Anthropic CEO says we need to think bigger than a universal basic income if we want to solve the AI inequality problem

Amodei, a former OpenAI employee, launched Anthropic in 2021 with his sister, Daniela, and five other OpenAI colleagues. They believed AI would have a dramatic impact on the world and wanted to build a company that would ensure it was aligned with human values. Amodei described it to Time as a company focused on “public benefit.”

Many in the tech industry have expressed support for universal basic income, a recurring cash payment to all adults in a given population regardless of their wealth or employment status, to mitigate the economic impact of AI. The idea is that it will act as a safety net for individuals whose jobs have been threatened by the technology.

But Amodei thinks that AI will alter society in such a fundamental way that we need to design a more comprehensive solution. “I think in the long run, we’re really going to need to think about how do we organize the economy, and how humans think about their lives?” He doesn’t have the answer, in part, because he believes it needs to be a “conversation among humanity.”

Amodei isn’t the only one thinking beyond universal basic income. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, while a vocal proponent of it, has also proposed the idea of a “universal basic compute.” The idea is that as large language models advance, owning a slice of one will be more valuable than money.