Astral Codex Ten

UBI

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UBI

Article

UBI is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between January 02, 2025 and August 12, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “even a tiny amount of redistribution (eg UBI)”; “stuff like UBI”; “if everyone is on UBI, status is less of a concern”. It most often appears alongside OpenAI, AGI, Anthropic.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 3
  • Issue count: 3
  • First seen: January 02, 2025
  • Last seen: August 12, 2025

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

It's Still Easier To Imagine The End Of The World Than The End Of Capitalism
January 02, 2025 · Original source
OpenAI was previously a “capped nonprofit”, where investors could make up to a 100x return, and all further profits went to a nonprofit arm. The exact mission of the nonprofit arm was never clear, but given Altman’s interest in universal basic income and his statements around the company’s founding, plausibly the idea was to create superintelligence, obtain approximately all the money in the world, use a tiny sliver of it to pay back investors, and distribute the rest as a UBI. You can say what you want about whether to trust companies in general or Sam Altman in particular, but -conditional on being an AI company - I think this is about as socially responsible as you can get. The investors don’t get enough to become technofeudalist barons, and the vast majority of gains still go to the public.
Inline links: interest in universal basic income
This may not result in catastrophic poverty. Maybe the post-Singularity world will be rich enough that even a tiny amount of redistribution (eg UBI) plus private charity will let even the poor live like kings (though see here for a strong objection). Even so, the idea of a small number of immortal trillionaires controlling most of the cosmic endowment for eternity may feel weird and bad. From No Set Gauge:
Inline links: see here
Links For February 2025
February 27, 2025 · Original source
43: Just as there are stock indexes like NASDAQ or Shanghai Composite to easily track questions like “how is tech doing?” or “how is China doing?”, Metaculus is experimenting with prediction market indices. I’m skeptical of their flagship example - “how ready are we for AGI?” - which seems to be a weird mishmash of questions about how good AI capabilities are, how well technical alignment is going, and stuff like UBI. Split between recommending better curation vs. worse curation (eg something more like NASDAQ that includes so many thousands of stocks that it can’t help but track underlying trends).
Inline links: experimenting with prediction market indices, “how ready are we for AGI?”
Highlights From The Comments On Liberalism And Communities
August 12, 2025 · Original source
Yeah, this is a good point. I hope the post-singularity version is immune to this (if everyone is on UBI, status is less of a concern). Otherwise I don’t know how to solve it, except by making community itself high-status (which I think is somewhat happening in some sectors).