Why Tech Companies Must Back Universal Basic Income
Zainab Bie
Director of Asia Pacific, Equal Right
Here's the irony of the AI age. The same technologies that could help us solve humanity's biggest problems, like discovering new drugs or modeling the climate, are quietly tearing apart the economic foundation billions of people rely on. The gains are huge. But the way those gains get shared? Not so much.
The Displacement Is Real, and It's Coming Fast
McKinsey report estimates that automation could displace between 400- 800 million jobs globally by 2030, with up to a third of workers in advanced economies needing to change occupations entirely. Wage pressure is already hitting logistics, administration, creative work, and professional services, while large language models now affect tasks performed by up to 80% of the US workforce.
The communities that feel these shocks first are rarely the ones capturing the productivity gains. Lower-income workers, informal employees in the Global South, and women, who are disproportionately concentrated in automatable service roles, get to stand at the front of the displacement line and the very back of the benefit line.
Last week, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told employees in a memo that the company needed to lay off 8,000 people, roughly 10 percent of its workforce, because "success isn't a given" in the competitive AI space.
Meta's chief compliance officer told employees in the risk division that several positions would be eliminated because new internal technology was replacing their jobs. This is what the new trend looks like: Automate the function, eliminate the role, redirect the savings toward the next wave of automation. Across the tech sector, more than 152,000 workers lost their jobs in 2024, followed by at least 118,000 more in 2025.
Universal Basic Income as the Foundation
Universal Basic Income, regular, unconditional cash payments to individuals has never been more necessary and more achievable. It is becoming a condition for social stability and human dignity in this age of AI-driven layoffs and accelerating automation.
For most of modern history, survival depended on labour because human labour was economically necessary. That bargain is beginning to collapse. Companies are building systems explicitly designed to reduce dependence on human workers. Entire categories of employment, from customer support to logistics to design to compliance, are being automated faster than societies can create replacement jobs. Yet access to food, housing, healthcare, and security still depends almost entirely on wages. That contradiction is becoming unsustainable.
This is why UBI is fundamentally a matter of justice. The wealth generated by AI does not emerge from nowhere. These systems are built on generations of publicly funded research, collective human knowledge, shared language, public infrastructure, and data extracted from billions of people. A handful of corporations may own the models, but they did not create the foundations of intelligence alone. If automation allows society to produce more wealth with less human labour, then the benefits of that productivity must belong to society as a whole, not only to shareholders and executives.
Without redistribution, AI risks creating an economy where millions of people become economically unnecessary while still being expected to survive through markets that no longer need their labour.
History shows what happens when large populations lose economic security while wealth concentrates at the top: democratic institutions weaken, extremism rises, social trust collapses, and violence follows. The deeper risk is the breakdown of the social contract itself
UBI creates a baseline of freedom beneath everyone, ensuring that technological progress translates into shared prosperity rather than mass precarity.
Pilots across Kenya, Finland, India, and the United States consistently find that recipients use cash to stabilize their lives, invest in education, improve health outcomes, start businesses, and strengthen their communities. Security increases people’s capacity to contribute meaningfully rather than reducing their contributions.
Project DEEP's pilots in India found that lump-sum unconditional transfers led 56% of recipient families to improve their housing, 60% to strengthen water access and cultivable land, and 34% to invest in new livelihoods. Give people a financial floor, and they make rational, courageous decisions.
Who Pays?
The gains from AI-driven productivity flow primarily to the companies and shareholders who benefit from automation, not to displaced workers or affected communities. UBI can be funded through AI-specific automation levies, taxes on data economies, and higher capital gains taxes on productivity windfalls.
What This Means for Tech Companies
If your company's business model depends on AI, your CSR obligation must go beyond carbon offsets and coding bootcamps. It must address the economic insecurity and climate instability its technologies can intensify, especially for vulnerable communities.
Supporting organizations that work at the intersection of UBI, climate finance, and human rights is the first step of recognizing that a world of extreme inequality, climate breakdown, and mass displacement isn't a world where any tech company's products will thrive. Or deserve to.
Equal Right works with governments, multilateral agencies, and civil society to pilot unconditional cash programs, model global financing mechanisms, and build the policy evidence that changes how institutions think about redistribution.
AI is accelerating economic disruption, while climate change deepens inequality. Universal Basic Income provides the foundation for adaptation, reskilling, innovation, and justice. Equal Right exists to help build that foundation globally and equitably.
If you believe in economic security, fair redistribution, and a future where technology serves everyone, sign the AI Pledge for Humanity: a global commitment to ensure the immense wealth and productivity generated by AI is shared equitably through Universal Basic Income and unconditional cash transfers.
