Universal Basic Intelligence
Written today
I think the government should give out Claude subscriptions for free and impose a tax AI tokens.
Assume that two things are true in the future. The first assumption: intelligence means more production. This means the more an economy spends on intelligence compute, measured in tokens (roughly $30 per 1M tokens), the more the economy produces. AI replaces job on a mass scale, further making jobs less valuable and humans more replaceable. Unemployment increases. Secondly, assume that the more intelligence compute you do, the more energy you require and the more environmental harm you cause. Sure, we are optimizing it right now such that one token means less environment damage but assume we cannot get that to a negligible number. There's very well documented claims of water usage, pollution, power grid strain, etc. being adversely affected by data centers. Power usage causes nuclear waste to be generated, pollution from fossil fuels. Fusion turns out to be non-viable.
There is good reason to believe all three of these assumptions will be true. The first claim is probably the biggest question mark. However, with more intelligence compute, people are already more productive: a Stanford study[1] shows people gain 76-176% more productivity from using AI. Some estimate that number to be lower, but it is arguably more productive than not having AI. People use AI to learn. Increasing universal intelligence could mean lower-income individuals get more access to education. Barriers to entry would be lower for jobs as people could research skills on their own.
Social welfare exists to serve those who have less access to certain resources. California's SNAP provides families with better access to more nutritious food. FAFSA provides lower barriers to education via student loans. Doesn't it make sense to provide intelligence to lower income individuals too?
There exists a lot of latent production in the economy: people who do not have skills cannot go into a high skill job. Because someone can just talk to AI, it is very easy to use. One can reasonably create capital (an application, a program) that others use to become more optimized. This in turn increases the production of the economy.
The problem is that intelligence will scale beyond belief. Intelligence is finite as due to assumption 2: there are real costs to scaling intelligence. A reason that governments exist is to manipulate money and resolve market failures. Intelligence compute is clearly has negative externalities due to its pollution. This means that we should think of compute as a finite resource: we cannot scale it infinitely, even if xAI's Colossus works out and the billions of capital expenditure spent in AI produces infrastructure at a great scale.
Progressive taxes exist to distribute money more equitably: it can be used to distribute intelligence fairly too. It makes sense to impose taxes on the wealthy to redistribute the intelligence to less wealthy. This also incentivizes the smart people to use tokens more efficiently. More tokens will be taken from the rich and given to the poor.