One of Silicon Valley’s most iconoclastic entrepreneurs, Elon Musk, just told us something we’ve heard countless times over the last few years: The likelihood of a robot doing your job in the future is high.

The end is far from nigh, though, according to Musk, who mulled over the advent of a Universal Basic Income and regular folks having much more leisure time – something Karl Marx said would happen once machines supplanted a great number of humans and there was surplus labor in the world, leading to Greek philosopher Aristotle’s Eudaimonia, the “Good Life.”

Marx in some ways imagined The Rise of the Robots, the possibility that humans would create machines that could vastly lower the amount of labor we need to do and so give us much more free time to chase dreams, expand our minds and be good to one another. Talking with CNBC, Musk mirrored Marx’s ideal future of people living this Good Life, “People will have time to do other things, more complex things, more interesting things,” Musk, said, adding, “certainly more leisure time.”

These days we are hearing that a large proportion of jobs will soon be automated. This will start with the customer service sector and soon move into the truck and taxi industry. U.S. President Barack Obama foresees the elimination of much of the workforce, something he says we are going to have to “figure out.”

Free money for all

The solution Musk told CNBC is Universal Basic Income, otherwise known as just basic income. “I am not sure what else one would do,” Musk said in the interview.

The concept of a basic income has been around for a while. Martin Luther King Jr. said the only way to abolish poverty was to implement a “guaranteed income.” Before that, British philosopher Bertrand Russell was one of the first adherents to something bigger than welfare, or what Britain had previously called the Poor Law. “A certain small income, sufficient for necessities, should be secured for all, whether they work or not,” said Russell.

It’s likely both these social activists could not comprehend the technological genius of Elon Musk or something such as the post-quantum encryption algorithm. The rise of the machines is nigh, perhaps hyped at times, but it is also starting to happen. Recent adventures in looking for alternative succor for the needy by governments show us how seriously automation is being taken.

Switzerland may have voted against a basic income, a whopping $2,578 per month for nationals, but talk of a UBI isn’t going to go away anytime soon. Canada is currently testing a C$25m pilot UBI in the province of Ontario, something which has been called a “panacea to poverty” and “a floor beneath which people are not allowed to fall.” According to reports, similar projects will start in Finland, the Netherlands and Kenya, while incubator Y Combinator has said it has its own ideas for a basic income.

The jobs will go, with even the fast food industry warning us that humans decrying low wages are far more hassle than the uncomplaining robots they are about to introduce. Emancipation for the poor, redistribution of wealth for the left, less government for the right, leisure time all around, creativity and innovation over workplace oppression and mindless toil: What could possibly go wrong?

Intellectually simplistic?

Some of the criticism towards UBI (and there’s a lot) revolves around a technotopia in which our reliance on machines and technology is in its own way oppressive, and we are ruled by libertarian ideological overloads such as Elon Musk, part of a roundtable of tech magnates that own just about everything. “Intellectually simplistic, socially perverse, and politically impracticable,” argues one critic, something anyway that would not be achieved by caring activists and the labor movement, but by people alienated from the working classes.

Other more prosaic criticisms relate to a disablement of enthusiasm in those collecting their UBI, heralding something like a slothful generation with ample cash for Xanax, Oxycontin and an Oculus Rift, a specter far from Aristotle’s ideal existence or Musk’s man of leisure.

There’s also the possibility that poverty will still exist in terms of crumbling infrastructure. Relative poverty will always exist; perhaps even now, the impoverished are spoiled in relation to all those Texans that lived without electricity in the 1930s. The concept of more leisure time and the tapping of formerly immured creativity, which sounds so appealing to us all, has been called, “ludicrous and at worst patronizing.”

The Trojan Horse

Author and visiting scholar at Stanford University Evgeny Morozov calls UBI a Trojan Horse, a tool used by progressive-looking tech conglomerates to further empower themselves.

Morozov asks if Silicon Valley is so set on a basic income then why are we not the owners of our own data? “At the very minimum, it could help us to find alternative, non-commercial users of this data,” said Morozov. “At its most ambitious you can think of a mechanism whereby cities, municipalities and eventually nation states, starved of the data that now accrues almost exclusively to the big tech firms, would compensate citizens for their data with some kind of basic income.”

Skeptically he concludes that tech elites “empty advocacy” of UBI is only because they want the people to be content enough not to riot, as they lose their jobs to machines but stay faithful consumers of the main players goods and services.

Get ready

Would Mozorov condemn Musk to being a dark, techno-lodestar, vying only for power? It seems unlikely, given Musk’s trenchant views on global warming, his railing against the fossil fuel industry.

Musk was even mentioned in the National Geographic’s recent scathing documentary, “Before the Flood“, which depicted global warming destroying the Earth not so many years from now, condemning the many catatastrophe deniers cloistered within the upper echelons of politics, business and high-society. Musk was one of the few “good guys” in the film, with his solar panels and case for a carbon tax.

The Trojan Horse theory is at the moment a minority attitude, and while it’s perhaps cynical, we might benefit from employing a similar skepticism to leisure-laden utopias. One thing that seems entirely possible is the encroachment by machines on our jobs, and without contingencies and solutions ready to meet this juncture, some amount of chaos should be expected.

Photo credit: photographymontreal via Flickr