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A computer can never be held accountable. Therefore a computer must never make a management decision. – From an IBM staff presentation, circa 1979

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I don’t know how closely you’ve been following the developments in Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) lately but it’s been The Next Big Thing in the tech sector for the past few years. Even if you’ve gone out of your way to try to avoid it, it’s being crammed down your apps just as soon as the companies behind them can update them. You’ll have noticed your internet search engines adding “AI summaries” instead of giving you links to the website you want. The call centres you’re trying to navigate through have replaced overworked and underpaid scut-workers with AI chat bots that on a good day eventually pass you through to one of the remaining scut-workers and on a bad day it’ll break in ways that would be hilarious if not for the fact that these bots are being pushed into mission-critical roles too. You might even have noticed the news that Meta wanted to introduce GAI bots that would set up fake profile pages, post fake posts and then be responded to by fake comments from other bots – all in the name of harvesting ad revenue. That plan lasted less than a week, but will be back as soon as we’re distracted by something else.

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“The coronavirus pandemic is exactly the kind of cataclysmic event that brings about drastic changes. I think Medicare For All and UBI are now inevitable. It’s either that, or complete chaos.” – Oliver Markus Malloy

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Techbro Billionaire and founder of OpenAI, Sam Altman, has just concluded one of the longest running Universal Basic Income experiments to date. He launched the project after becoming intrigued albeit unconvinced by the idea (and as accusations grew that tools like his AI could become an increasing threat to jobs) and he made a show of personally funding the scheme that saw 1,000 low income people being paid $1,000 a month plus 2,000 people receiving $50 as a control group. All participants had a household income below 300% of the federal poverty line (the limit below which people start to qualify for federal low income support – the various thresholds can be found here) and the average household income of participants was $29,000 (approx £22,500 as of current exchange rates).

The results of the study have been overwhelmingly positive and entirely in line with other studies of UBI.

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The Common Green

Dr Craig Dalzell

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DeepSunk Costs