For years, I opposed Universal Basic Income, firmly and reflexively. I treated it as a liberal fantasy — an invitation to idleness, a subsidy for stagnation, a sedative administered by a bloated state. Work, I believed, wasn’t merely how societies functioned but how men and women found meaning. Pay people for nothing, and you dissolve discipline. That was the story. I told it often.
That position no longer survives contact with reality.
Something fundamental has shifted, and pretending otherwise is nothing short of denial. The AI revolution is here, and it’s gutting entire sectors with hurricane force. This isn’t an industrial transition, nor a replay of mechanization or globalization. It is a technological rupture of a different magnitude. Machines replacing not only muscle but cognition itself: judgment, pattern recognition, reasoning. And it’s advancing at a pace that outstrips legislation, labor markets, and political capacity, moving faster than most in government are willing to admit.
The most sobering warning comes from Geoffrey Hinton, one of the architects of modern AI. Hinton hasn’t joined the hype merchants. Instead, he has joined the alarmists. His claim is troubling: AI capability is effectively doubling every seven months. Not every decade. Not every few years. Every seven months.
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