How to Pay for a Life of Abundance in a World Without Work

Elon Musk and others are calling for a universal high income as AI job losses accelerate. Think-tank founder and CEO Daniel Schreiber has a plan for funding it.

What if artificial intelligence took your job, and you still took home upwards of $60,000 every year?

That’s the essential promise of an idea gaining traction among AI thinkers who believe the technology’s growth will lead to high productivity and a dramatic decline in work for humans. Universal high income is an elevated twist on universal basic income and has been described by Elon Musk as “the best way” to address AI-related unemployment.

High-income payments may not be rolled out anytime soon, but as AI’s impact on the jobs market starts to take hold, decision-makers are starting to pay attention.

Daniel Schreiber is taking a practical approach to the debate. The think-tank founder and insurance executive has created an economic model — even using ChatGPT and Claude to do so — designed to redistribute the wealth generated by AI. While bankers dismissed the ideas in private meetings as communist, he has also testified at Israeli parliamentary subcommittees.

“I don’t think there’s anything automatic about a happy ending when it comes to AI,” said Schreiber, 55, whose MOSAIC AI Policy Institute is based in Jerusalem.

Universal basic income is where the state provides regular flat payments to citizens to help cover fundamental human needs. Universal high income, however, imagines a world in which AI and robots create so many goods and services that everyone is afforded a life of abundance without the need to work.

Under Schreiber’s model, high-income payments would be financed through taxes on business production and sovereign wealth fund profits, among other sources, then redistributed by the government.

Schreiber is a champion of AI and expects it to drive economic growth along with universal access to top-class education, medical care and legal advice. As chief executive officer of insurance company Lemonade Inc., he has also seen the business benefits of AI. Using the technology in pricing policies and handling claims has helped boost revenues and customer numbers — all with fewer staff.

But Schreiber worries that, left unchecked, AI will lead to widespread unemployment, greater inequality and poverty.

He pointed to the 2023 Hollywood writers’ strike as a warning of the kind of disruption AI can cause. Once mass layoffs start to kick in, he said, even individuals motivated by growth — or greed — will have to consider how to “neutralize the resistance” that arises.

Whichever side you fall on, the debate over AI’s impact is becoming increasingly heated.

Earlier this week, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders proposed creating an AI sovereign wealth fund that would give the public a stake in America’s largest AI companies and a means to benefit from the “trillions of dollars potentially generated.” OpenAI’s Sam Altman has advocated for universal basic income and more recently for what he describes as “universal basic compute,” which involves expanding access to AI resources, while Anthropic’s Dario Amodei has warned that AI could wipe out half of entry-level roles in the coming years.

In South Korea, one of the frontrunners in the AI race, stocks were roiled in recent weeks after a presidential adviser mused on social media that AI-driven tax revenues could be used to fund a dividend for citizens. Pope Leo XIV has weighed in, saying that current approaches to the technology can “de-skill workers.” Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s CEO and Apollo Global Management Inc.’s chief economist have downplayed concerns.

Andrew Yang, who helped popularize the basic-income concept during his 2020 Democratic presidential bid, said he’s encouraged that Schreiber’s model is getting attention. The two met in New York recently.

“What I love is that this has already left the intellectual exercise stage,” he said in a telephone interview. “There’s actual engagement with senior policy makers.”

High Productivity

Cash-transfer programs have been around for decades. There have been more than 200 projects in the US alone, according to the Stanford Basic Income Lab, while countries including Iran and Finland have experimented with their own models.

The outcomes of these programs remain a matter of debate. Advocates say cash transfers can reduce poverty, improve mental health and boost employment, although those who back the concept don’t consistently agree on how payments should actually work. Critics, including a broad swathe of conservatives, argue handouts are costly and discourage people from working. Still, AI-driven wealth redistribution crosses some traditional economic and political lines: After all, it’s rare to find an ideological overlap between Sanders and Musk.

Musk talked about universal basic income as a response to automation as early as 2016, before calling in 2023 for “universal high income, not basic, in a positive AI future.” He recently posted on his social media platform, X, that the federal government should issue universal high-income checks to address AI-driven unemployment. Schreiber — who said he’s only interacted with Musk on X — disagreed, saying that printing the necessary amount of money would trigger inflation. Musk didn’t respond to requests for comment.

In Schreiber’s view, what distinguishes AI-driven unemployment from past periods of joblessness is that while workers lose their roles, their jobs get done better and faster by technology. That could ultimately lead to mass unemployment existing side-by-side with high productivity.

“That was the opening to [considering] how we could fund a salary for everybody,” he said.

Growing Abilities

London-born Schreiber started his career as a corporate lawyer, before leadership stints at various technology companies. He has been tracking AI for the past decade or so, after attending Singularity University, a Silicon Valley institute offering education on futurism, in 2015.

He started his think tank in 2024. The institute has hired economists, data analysts and policy experts and his board includes several former Israeli government officials, including the previous head of AI at the prime minister’s office.

His high-income payments model, detailed in a 38-page paper published this year, is focused on Israel. It calls for a value-added tax on production and a portion of the surplus profits generated by AI to be set aside for redistribution. That money would fund a “poverty‐ending” income of about 6,750 shekels ($2,320) a month per adult, according to the report. That’s the equivalent of a lower-middle-class wage.

Other sources of cash such as estate taxes and sovereign wealth fund returns could result in monthly payments of 15,000 shekels, lifting people into the country’s top quartile, according to the report.

“A future where everybody is privileged,” Schreiber said, adding that the model is best suited to nations with technologically advanced economies in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation & Development.

Josh Bivens, chief economist at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, DC is in favor of redistribution but said Schreiber’s unemployment projections are more extreme than most and that his framework seems to ignore the prospect of shrinking demand for goods and services.

“The model takes as given that output can be sustained while labor collapses,” Bivens said. “From a supply-side perspective, maybe, but I don’t see how that would work with demand.”

Rachel Greszler, senior research fellow at Advancing American Freedom, a conservative policy group, said that if a middle-class lifestyle required no work, fewer people would do it while others earned more from scarcer labor. That could fuel resentment towards wealthy workers and non-workers alike, she said. Ultimately, she said, universal high income “would fall apart economically and socially, resulting in a smaller economy and greater inequality.”

However, Peter Diamandis, the founder of the X Prize Foundation and an early investor in Lemonade who has discussed universal high income with Musk, is more positive. In his view, Schreiber’s model is “an elegant solution to what’s been a political dead end for years.”

Canary in the Coalmine

Schreiber said he hopes his forecasts are proven wrong. He acknowledges that humanity has largely come out ahead in past technological disruptions, including the industrial revolution.

But while that period resulted in broad prosperity, governments had to intervene with labor and safety laws, he said, and globalization left places like the US Rust Belt behind.

High-income payments may seem like a radical proposition, he said, but other policies once deemed unthinkable, such as universal healthcare and education, have become mainstream in some parts of the world.

In Schreiber’s view, finding a way to widely share the benefits of AI is only becoming more pressing. Citing the proverbial canary in the coalmine, he said: “My canary just died.”