For the last couple of years, the tech community has tested no-strings-attached payments of $500 or $1,000 a month to those in dire need. Some of these experiments have happened in the heart of Silicon Valley, where a one-bedroom apartment rents for $3,000 a month and a modest house is often an unaffordable luxury.
Silicon Valley’s backing of these efforts has propelled the idea of a guaranteed income — also known as cash transfers, unconditional cash and, in its most utopian form, universal basic income — into the mainstream. But a bipartisan political consensus around the movement is fracturing even though the data seems to show that the programs are effective.
In recent months, the Texas attorney general went to court to prevent public funds from being used in a basic income program in Houston. Republicans in Iowa, Idaho and South Dakota banned similar programs. A ban in Arizona was vetoed by the governor.
The movement has scored a few victories, too. A proposal for a statewide basic income program is likely to be on the ballot in Oregon this fall. The measure would give $750 to each state resident annually, funded by a 3 percent tax on corporations with revenue over $25 million.
It is a critical moment for guaranteed income, which has been touted by the OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman, the Tesla chief executive Elon Musk, the Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, the Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff and others.
On Monday, the results from the biggest direct income program to date, the Unconditional Income Study, will be released. The study was the idea of Mr. Altman, who has emerged as the chief cheerleader of a boom in artificial intelligence that, he says, will sweep away all that came before it. Anyone whose job can be done by A.I. software might need a guaranteed income by and by.
“It’s impossible to truly have equality of opportunity without some version of guaranteed income,” Mr. Altman said in 2016 when he announced the effort to gather data about a policy that had not been rigorously tested. Critics wondered if recipients would blow the funds on lottery tickets and booze.
Dozens of pilot programs that took fewer years than the Unconditional Income Study have since answered that question. Basic income is not a panacea, and it does not solve the problem of unaffordable housing, proponents said, but the payments have helped to stabilize families who live on the edge, preventing them from tumbling off.
While they welcomed Mr. Altman’s study, the issue for members of the basic income community has shifted to establishing the programs on a wider scale. The time for research, they say, is over.
“This country is on fire, Mr. Altman,” said Jennifer Loving, who runs Destination: Home, a nonprofit that administers basic-income pilot programs in Silicon Valley. “Some people in America are becoming rich, and many, many more are becoming poor. What is your responsibility in bridging that divide rather than making it worse?”
Mr. Altman, who is one of those becoming rich, declined to be interviewed before his report is released. Ms. Loving has a few ideas for what he and other tech leaders should do then.
“I’d like to see Silicon Valley use its access to power to lobby for guaranteed income so the federal government will do it at scale,” she said. “The government is ultimately responsible, but tech must be a partner.”
Others think Silicon Valley has a more forceful role to play. Technology companies have created trillions of dollars of wealth over the last quarter century. If A.I. fulfills its hype, it will make trillions more while pushing down wages or eliminating many jobs altogether.
“Although all wealthy people and corporations should support a universal basic income, the tech industry has special responsibilities,” said Karl Widerquist, a philosophy professor at Georgetown University in Qatar who has been a co-author and an editor of books on the topic. “They’re using our data to create their products and haven’t paid us back. And they’re the ones saying they’ll disrupt the economy and put people out of work.”
A handful of tech people have played outsize roles in bringing basic income this far. Mr. Dorsey made a $15 million commitment to fund programs at the height of the pandemic. Chris Hughes, a Facebook co-founder, has also been a prominent promoter. He helped to start the Basic Income Lab at Stanford University in 2017 and has funded several pilot programs.
“I talk to people about philanthropy and how to make change in the world, but not many are tech people,” Mr. Hughes said, adding that he hasn’t been in Silicon Valley in years, and the people there don’t seek him out.
Michael Tubbs is a former mayor of Stockton, Calif., which started a guaranteed income pilot in 2019, and the founder of a group called Mayors for a Guaranteed Income. “I’ve approached dozens of folks in Silicon Valley,” he said. “I get polite interest and no movement.”
In Santa Clara County, Calif., which includes the communities of Palo Alto, Mountain View and Cupertino — the heart of Silicon Valley — a public-private partnership of local governments and nonprofits like Destination: Home have nine pilot programs either running or being developed, with 950 people getting around $1,000 a month. About a third of the $26 million budget comes from the tech community, including Google.org, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation and, indirectly, Cisco and Apple.
The budget for Mr. Altman’s study was $60 million. He hired Elizabeth Rhodes, a scholar with a joint doctorate in social work and political science, to run the effort, set up an affiliate called OpenResearch to house it and spent $14 million of his own money to fund it.
Another $10 million came from OpenAI, $15 million from Mr. Dorsey’s public fund for global Covid relief and $6.5 million from Sid Sijbrandij, a founder of the GitLab open source software platform. The rest came from foundations, federal grants and personal and anonymous donations. (The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement.)
In 2019, after some preliminary work, OpenResearch began enrolling 3,000 people in Texas and Illinois who had annual incomes of less than $28,000. A third received $1,000 a month; the others, who functioned as a control group, got $50. The program lasted three years.
Among the topics the experiment aimed to investigate was how unconditional cash shapes behavior, including its ability to affect stress levels and raise hopes for a better future. With increased financial security, some people might take a lower-paying job they like better or increase their participation in society by, say, volunteering. Others could go back to school or sign up for additional training.
Mr. Benioff, who co-founded the software company Salesforce in 1999, has long been critical of the tech community’s philanthropic efforts. “Silicon Valley is good at building products and building companies and hiring lots of people, but it has a long way to go on social responsibility,” he said in a text message.
In 2019, Mr. Benioff and his wife, Lynne, gave $30 million to fund the Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative at the University of California, San Francisco, which is studying basic income programs. He said basic income programs should be led by the government, although he also said any new programs would be “in direct conflict with the huge deficits and entitlements our government is already supporting.”
Told that he was simultaneously arguing that Silicon Valley should do more and that it was really the government’s job but that the government was overburdened, Mr. Benioff responded by texting a link to the Wikipedia page for capitalism.
Silicon Valley’s zeal for all things A.I., just like its enthusiasm a few years ago for all things related to crypto and the blockchain, is capitalism unleashed. A few years ago, none of the top tech companies had market capitalizations of more than $1 trillion. Now, on the strength of A.I., Microsoft is worth $3.4 trillion; Google, $2.3 trillion; and the chipmaker Nvidia, $3.1 trillion.
Some people in the basic income movement are worried that it might become “a Trojan horse” for A.I., as Juliana Bidadanure, the former director of the Stanford Basic Income Lab, puts it.
“Is Silicon Valley pushing basic income as a way to make the state smaller? To replace all the other safety nets? A way to accelerate A.I.?” Ms. Bidadanure asked. “Personally, I think that unemployment due to A.I. is one important reason to build a robust floor through a universal basic income. But it is one reason among many.”
Another reason basic income backers may not be able to rely on Silicon Valley is that the tech industry’s support may prove fickle. Mr. Musk said in 2018 that “universal income will be necessary over time if A.I. takes over most human jobs.” But in November he said: “We won’t have universal basic income. We’ll have universal high income.” He didn’t explain the difference.
In a podcast interview in May, Mr. Altman said he wondered “if the future looks more like universal basic compute than universal basic income.”
In other words, people will get computing time rather than cash, and Silicon Valley — or perhaps just OpenAI — would take dominion everywhere.