D. McNelis, S.J., reminds us that universal basic income has crossed political lines for over a century. George McGovern campaigned on it in 1972. Milton Friedman defended his own version in the 1960s. Henry George proposed something like it in the 19th century.

What’s new, McNelis argues, is the threat that A.I. could break a cycle that has historically softened the blow of technological change. New technologies displace workers, but eventually create new kinds of jobs for them. With A.I., that second half of the story may not arrive.

“What if the artificial intelligence revolution fails at labor reinstatement? Do we just do nothing in the midst of rising unemployment, sharp increases in poverty and growing despair among large categories of wage-earners?”

McNelis goes further by naming what he calls "the elephant in the room":

“The prospect of a permanently high level of unemployment remains largely unaddressed.”

It’s the harder conversation. Not whether A.I. will write better emails, but whether the economy that emerges on the other side will still have a place in it for most people.

The Old Objections Don’t Hold Anymore

For decades, the case against universal basic income rested on three claims. Each one is wearing thin.

"We can’t afford it." The productivity surplus from A.I. is projected to be the largest in human history. The money is there. The question is what we choose to do with it.

"We can’t deliver it." Mobile money and open-source infrastructure have quietly solved this problem. We send transfers to recipients in Sierra Leone every month, directly to their phones. What was once a logistical challenge is now a plumbing one.

"It won’t work." The evidence keeps coming in, and it keeps pointing the same way. GiveDirectly’s long-running cash transfer programs in Kenya, the Stockton SEED experiment in California, the Finnish basic income trial — across very different contexts, the same pattern emerges. People work. People plan. People build. The fear that "free money makes people lazy" is one of the most thoroughly tested, and disproven, assumptions in modern social policy.

This is what we see every day in Sierra Leone. A mother in Freetown uses her transfer to keep her children in school. A farmer in Kenema reinvests it in his land. The decisions are theirs to make, because they’re the ones who know what their lives need.

The Only Question Left is Will

A universal basic income isn’t a technology problem anymore. It’s a political one and a question of priorities.

The mechanisms exist. A tax on A.I. revenue. Sovereign wealth funds that redistribute the gains of automation. Global giving pledges from the people and companies most enriched by the new technology. Every one of these is workable, but none of them are easy.

Our own answer is small but concrete. Contributors share 1% of their income with us, and that money goes directly, every month, to people living in extreme poverty in Sierra Leone. No middlemen. No conditions. We see it as a small working version of the principle McNelis is arguing for at a national scale: that wealth, however it’s generated, belongs in some basic measure to all of us.

If A.I. delivers on even half of what its champions promise, the coming decade will produce more wealth than any decade in history. Where that wealth lands, in whose pockets and in whose communities, is one of the defining questions of our time.

The future of work is being rewritten right now. The least we can do is make sure no one is written out of it.

Join Us

If the case for a basic income, for the people who need it now and for the new realities A.I. may bring, is one you want to be part of, we’d love to have you with us.

You can become a volunteer or a contributor, share 1% of your income, and help fund a basic income for someone in Sierra Leone, Liberia or Ghana today.