Study: Universal income helps job seekers
San Francisco software company OpenAI spent the last three years quietly helping fund a program that handed out up to $1,000 a month to low-income Americans, one of the largest studies ever conducted on the impact of universal basic income.
Some AI researchers and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman have for nearly a decade worried that artificial intelligence technology they are developing could one day be good enough to make many knowledge workers, even coders, obsolete — raising the question of how people would support themselves.
To better understand the ramifications of continuing its work, OpenAI funded an academic study that gave monthly cash to 3,000 people in Texas and Illinois whose households earned an average of $30,000 per year in 2019. The study period ran from November 2020 through October 2023.
One group of 1,000 people received $1,000 per month, while the control group of 2,000 people received $50 per month. No conditions were placed on how to use the cash.
Recipients of the larger
amount were more likely to look for new work, and the study suggested the new source of income meant participants were able to be more selective about the jobs they applied for. Researchers found that the participants who got the most money said the income they earned from other sources fell by about $1,500 a year. They also worked slightly less each week and spent more time on leisure activities.
That is in contrast to previous studies that found doling out
cash had little effect on labor market participation while improving health and educational outcomes, especially among young people.
One closely watched experiment run by the city of Stockton previously gave 125 randomly selected low-income people $500 per month for five years. That smaller study found employment increased among participants, along with improved metrics around health and wellbeing.
Researchers in the OpenAIfunded
study found that overall, “our results suggest a moderate labor supply effect that does not appear offset by other productive activities.” In other words, participants worked a little less and in some cases spent time finding the right job, but did not go about doing things like starting businesses of their own.
The study also looked at health data, including blood samples taken from some participants. Researchers said they found “essentially no evidence of improvements in physical health due to the transfers and again can rule out even small improvements.”
Dozens of guaranteed basic income experiments have been conducted across the country, many in California, according to the Stanford Basic Income Lab.
This study, with its larger sample size, was run by OpenResearch, a nonprofit that while not a part of OpenAI, came out of the startup accelerator Y Combinator when Altman was its president.
OpenResearch has since received more than $20 million from Altman and OpenAI’s nonprofit arm. Private donors including Sid Sijbrandij, the cofounder and CEO of GitLab, and retired basketball star and recently hired Los Angeles Lakers head coach JJ Redick also funded the study. Some aspects were also funded by the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, according to OpenResearch.
Altman is not the only techie to float the idea of a universal basic income brought on by their innovations, with the idea predating the current AI boom.
In 2017, Tesla CEO Elon Musk told the World Government Summit in Dubai, “I think ultimately we will have to have some kind of universal basic income, I don’t think we are going to have a choice.” Musk, an early OpenAI funder, has launched an AI company of his own called xAI.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, whose company makes the Llama family of AI bots, praised the idea in a commencement speech at his alma mater in 2017.
Some AI researchers have suggested a pause to continued development of the increasingly capable technology, warning of its “profound risks to society and humanity.”