Universal Basic Income sounds radical until you think through the alternative. If artificial intelligence eliminates millions of jobs over the next decade, and the companies deploying that technology capture the productivity gains while displaced workers are left to manage on their own, the social and political consequences will be severe. The question is not whether to address it. It is how.
John Chachas has a specific answer. Writing in Boss Magazine, the founder of Methuselah Advisors and CEO of Inyo Broadcast Holdings proposes what he calls a UBI Trust Fund: a mandatory contribution mechanism requiring corporations profiting from AI-driven labor displacement to fund support for the workers they displace.
The proposal has a certain elegant logic. Instead of creating a new government tax and distribution system, it establishes a direct connection between the cause of displacement and support for those displaced. Companies that deploy AI in ways that eliminate jobs would be automatically liable for contributions to the fund. Companies that do not automate do not pay. The incentive structure is built in.
“This is not socialism,” he argues in similar essays. “It is pragmatism.” The companies getting rich from automation should not be allowed to externalize the social cost of that automation onto communities, government welfare programs, and individuals who had no part in the decision to automate. “If corporations want to reap all the profits that AI can indeed produce, they will have to be compulsory funders of a UBI Trust Fund,” Chachas writes.
His perspective is grounded in what he has already watched happen to another industry. As a media banker who has spent decades on deals including the $18 billion Clear Channel buyout, he has had a front-row seat to what happens when technology disruption outpaces regulatory response. Local newspapers were destroyed by platforms that extracted their value without compensating them. The community institutions those papers sustained went with them.
He does not want to see the same dynamic play out in labor markets. The workers who will be displaced by AI are not abstractions. They are people in their thirties and forties with specialized skills, mortgages, families, and expectations built on a social contract that promised them a middle-class life in exchange for education and effort. They will not quietly accept a future of precarious employment after decades of stability.
The alternative, social instability at a scale we have not experienced, is not an economic abstraction. It is what happens when the social contract breaks down and no one steps in to repair it. Chachas has watched that play out in media. He is trying to prevent the same outcome in the broader economy.