"The human promise of the AI revolution," 14 September 2018

Looming before us in the coming decades is an AI-driven crisis of jobs, inequality and meaning. The new technology will wipe out a huge portion of work as we’ve known it, dramatically widening the wealth gap and posing a challenge to the human dignity of us all... [However,] [i]f handled with care and foresight, this AI crisis could present an opportunity for us to redirect our energy as a society to more human pursuits: to taking care of each other and our communities... AI’s main advantage over humans lies in its ability to detect incredibly subtle patterns within large quantities of data and to learn from them... [T]his allows AI to take over countless tasks across society... lead[ing] to massive increases in productivity... This is great news for those with access to large amounts of capital and data. It’s very bad news for anyone who earns their living doing soon-to-be-replaced jobs... There are, however, limits... [I]n the world of robotics, AI is able to handle many crude tasks like stocking goods or driving cars, but it lacks the delicate dexterity needed to care for an elderly person or infant.

We can’t know the precise shape and speed of AI’s impact on jobs... but [t]his will not be... a process that inevitably arrives at a new equilibrium of more jobs, higher wages and better quality of life for all... Instead of simply falling back on an economic painkiller like a universal basic income, we should use the economic bounty generated by AI to double down on what separates us from machines: human empathy and love... At the center of this vision... there needs to be what I call the Social Investment Stipend, a respectable government salary for those who devote their time to... care work, community service and education. These activities would form the pillars of a new social contract, rewarding socially beneficial activities just as we now reward economically productive activities.