The case for Universal Basic…Service!

Used right, AI can provide enough income for all, but let’s make sure we use the surplus to foster human purpose.

Supervisor, UBS trainee, children. All are training others, formally or not; all are learning!

Right now, everyone - including the AI hyperscalers themselves - is talking about various forms of Universal Basic Income (funded by AI taxes of some kind) as a response to AI’s impact on the US workforce. Yet they are missing the real challenge posed by the widely feared loss of jobs: how humans can secure not just financial sustenance but also identity and meaning. If we do use it right, AI’s productivity can create enough economic value for all. But meanwhile, while we are considering how and whether Universal Basic Income might work, here is an approach that we could and should expand immediately, building on existing affordances: time-limited Universal Basic Service (UBS).

The adoption of UBS would work recursively, both creating, and helping us to recognize and support, the enormous value of human-to-human skills - most directly via better pay, but also with overall recognition by society. It should move us towards a world where the market rewards people for their human contributions, and universal basic insurance (including some safety nets for health care, housing, food, education, and child support) takes care of those who cannot fend for themselves or whom the market has failed. Through UBS, humans would learn what it means to be human, from other humans - skills and attitudes that AI cannot genuinely replace. Additionally, UBS would force people out of whatever bubble they happened to be born into, and give them the opportunity and challenge of collaborating with people they would otherwise never meet.

Right now, we are increasingly focused on efficiency, often supported by AI, and not enough on other valuable goals such as the slow learning and human connection you get from interacting with other people and the joy you get from making someone else happy. That’s what most parents offer to and receive from children, but it also applies to teachers, neighbors, mentors and the like. It’s what used to happen in PTAs, churches, synagogues and mosques, playgrounds, grocery stores, shopping centers, bowling leagues…all over the place. But now, instead of learning from one another in our communities, we are on our phones, scrolling social media, or working with efficient, automated systems that keep us disconnected from other humans. And when we do seek to mingle with others, we often look online to find people like ourselves, instead of peering outside our own bubble.

UBS would do the opposite: It would get participants out of their usual networks and geographies. In the model I imagine, everyone is invited (and as soon as possible required, I hope) to perform two years of service, sometime between the ages of 18 and 23 (the specific details, like age, matter less than the basic idea and principles). Whatever they do would be a full-time job, and should pay enough that they don’t need a side gig. The broad goal here is to invest in worker training, raise wages overall, and establish a higher valuation for human engagement in work; UBS should not be a source of cheap labor in disguise. Whatever the “output” of the service may be, it should also include the inputs of learning and teaching - in other words, human interaction, not paperwork or solo physical labor.

We can begin by scaling long-established programs such as Teach For America (TFA), HeadStart, AmeriCorps (including VISTA), the Peace Corps, Habitat for Humanity and the like alongside the UBS-like US military. Those outfits don’t just send people out into the world to serve - a one-way transaction. They offer supervisors who train the participants how to serve, and to communicate with and train community members (though this latter doesn’t apply to the military). Meanwhile, many go on to make careers in related fields - or even to work as trainers in the services that trained them. For example, says Yasmina Vinci, executive director of the National Head Start Association, which represents Head Start programs and the staff and parents of those programs: “When I was leading what is now Child Care Aware of America, we had a national AmeriCorps grant that placed members in communities across the country to help develop infant and after-school care programs. We tracked their retention rate and found that 64% of them remained in the early childhood field after their two years of service; many used their education stipends to continue their education and earn additional credentials.”

For context: Right now in the US, the overall number of people in these programs is small - about half a million - plus about 1.5 million in the military. (Note that the numbers were higher before COVID and DOGE, especially for Americorps.) There are a bit more than 4 million people in each single-year cohort between 18 and 23, so if each person’s period of service lasted 2 years, that would mean approximately 8 million people (minus those with some reason not to join) would be performing such service at any point in time (though it would take some time to ramp up). Assuming an investment of about $100,000 per year in training and paying the participants, that would cost about $800 billion per year to fundamentally improve the experience and human flourishing across our entire population. (You can imagine your own numbers for permanent UBI and for whom it would be provided, but it would certainly be a much bigger lift and focused only on financial security.)

