The head of Microsoft’s AI efforts believes artificial intelligence will not just reshape work, but force a fundamental rethink of how wealth and value are distributed across society via a universal basic income.
In a Bloomberg Television interview, Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of DeepMind and now head of Microsoft’s AI unit, lays out a long-term vision in which machines eventually outperform humans at most forms of labor, triggering structural changes far beyond the job market.
Suleyman says the shift is unavoidable and could arrive faster than many expect, raising hard questions about purpose, displacement and social stability as machines take over an expanding share of productive work.
“I think that it is inevitable that at some point over the next 20 or 30 years, machines are going to be more capable than humans at doing most work. And that might come much sooner. And so we have to decide as a society what our purpose is, and we have to be very thoughtful about the rate of introduction of new machines.”
Amid his expected AI-driven productivity increase, Suleyman believes that the technology will create a new age of abundance that will force policymakers to establish a universal basic income to distribute the wealth.
“I think I’ve long been on record saying that I think [a universal basic income] is both inevitable and very desirable. We already live in a world of abundance. It’s just poorly distributed. We already have more calories to consume. We have an incredible amount of food wastage. It’s just unevenly distributed. And now that value isn’t just manifested in atoms, like food and cars and physical things. It’s manifested in digital goods, ideas, knowledge [and] intelligence. And that’s actually great news, because that can proliferate. It can spread extremely quickly around the entire world.
These LLMs and chatbots have been the fastest spreading technology in history, basically 2 billion annual users in the space of three years. And that’s actually amazing, because it’s delivering knowledge to every single person who wants to use it on their phone in the current sort of format and device they already use. So I think that we have no problem with getting technology out and available to everybody because there’s going to be massive competitive forces to reduce the cost of experiencing an AI. I think the challenge we’re going to have to figure out is how we tax and redistribute so that the transition is a healthy one.”
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