Could UBI help in a time of job disruptions from AI?

What would you do if you were guaranteed about $1,300 a month for an entire year? Would you put it towards groceries? Maybe splurge on something you've always wanted but could just never afford to do? The concept of guaranteed basic income, also known as universal basic income, has gained a lot of traction in the age of artificial intelligence.

For a year, The New York Times followed recipients of such payments who were part of pilot programs in the San Francisco Bay Area, which received funding from Google. Eli Tan is one of the reporters who worked on the story. He recently joined “Marketplace Morning Report” host Kimberly Adams. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Kimberly Adams: The concept of guaranteed or universal basic income isn't new. Academics have been talking about this for decades. Why is Silicon Valley taking an interest right now?

Eli Tan: Well, there's a lot of talk about how artificial intelligence is going to potentially change the job market, and if a lot of jobs are going to be replaced or become obsolete because of AI, and one of the solutions that a lot of these AI leaders are pitching is that they'll have to give people some kind of basic income to get people through what could be some potentially big disruptions to the labor market.

Adams: What drew you to the story in particular?

Tan: Well, I grew up in Seattle, and my dad, you know his whole career he spent in the social services world. And growing up, I had gone on a lot of these home visits with him and kind of seen what this world of social services looked like. When I heard about the AI leaders kind of pitching this idea of like, "Oh, we'll expand this welfare system to help everyone," I just kind of thought, you know, "This is so much more complicated than I think most people know." And part of what I wanted to do in the story just kind of bring readers into a world that I think a lot of people just don't really know what it's like for people that are living on this kind of assistance.

Adams: In your reporting, one of the program's recipients, Ms. Weeks, not only supported herself and her child, but also her mother and sister as well. Can you share more about her journey with the program?

Tan: Yeah, so she went on the program. She had a toddler — a 14-month-old son named Sky — and around two months into the program, her grandpa actually, who was living in Tennessee, he passed away. And her mom and sister, who had been living with her grandpa, they were looking for a place to live, and they said, "Well, why don't we move to Santa Cruz, California, where Miss Weeks was living?" And you know, thanks to this money, she thought, in part, she could make it work. So within three months of starting this program, not only was she supporting her son with the payments, but she was also helping her mother and sister who had moved in and were living on an air mattress and her couch for the next few months while she was also enrolled in community college. So it was a lot of change happening at once.

Adams: What's your takeaway in terms of how effective these programs are?

Tan: The people we followed, they were able to take their kids to a birthday party at an amusement park for the first time. They were able to go out to dinner and get whatever they wanted on the menu — just little things that really don't show up anywhere in economic data, but to me, kind of made all the difference in these people's lives for the year.