For the past 8 years, an experimental project funded through billionaire OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman has quietly tested a utopian idea: what would happen if you earned loose money, regularly and with no strings attached?
“Universal fundamental income” was one of the first concepts studied through OpenResearch, a think tank connected to OpenAI to which Altman personally contributed tens of millions of dollars in a crusade to shape a long term that he considered inevitably interrupted by synthetic intelligence. Today, the task releases the results of an extensive trial that donated a total of $45 million to thousands of people across the United States, in what he called “the most comprehensive study” ever conducted on guaranteed income.
The study locations were shared today in two papers published through the National Bureau of Economic Research. This is the first in a series of trials OpenResearch plans to publish, and it details a three-year trial in which 3,000 participants from Texas and Illinois were randomly decided to get a monthly stipend of $1,000 or $50. The goal of the survey is to find out how our lives would change if we got a small unconditional allowance. Their initial findings reveal that other people who earned this money tended to spend it on basic needs, health care, and helping others. Future articles will cover topics such as children, mobility, crime, and politics.
Throughout the trial, the researchers collected data from telephone and online surveys, interviews, and time diaries, as well as third-party resources, such as school records and credit reports. They also took blood from volunteer participants to track changes in certain fitness biomarkers. Once their research is complete, the team hopes to anonymize and publicly share their body of knowledge. “Our purpose is simply to produce knowledge and make it available in the form that works most productively for other people and as widely as possible,” Elizabeth Rhodes, director of OpenResearch, told Forbes.
This isn’t the first attempt to measure the benefits of a guaranteed revenue stream, but the OpenResearch study is part of several dozen pilot systems around the world. The largest is a 12-year trial in Kenya that began in 2017 and is funded through the philanthropic organization GiveDirectly. Countries such as the United States and Canada have also flirted with this concept. Since the 1980s, Alaskans have earned annual bills generated through royalties from the state’s oil and fuel. And last year, California introduced its first state-funded guaranteed bond. source of income test, which will focus on former youth in foster care.
Karl Widerquist, a fundamental income stream historian and professor at Georgetown University in Qatar, said we are experiencing a “third wave of the fundamental income stream movement” lately, after witnessing its growing popularity over the years. years. blows over several decades. He contacted OpenResearch a few years ago to ask for feedback on the trial, which he had not yet started, and told Forbes that they had selected “decent amounts” to study. He now needs the federal government to move forward with implementing a critical source of revenue. “We have a lot of knowledge about what can make it a vital source of income. We just don’t agree on whether we need this to happen.
Altman has continually said that he sees the universal fundamental source of income as a solution to poverty, dating back to his time as president of startup accelerator Y Combinator. In a blog post published almost a decade ago, he made an exclusive appeal to researchers. “We want to finance a study on the main sources of income,” he wrote. “This concept has intrigued me for a while and although it has been discussed a lot, there is little knowledge about how it would work. ” Recently, Silicon Valley technologists have evangelized a critical source of income as a cure for human unemployment caused by automation. “This is going to be necessary,” Elon Musk said in 2017, because “there will be fewer and fewer responsibilities that a robot cannot perform better. ” (This year he updated his brain and said, “We will not have a universal fundamental source of income. We will have a superior universal source of income,” without explaining the difference. ) Altman called this the “obvious conclusion” of his prediction. that “computers will update all production. ”
Some technologists remain skeptical. Computer scientist and “godfather of virtual reality” Jaron Lanier has a friendly war of words with Altman and others who have supported AI-subsidized welfare. Lanier told Forbes that by seeking to create a more equivalent society, the fundamental source of income risks centralizing this flow of wealth. Assuming superintelligence is just on the horizon, “I would like to see other people become proud providers of knowledge in a new economy” as a way out of this plutocratic scenario, he said. Meanwhile, he fears that technicians have sent the message that human elegance will soon become obsolete. “People probably wouldn’t say, ‘You’re so kind,’ they’ll say, ‘I hate you, you tell me you’re needed and I don’t, and I’m counting on your generosity. ‘”
Rhodes declined to comment on Altman’s worldview and how it might have shaped the essay, noting that the study was not intended to be prescriptive. “There is no single solution to a complicated problem,” he said. “There is never just one solution. “
Do you have any history advice for us? Contact Sarah Emerson at Signal at 510-473-8820 or by email at semerson@forbes. com.
But Altman is known for making his visions a reality, rarely at wonderful cost, a trait that has made him a polarizing figure in the tech world. In 2019, he founded Worldcoin, the cryptocurrency company that scans the iris and which he said would create a “collective global currency that will be distributed to as many people as possible. “The task falls far short of its goal of onboarding one billion users by 2023 and has been embroiled in a parade of controversies. Now that he leads the world’s most powerful artificial intelligence company, it’s hard to believe that even the most well-intentioned investigative task would fall outside his sphere of influence.