All these programs teach their members how to serve: how to listen to others, how to model good behavior, how to resolve conflicts, and so much more. In short, members learn how to live. This experience would benefit both the “servers” and the people they serve, and adds value to the world. It would also contribute financially by reducing the current costs of so many deficiencies in people’s lives that lead to poor mental and physical health and ultimately to unemployment, homelessness and the like.

For the rich or otherwise privileged, the basic dynamic of UBS is that you are obliged to share that privilege. You need to move somewhere else and live among people who don’t have that privilege - some of them co-workers and some of them the people you are serving. With luck, and smarts, you’ll learn something, whether it’s about the work itself, the community you work in or the day-to-day reality of people whose lives are different from your own. At worst, you will probably have a boss who is neither sycophantic nor servile. For the much larger number of less- or dis-advantaged, it’s a risk-free way to join a new community, learn on the job, and get training and the ability to operate in a different environment. With luck, you will also meet a peer group of models and mentors, as well as people who need your help. And you will learn the people skills you’ll need in a world that, with luck, will value and pay for them!

Each person’s experience will be unique, but I take some perspective from my own upbringing - which was out of the ordinary and privileged but hardly sheltered. My first real job (more lucrative than 25 cents an hour for babysitting at home) was at the Princeton Public Library, when I was 14. This was the place I had visited so often as a kid; now I was working there, serving patrons mostly just a bit younger than myself, under the watchful eyes of senior librarians who could actually check books in and out. I was restricted to shelving the books, helping kids to find them, and other forms of customer support. I also observed the parents, more closely than when I had been merely a visiting bookworm. There were the parents who insisted that their kids read Jane Austen or Hemingway, while the kids wanted Nancy Drew or Madeleine L’Engle. Some kids complied; others pushed back. And then there were the parents who supported their kids as they picked out history and science books. I loved this job: As a semi-outsider, I was observing how different parents could be from one another - and how differently their kids could react.

There was also my favorite book, which I probably recommended quite a few times: Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine (1958), about Danny and his friend Jay, who programmed the mainframe computer of Danny’s mother’s lodger, one Professor Bullfinch, to do their homework for them! Spoiler alert: They learned a lot more and worked much harder programming the computer than they ever would have actually doing the homework. (Some hint about using AI in there, eh?)

Though the library was outside the even more disconnected bubble of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study - where my father worked and the home of Einstein - it was still in Princeton. I had enjoyed a more radical experience the year before, when somehow I persuaded my parents to let me spend what would have been my freshman year of high school living with the family of a friend of my father’s, in a middle-class suburb just outside London. I shared a bedroom in the attic with one of the three girls (plus one boy) in the family, and attended the local girls’ grammar school. I learned so much living outside my own bubble - far beyond what you can find in textbooks; it wasn’t good or bad, poor or rich, just different. Instead of biking or riding the school bus, I took the Tube (subway) to school. The boy in the family had cerebral palsy and needed care and attention; the free-range living I took for granted at home wouldn’t work for him, and it meant all of us girls paid him special attention. And finally, there was British hardiness: First one down in the morning had to stoke the stove that warmed the kitchen but not much else. I returned home vowing that I would never ever again live in a place without central heating!

What I really learned is what I want everyone to experience in their own way, and which can also be done within the US just by living in a place with sufficiently different demographics or culture. Pretty much everyone thinks their life is “normal” (though not necessarily ideal). In fact, the things you take for granted are often strange and incomprehensible to others. It’s those basic, unquestioned assumptions - of course each of my parents has their own car - that underlie so much misunderstanding. How can you understand something that the other person - someone whose “normal” is taking public transportation or biking everywhere, or three months off in the summer - does not even notice, let alone know how to explain? That’s another fundamental part of this idea: You need to do it elsewhere.

Universal basic service should not be service-work by a few as a gift to some lucky recipients, but rather an activity that’s both an obligation for ourselves and a longer-term gift to and from society.

