AI and Universal Basic Income w/ Joe Williams

Today’s episode does double duty as an interview and an announcement. Joe Williams, host of the new Kairos FM show “Beyond the Paycheck: Reclaiming the Case for UBI in the Age of AI,” joins Jacob to talk about his background as a freelance translator and how AI quietly dismantled his livelihood in 2025. From there the conversation expands into whether this moment is really different from past waves of automation, who exactly makes up the tech billionaire class, and why you should probably raise an eyebrow when someone like Elon Musk says he supports UBI. Go check out Beyond the Paycheck!

Chapters

Links

Historical Precedents

• Josh Steimle blog post - Will AI Destroy Jobs? 500 Years of Predictions Say No
• The Strategy Bridge article - Technological Optimism and the Imagined Future: Implications for Warfare
• History Stack Exchange thread - How Did the Monks Whose Job Was to Copy Books React to Gutenberg’s Printing Press?
• Smithsonian Magazine article - What the Luddites Really Fought Against
• The National Archives (UK) education resource - Why Did the Luddites Protest?
• National Geographic article - Before AI Skeptics, Luddites Raged Against the Machine…Literally
• EBSCO Research Starters reference entry - Sextus Julius Frontinus

Automation and Economic Futures

• John Maynard Keynes essay - Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren
• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Monthly Labor Review article - A Reappraisal of Keynes’s “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren”
• Universal Basic Income in Historical Perspective book chapter - American Cybernation: Technological Upheaval and Guaranteed Income Advocacy in the 1960s United States
• Oxford University working paper - The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation?
• ITIF report - Oops: The Predicted 47 Percent of Job Loss From AI Didn’t Happen
• American Action Forum policy brief - Understanding Job Loss Predictions From Artificial Intelligence

UBI Research and Discourse

• OpenResearch (nonprofit research lab) study page - Unconditional Cash Study
• MIT Media Lab article - The Paradox of Universal Basic Income
• Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence journal article - AI, Universal Basic Income, and Power: Symbolic Violence in the Tech Elite’s Narrative
• Time article - Inside Compton, California’s Universal Income Experiment

Sammy’s Worldcoin Misadventures

• Y Combinator blog post - Basic Income
• Y Combinator blog post - YC Research
• World (formerly Worldcoin) press release - Introducing Worldcoin
• Futurism article - OpenAI Says Not to Worry About UBI, Because It Has Another Idea
• Bloomberg article - Sam Altman-Backed Group Completes Largest US Study on Basic Income
• Time article - What to Know About Worldcoin and the Controversy Around It
• CryptoNews article - Yet Another Controversy Overshadows Worldcoin — What Is It Now?
• BigGo Finance article - AI Tokens as the New Currency? Huang and Altman Outline Vision for “Computing Resource Basic Income”
• Wikipedia page - World (blockchain)