Granting every working-age member of a population a stipend of money per month, per year, for the rest of their lives will do little to mitigate the two states it’s designed to relieve: human avarice and envy, and a lack of meaningful employment opportunities. No matter how much the AI technologists promise that such schemes will, in some utopian future society, we will never arrive at.

Jealousy (of people), envy (of things), and avarice (the desire to acquire more) are human emotions that aren’t often acknowledged as the darker motivators for people to engage with work. All of these emotions, along with vanity and pride (all emotions grounded in negative storytelling), are typically at the bottom of many people’s motivations to chase money, status, titles, honor, and respect. And because they’re all lurking in the basement of every human heart, the materialist rationalist utopians among us are inevitably surprised when they manifest as genuine, but irrational, resistance to the desire for a Universal Basic Income-driven future.

A fellow named Dostoyevsky, however, put words to what the technologists can’t seem to name, around 160 years ago, in a pre-Industrial Revolution, agrarian monarchial society:

“Now I ask you: What can be expected of man since he is being endowed with such strange qualities? Shower upon him every earthly blessing, drown him in a sea of happiness, so that nothing but bubbles of bliss can be seen on the surface; give him economic prosperity, such that he would have nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes, and busy himself with the continuation of the species, and even then, out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite, man will play you a nasty trick. He would even risk his cakes and would deliberately desire the most fatal rubbish, the most uneconomical absurdity, simply to introduce into all this positive good sense his fatal fantastic element.” ~ Notes From Underground, Part One, Chapter Eight

In our post-modern society, the era of “make-work” is over. And it’s been over for a while. But the thing is, we have also arrived at the end of the hangover from the end of the Industrial Revolution, so the era of “we financialize human effort in just a little bit better ways” is also about to be over with the dominance of LLMs that can do all that average make-work better and financialize it faster.

This is a real problem because, under the scheme that has built the last 125 years of scalable economic systems, meaningful employment was typically not found at the beginning of the employment ladder in minimum wage positions for many people. But now, even those rungs of the ladder are being hewn away. Without addressing both a lack of meaningful work opportunities for people at the beginning of their careers and the inherent built-in drivers toward accomplishing goals and earning money, all the Universal Basic Income in the world will only serve to exacerbate conflict, providing enough impetus for people to engage in conflict en masse. Because without work, idle hands will surely “…play you a nasty trick.”

Work provides spiritual, psychological, and emotional meaning for many people. But because those intangible outcomes don’t appear anywhere on a spreadsheet, they are either discounted as being meaningless or not even considered in the first place. A universal basic income does nothing to address any of those needs, emotions, or drivers in people. As a matter of fact, such schemes spit in the face of human motivators and dare the human being to do something about it. History proves that’s a negotiation human beings are fine with accepting the consequences of. And just declaring “Game on” doesn’t quite do justice to what will surely result from such schemes.

Human truth and what lurks deeply in the dark human heart are fundamentally what defeat all UBI schemes, whether from the State, from businesses, or even from our current crop of techno-utopians, drunk on AI outputs. Such proposed schemes really come down to giving people money, hoping to cure the deep disease of the human heart and the human spirit without ever engaging in performing the uncomfortable surgery of examining–and acknowledging–much deeper and darker motivations. You know. Those ones that have always lived deeply in the human soul, where even the state and technology cannot reach.

This is a sure recipe for universal basic conflict. And at scale.