Of course there would be complications making that transition from a voluntary program to mandatory national service. This post is a prompt, not an answer; one person I’m addressing it to is Molly Kinder, who has written a lot about the impact of AI on jobs and who is now leaving the Brookings Institute think tank to start a do tank. How do you deal with the outliers in both directions? This program should apply to all: both those who have better alternatives than the jobs on offer via UBS (and may suffer from bone spurs), and those who can’t get a decent job and see UBS as a guaranteed stipend and training for a couple of years. And also to the disabled, some of whom may be the most able to benefit from a change of environment, an employer that wants to train them, and a system that wants them to succeed.

Brass tacks

The context in which UBS would operate is complex. The world’s biggest problems right now are intertwined: economic inequality, political polarization, environmental degradation, crumbling healthcare and education. One shared root cause is a divisive, individualistic culture that fosters broad mistrust of others and prevents us from collaborating to solve those problems. People think short-term and only about themselves, and don’t see or understand what they have in common with others. And no one trusts the inscrutable systems (run by inscrutable people, with or without AI) that control us all. UBS could address these dynamics on multiple fronts, helping people see past - and understand or even celebrate - their differences.

More than ever, the coming economy will need humans who know how to interact with other humans. Right now in the US, we have a surplus of young people without good jobs, and an overall deficit of workers in healthcare and education. These roles in particular benefit from people skills that young people have often failed to acquire during school, COVID and endless hours scrolling through social media. A few years of UBS can help them acquire those skills, along with experience and empathy for others unlike themselves.

The market has not worked very well in education and healthcare in particular because these are both areas where the workers do not typically get paid directly by the users, so there’s little direct “quality control.” Nor do they scale; they are not “efficient.” But they are key to human flourishing, even though the value created by these human-centric workers - healthier, happier and more productive humans, both the workers and the people they serve - takes a while to manifest and the long-run benefits are realized by society as a whole: wrong timing, different pockets. Fortunately, now we can use UBS to create and AI to track those long-term benefits. Any thoughtful person, let alone an economist, would argue that people are the country’s fundamental asset; keeping them healthy and educating them well pays off economically over the long run.

Once we have established the value of UBS with some compelling models, we should be able to fund them to spread broadly with general support, though it may be premature to figure out how to set it up in our current political environment. We can start with a non-universal form of Basic Service, which will help us knit our social fabric back together and teach humans how to teach and support other humans. If we can change the culture to recognize the value of human service both to the servers and to the recipients, the political path to spread it will emerge on its own. And then it should reinforce itself.

So, what to do first? As I mentioned above, we can expand the existing programs that right now are underfunded, under-resourced and under-promoted. They are good demonstrations of what works, but hardly critical-mass. Over time, I believe we should make participating in UBS a “normal” experience for all - like military service in Israel, where it is required of both men and women, and in many other countries - but for a wider variety of public service (firefighting, educational services and the like).

And now there’s some hope of serious funding, using those AI taxes and AI philanthropy that people are starting to talk about. This is exactly the way we should be applying those AI riches: investing them in our next generation of humans. Among other things, it might help AI’s public image.

Come on, Elon and Sam and Dario! How about putting a few of your many billions into Teach for America, AmeriCorps VISTA, the Peace Corps, Head Start, Boys and Girls’ Club, ExpandED Schools, Goodwill’s training programs, and a variety of post-incarceration or rehabilitation programs? Fund both the services, and the training of the workers in those services. Meanwhile, everyone, vote for more public spending to train and raise the pay of teachers and healthcare workers, including community health workers and doulas. That would address the affordability crisis - not by keeping prices unsustainably low, but by raising wages.

Is this all just an AI hallucination? Not at all. It is our collective opportunity and obligation to make it come true.

Disclosures: I’m on the board of (and donate to) ExpandED Schools, have donated to a local Boys and Girls Club, and spent two months living in Oujda, Morocco, with my first boyfriend, who was serving as a Peace Corps volunteer. My nonprofit Wellville.net worked with some excellent VISTA volunteers serving nonprofits in Lake County, CA. I also sit on the board of Charity Navigator, which is actively involved in helping donors find the best use for their funds - and their time!