Covid killed UBI; Long live guaranteed income

It was December 2020, and she was being invited into a pilot program providing guaranteed income--a direct cash transfer with no strings attached. For Softky, it was a lifeline. "For the first time in a long time, I felt like I could … take a deep breath, start saving, and see myself in the future," she says. The idea of "just giving people money" has been in and out of the news since becoming a favored cause for many high-profile Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, including Twitter's Jack Dorsey, Facebook cofounders Mark Zuckerberg and (separately) Chris Hughes, and Singularity University's Peter Diamandis. They proposed a universal basic income as a solution to the job losses and social conflict that would be wrought by automation and artificial intelligence--the very technologies their own companies create.