And then there are the real messes. OpenResearch and OpenAI share a DNA, as the AI company claims to have been subsidized through a donation from the lab. They also rarely share personnel: a former general suggests and someone who played other roles in each. Last year, a researcher affiliated with OpenResearch and OpenAI co-authored a study on the effects of AI on the labor market. OpenResearch said that because the two organizations were founded at the same time, they were transparent opportunities for hard work. Finally, Hard Work has only two members on the board of directors: one of them is Altman; the other is Chris Clark, former director of nonprofit and strategic initiatives at OpenAI. Clark left the AI company earlier this year, saying he was looking to “dedicate more time to the people and projects that are deeply important to me outside of OpenAI. ” “The Information reported in May. He remains COO of OpenResearch, where he continues to manage high-level operations within the organization.
OpenAI and Altman responded to a request for comment.
After earning a doctorate in social painting and political science from the University of Michigan, Rhodes responded to the assignment Altman offered him in 2016 without “ever having heard of Sam or Y Combinator or anything. ” She hired Rhodes that year, making her one of the first painters for YC Research, which later became OpenResearch. The lab was created to incubate long-term projects that ask open questions. It also housed a humanist generation center run by IT pioneer Alan Kay and a “better cities” project. In particular, she supported a team of synthetic intelligence experts who built OpenAI from its inception.
Since its launch in 2015, OpenResearch and its entities have raised about $60 million in funding. Ten million came from OpenAI’s nonprofit arm, while Altman donated $14 million and a $25 million line of credit to the lab, according to recent tax filings. Other supporters include Twitter co-founder and fundamental revenue proponent Jack Dorsey, who has donated $15 million through his Start Small charitable foundation, and GitLab co-founder Sid Sijbrandij, who has contributed $6. 5 million. Thanks to some of its researchers, The Task also won approximately $1. 1 million in grants from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.
The lab — which has six full-time employees, six volunteer educational partners and 17 volunteer advisory board members — has intentionally kept a low profile to the shadow of its benefactors. But it gained attention several years ago after the release of two fundamental source of revenue pilots in Oakland, California, intended to spotlight disorders that may just stand up in long run bigger trials. Fewer than one hundred other folks won up to $1,500 a month for about a year. In 2018, Wired called the efforts slow and received an email Rhodes had sent to then-Oakland mayor Libby Schaaf, saying, “Even even although it is frustrating for funders, it is been smart from a studies standpoint. ” OpenResearch declined to say who the ones frustrated funders were, yet noted that the pilots were only aimed at greater understanding things like recruiting and moving cash to the unbanked.
Its most recent test with 3,000 more people was conducted from November 2020 to last October, and nearly 40,000 more people responded to 1. 1 million promotional emails sent to addresses in Texas and Illinois. Applicants between the ages of 21 and 40 with household incomes not exceeding 300 percent of the federal poverty level were selected from urban, suburban and rural areas. (In their initial call, Altman said they were looking to recruit other people who were “motivated and talented but with poor backgrounds. “)month.
One participant, Cara, was diagnosed with a rare nerve disorder that prevented her from working. They were on short-term disabled, had sold their belongings, and had even set up a GoFundMe page to make ends meet. “It’s like feeling the loss of the ability to take care of yourself,” they recalled in an interview recorded and shared through OpenResearch. Cara allocated the $1,000 trial organization and said the monthly bills “lowered the panic a few levels. “
The greatest general location of the exam is that money creates flexibility: to be more selective in searching for a job, to obtain medical care, or to help a circle of relatives pay their own bills. The money transfers caused participants to spend more on fundamental wants like food, rent and transportation, according to the results.
“What surprised me the most was that [compared to the $50 control group] the biggest increase in spending was in money for others,” said Karina Dotson, head of research and ideas at OpenResearch. Dotson said participants said they used the budget to give gifts and loans, donations to charities or assistance to incarcerated people. “And this was especially true for lower-income recipients in our population, who, as we know from the existing literature, are also more likely to have low incomes. source of income from social networks. “
The team also asked permission to take blood samples, which 1,206 participants ended up doing. They measured biomarkers such as cholesterol, diabetes risk and hypertension, but found no significant surrogates. “Personally, I didn’t expect to see a genuine change in fitness in such a short period of time,” Rhodes said. “Especially with this population that likely would have had limited access to care for a long time. ” The researchers observed a slight increase in the likelihood that a user would seek physical care, such as a stop at the dentist.
Other technology corporations are worrying about giving away loose cash; Google funded a study on income earners and homelessness that will be conducted soon in the Bay Area. OpenResearch also lent its expertise to Illinois state officials passing a law in 2019 that prevents participants in non-government-funded money movement studies from wasting their existing benefits.
It’s unclear whether Altman plans to continue investing in the fundamental source of revenue research. OpenResearch supported other projects that were eventually abandoned, such as a platform to advertise clinical trials on Covid-19. And he said he would continue to raise funds to make his work bigger with monetary aid and perhaps begin to address medical inequities. Earlier this month, OpenAI announced a partnership with wellness company Thrive Global to create a custom AI fitness trainer.
Meanwhile, Altman’s outlook on the fundamental source of income appears to be evolving. A few months ago, he introduced a new concept for humanity: monetary dividends that “everyone” would get from wonderful language models like ChatGPT. He didn’t know how or why it would work, but he made the decision to call it “universal foundation calculus. “