michael-dean-k/

Universal basic income is a basic phrase. It’s only one of several approaches to reattribute wealth after our social contract nullifies.

One alternate idea is universal basic compute (UBC), which is about giving everyone free access to the most powerful AI models. Sam Altman recently said that UBI might not work, and we should try UBC instead. This is even more unlikely to work. Giving someone Claude Mythos, the killer model, doesn’t mean they can turn prompts into dinner. Access doesn’t guarantee results. It faces similar odds as entrepeneurship. But maybe it has enough agency so all you have to do is write “make me $10,000 this week”—in that case, everyone will run it, and then it’ something like a lottery, where some machines happen to beat other machines.

The more likely route is universal basic services (UBS), where a government or company provides you, for free, all the things you used to need money for: healthcare, education, housing, transportation, food. The engineering elite will harness their superintelligence to achieve such radical efficiencies that the cost of everything will crater. Maybe it's cheap enough to become a trivial expense. This is a nice idea, one where I can imagine myself focused completely on my art, with no need to slave away for a wage anymore. It’s also science fiction. I don’t doubt that this can happen in 20 or 30 years, but labor shock is coming a lot faster (in less than 5), meaning there will be a transition generation of turbulence.

Then there’s universal basic dividends (UBD) and universal basic equity (UBE), in which citizens get shares of collectively-owned assets, like shares in a frontier AI lab or robotics company. OpenAI was originally set up for something like this, until it weaseled out of it’s non-profit entity.

All of these have the same critical flaw, the U. Whether it’s a government or company, you can’t meaningfully redistribute to 7 billion people without destroying the parent entity. Instead, we may be looking down the barrel of a new definition of labor, less focused on productive output, and unfortunately, more so on data and attention, what a citizen truly has to offer in the eyes of a state. We'll find something to exchange for the money and services to flow down, but it won’t be unconditional. I suppose a contract, by definition, is never unconditional, and so neither should a social contract.

AI summary of one of my threads:

"Paul Graham founded Y Combinator in 2005 and hand-picked Sam Altman—a founder from YC’s very first batch—as his successor, creating a mentor-protégé lineage that symbolizes the essential partnership between ideas and action in technology. Graham, the essayist, codified startup wisdom into executable blueprints, democratizing knowledge that had been locked in VC oral tradition and proving that clear writing is the mechanism of clear thinking; Altman, the accelerator, absorbed that intellectual operating system and is now applying its core logic—“startup = growth,” “build things people want”—to the ultimate technological lever: intelligence itself. Their relationship frames Graham as perhaps the most consequential pragmatic philosopher of the 21st century: not a thinker who wrote to be understood, but one who wrote to be executed, with Altman and the AI revolution serving as empirical validation of his text. Graham wrote the blueprint for the current world; Altman is using it to build the next one."

I'm ashamed to admit that a meme on Sora got me to laugh and cry so hard that my head was in pain and I had to close the app. It was Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream Speech,” but AI replaced the text with the script from the meme of that 4-year-old who can’t describe his dream (“Have you ever had a dream that you, um, you had, your, you— you could, you’ll do, you— you want, you, you could do…” etc.). There is something about seeing a great American orator mumble endlessly that I apparently can’t handle. Technically, I “made” this meme, which makes it worse, like I’m laughing at my own jokes.

What makes Sora an incredibly weird experiment is that, in 10 seconds, anyone can upload their “likeness.” Basically, you spin your head around, you say some words, and you get a photorealistic avatar that you can lend to your friends so they can prompt you into absurd situations. Of course, Sam Altman is one of the default avatars available. 50% of the app is Sam Altman fan fiction. You will find him stealing graphics cards from Target, smoking weed and saying “we’re cooked,” debating Cartman in court, using Pikachu to power a fusion reactor, etc. Also if you like Pikachu, there is now infinite Pikachu content. It is all very dumb, but it is endlessly novel.

This feels like a preview of a culture who only communicates through Superbowl commercial skits. I hope it doesn’t work, but I fear it might. I assume most people are questioning “why would anybody make their likeness public?” The answer is attention. I imagine that, within a week or two, Sam will have the montages and metrics to sway influencers and celebrities. It will be pitched as the new way to engage your audience: “let them create through you.” They know they can’t use the likeness of real people; I wonder if the point of this app (a wrapper over their underlying video model) is to get people to hand over their identity for free.

I am debating if I should delete this from my phone (I don’t allow any feeds on my phone … except Substack), or, if I should lean in, sell my likeness, and write about the consequences. This feels like an essay-worthy moment, but I can’t find the terms and conditions, and I get paranoid when I imagine the possibilities.

There is a striking clash between today's GPT-5 release—which seems like a router to switch between existing models, and SAMA’s meme from yesterday: the Death Star, a weapon. GPT-5 does not feel dangerous. It makes me wonder if they had to pull the real GPT-5 for security concerns. Obviously this is a conspiracy theory, but I’ve long thought that their consumer apps are just a side project compared to the geopolitical power their research might yield.