REMEMBER the basic income grant South African labour unions, churches and NGOs campaigned for back in the 1990s and early "noughties", but on which Trevor Manuel's Treasury frowned on as a fiscal nonstarter? Silicon Valley A-lister Sam Altman thinks the US will have to adopt something like it within the next generation or two -- and he's not alone. Altman is founder and president of Y Combinator, the seed-stage tech investor that helped launch Airbnb and Dropbox. As co-chairman of OpenAI, he is working with Elon Musk to see that artificial intelligence, as it approaches and perhaps surpasses the human variety, benefits mankind. He believes that while technology will generate vast new wealth, it will in the process destroy much traditional employment without replacing it.