By Kyla Fisher, Queen’s University

Over the past few years there has been increasing discussion in the media about the potential that technological change has in leading large portions of society to be unemployed. On one side, doomsayers point to the rapid progress in automation and artificial intelligence (AI) as signs that human workers will soon be replaced. Their opponents note that these same predictions were made in the past during the industrial revolution and turned out to be incorrect. One thing that does seem clear is that large numbers of jobs are susceptible to automation. A study by Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne found that 47% of U.S. workers had jobs at high risk of future automation (Frey & Osborne, 2017). The remaining question is whether enough new jobs will be created in other industries that can employ the displaced workers. Whatever your opinion, it is interesting to consider our options as a society if we had a major increase in unemployment. To consider this, let us assume that it’s 20 years in the future and that we are facing a significant reduction in the number of jobs available. What are options? In this article, we’ll consider two of the most popular solutions: universal basic income (UBI) and guaranteed basic income (GBI).

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