Musk’s fantasy for a future where work is optional just got more real: UK minister calls for universal basic income to cushion AI-related job losses

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has made no secret of his robot-powered fantasies for the future. Within the next couple of decades, work will be optional due to the widespread proliferation of AI and automation, he has predicted. Gone will be the need for retirement savings, as money will be irrelevant. Instead, Musk sees a world of robots outnumbering humans, providing healthcare and other services for their organic counterparts.

“With robotics and AI, this is really the path to abundance for all,” he said at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland earlier this month. “People often talk about solving global poverty, or essentially, how do we make everyone have a very high standard of living? I think the only way to do this is AI and robotics.”

Building on OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s proposed universal basic income, Musk has suggested a universal high income, usually from the government, given unconditionally to individuals.

He has said little else about what this vision of universal income would look like, but as AI gains momentum in the workplace, other global leaders are beginning to see it as a compelling option to address how automation is disrupting the labor force.

UK minister for investment Lord Jason Stockwood told the Financial Times this week that the government is weighing the introduction of a universal basic income as a means to support workers in industries where AI threatens to displace them. Stockwood, who was appointed to the House of Lords in September 2025, is a longtime tech investor and former CEO of insurance broker Simply Business.

“Undoubtedly we’re going to have to think really carefully about how we soft-land those industries that go away, so some sort of UBI, some sort of life-long learning mechanism as well so people can retrain,” he said.

Beyond calling for reskilling workers displaced by AI, Stockwood has previously floated the idea of tech companies being taxed in order to fund universal basic income payments.

“I think of the productivity gains and the wealth that AI can create, but we also need to think of the more pernicious and near-term danger that it just embeds inequality and makes a really small cohort of super-wealthy elites even wealthier because they control the capital and the technologies,” he explained.

AI’s changes to labor

Predictions about the future of labor in the burgeoning world of automation have greatly varied. While some CEOs see AI as adding new jobs, others see a complete overhaul of work as we know it. In a blog post published this past week, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned AI will have an “unusually painful” impact on the labor market.

“AI isn’t a substitute for specific human jobs but rather a general labor substitute for humans,” he wrote.

Massive headcount reductions are already happening in the world of tech. Amazon confirmed on Wednesday 16,000 corporate job cuts, piling onto an additional 14,000 layoffs in October 2025, though the company previously said the reductions were not about AI. Morgan Stanley noted in a report earlier this week that AI-related job cuts are hitting Britain the hardest, with 8% net job losses over the last 12 months.

Could universal basic income really work?

Universal basic income isn’t unheard of, and 163 programs piloting the social service, including 41 active programs, have been run in the U.S. alone, according to the Stanford Basic Income Lab. Altman, with his own curiosities about the efficacy of the payments, helped finance a series of experiments on basic universal income from his OpenResearch project, beginning in 2020.

The results of these pilots suggest that providing individuals, usually low-income ones, with a series of consistent payments results in greater spending on basic needs and spending on others, with participants continuing to hold jobs.

Ioana Marinescu, an economist and associate professor of public policy at the University of Pennsylvania, said universal basic income could be a pragmatic solution to addressing AI job displacement, especially given the uncertainties around how many people will lose their job due to AI, and for how long they will be out of work.

For many without a job right now, they rely on unemployment insurance benefits, which are contingent upon an individual having a track record of previous employment, she said. For people out of work for a long time or lacking a long list of prior jobs—especially Gen Z, who may be particularly vulnerable to their jobs being automated—those benefits aren’t guaranteed. Therefore, having an unconditional series of payments from universal basic income would be an effective safety net for unemployed individuals, Marinescu told Fortune.

One positive side effect of taxing tech companies and other businesses benefitting from AI  would be that it would slow the adoption of AI in the workplace, according to Marinescu. That should also decrease the likelihood of mass layoffs or displacement, giving workers a chance to find jobs elsewhere.

But there’s risks associated with rolling out a universal basic income policy, too, Marinescu suggested. When given these payments, low-income individuals are only modestly able to increase spending compared to higher-income people, as many are saddled with debt or other poverty traps. Moreover, as tech billionaires get richer, there’s a chance they may be less interested in parting with their ballooning wealth—even perhaps universal basic income advocates like Altman and Musk.

“Essentially, I’m worried that people who benefit from AI, after the fact, are going to say, ‘Well, why do we have to pay for all these people’s problems?’” Marinescu said. “But right now, we don’t yet know exactly who wins, who loses.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com