Hey there, it's Stephen Dubner.

Over the past several years, artificial intelligence has gone from something you read about,

to something you encounter once in a while, to something that many of us use every day.

But a lot of people find it off-putting, even frightening.

One fear is that the more useful AI gets, the more it will displace

human workers. Companies like Amazon and Ford and J.P. Morgan are talking about reducing their

workforce since the AIs can do some of the work at a fraction of the cost of human employees.

We have made several episodes that touch on this, including a 2023 series called

How to Think About AI, guest hosted by Adam Davidson, and an episode from last October

called What Do People Do All Day? The fear that technology will replace human labor is nothing

new. In fact, it comes up in just about every generation. There is also a

proposed solution to this problem that comes up again and again. A guaranteed basic income is what

some people call it. And we made an episode about that way back in 2016, years before anyone had

heard of chat GPT. The idea was having a moment then, and now, thanks to the AI boom, it's having another moment.

So I wanted to replay that episode for you today.

We have gone through and updated facts and figures as necessary.

We'll begin with the economist Eric Brynjolfson, who was at MIT when we spoke back then, but has since moved to

Stanford. Here's how Bryn Yolfsson describes the central problem. We're now beginning to have

machines be able to augment and automate our brains and replace mental tasks. Machines can do

computations and make decisions.

And we're still in the early stages of this,

but we believe that the implications will be at least as profound

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