I didn't want to be the face of a Universal Basic Income Policy, but here we are.
- Ashley Laker
- Apr 22
- 6 min read
I wasn’t even meant to be in the room. My job title had earned me a last-minute invite to a “Future of Work” presentation by one of the big consultancy firms.
A wise-looking, well-dressed, and intensely confident man presented to a room of managers who looked like they’d just glimpsed their own redundancy. His slides—clearly recycled—outlined how his team was helping New Zealand’s largest enterprises quietly erase jobs.
The slide that stopped everyone’s breath looked something like this:
—A job, sliced into parts
—Which parts can be automated, and by when?
—Automate up to 75% of the job
—That job, once done by 5 people, can now be done by 1
—Timeline: 1.5 years
—”We estimate 26% of the current job market will be automated by 2027”
My hand went up. “If job displacement happens that quickly, to that size of the population, surely we’ll need to do something for these people. Like a Universal Basic Income?”
He thought for a moment.
“I like to err on the side of optimism and assume people will retrain,” he said. “But yes, we’ll have to do something for everyone left over,” he said.
“Although addressing that is neither my job, nor yours.”
Two things struck me. First—A suit from a Big 5 firm just conceded the need for Universal Basic Income. Second—I couldn’t, for the life of me, figure out whose job it was to address it, because no one in New Zealand’s government is trying.
Yes, it’s personal
I left that session not just angry—but bewildered. Not just at him, but at how normal it’s become to talk about people and their livelihoods like they’re obsolete.
I went back to my desk and finished the day. But lying in bed that night, staring at the ceiling, I knew I had to do something.
My career is in communications. It’ll be replaced by AI—maybe not tomorrow, but probably within five years. My husband works in a job that’s already being automated. So yes, this started as something personal.
We work hard, my husband and I. So do our friends. So does nearly everyone I know.
There is a loud and large group of voices who suggest that, so long as you adopt AI and know how to use it, you’ll be fine. “Society will just bounce back!”
But studies have shown that high-skill reskilling cannot keep pace with forecasted displacement, and New Zealand is ahead of the curve. Rural and primary industry sectors (e.g., agriculture, forestry, logistics) are particularly vulnerable. The speed of transformation is high, while reskilling infrastructure is slow, especially in regional areas.
Can we all retrain? Sure, but into what? AI is shifting the world so fast it’s almost impossible to choose a “safe” profession. Nurses are being replaced (yes, right now) by an iPad with someone based in the Philippines on the other end, in our aged care homes. (If you have a loved one in aged care, I would call up and ask that someone, in person, is actually taking care of them.) That was meant to be the world’s safest career.
So, perhaps we all become welders or bricklayers, plumbers and hairstylists. Fine. But even then, how are we meant to support our families while we retrain?
At home, over cocktails, our housemate—who loves AI—finally said what I’d been circling for weeks: “Surely this leads to a Universal Basic Income.” We’ve heard this for a while now—a utopian idea that AI will make the world so efficient that no one will need to work and everyone will have a UBI and time to paint still lifes. An economy productive enough that no one’s forced into meaningless work just to survive.
People could grow apples. Raise kids. Save forests. Do the things that actually matter. Money wouldn’t stand between us and our joy. Hurrah.
Except I know how politics works.
Maybe 10% of people believe something like this is achievable.
Another 40% think UBI is unfair (it’s not).
20% say it’s unworkable (also not true, it’s been piloted) or that AI isn’t going to replace that many jobs (eek, I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news…)
The rest? They won’t engage.
A project like this would be gargantuan. And as far as I could tell, none of our fearless leaders were taking it on.
So I started writing.
It needed to be good. Really good.
The first dilemma was obvious:
The only way I could write something this fast, this watertight, and this feasible—was to use AI. Seriously? Was I okay with that irony?
It took me about half a beat. Yes. If AI is replacing us, it can help us survive it. I started with the framework.
Universal Basic Income—funded through reasonable levies on corporations that carry out mass redundancies and replace jobs with AI. Supplemented with other long-debated tax mechanisms. (I hesitated on this, knowing it would be a sticking point for the right and the wealthy. But come on. Nationwide, broad-scale layoffs that gut the economy and dignity of work is breaking the social contract. Even they must be worried about stability.)
Was there another option? I checked. There wasn’t.
So here it was. A bi-partisan, mostly new idea—socialism’s take on capitalism. (Or capitalism’s take on socialism… whichever you prefer.)
It was a real, fundable policy. But it still wasn’t ready. The world is full of AIs now, so I hired four: A mathematician. An economist. A researcher. A policy analyst. I asked them to talk to each other. Share feedback. Revise. And finally, I asked one simple question:
“If a politician came to you and asked for a social framework to protect their country from AI-induced job displacement, what would you recommend?”
The AI recommended this. My policy.
It was comprehensive. It was costed. It was socially and economically sound. And—most importantly, feasible. Great. Now for the real world.
Why I’m going public
I needed peer review. I reached out.
My best friend and my husband: Impressed. Just happy someone was doing something.
An economics professor from Auckland: Not willing to read it. Brutal.
A political science professor: No response.
A philosophy professor: “It sounds great. Just launch it and see how it goes!”
The Green Party and Chlöe Swarbrick: No response.
Te Pāti Māori: No response.
The Helen Clark Foundation: (Reviewing at the time of writing. Yay!)
Two journalists covering AI and the future of work: No response.
A friend of a friend: “You’re just Trojan-horsing a socialist agenda under the guise of AI displacement.”
I felt like I was in the desert, but after a few days, I came back to it. I compared The Prosperity Deal to The Green New Deal. To Andrew Yang’s UBI. To existing welfare frameworks. Mine was more comprehensive.
It was costed. It factored in cultural nuance, corporate ROI, Treaty co-governance, mental health outcomes, and community dignity. It even had a return on investment for corporations—good ones.
It was a strong policy.
Here’s the thing. I never wanted to be a politician. Or the face of a campaign. I wanted to write it. Strategise. Plan in the background. I imagined handing it to someone—maybe Chlöe at a rally, mouthing call me!—and watching the policy grow wings.
But a few days ago, I realised that no one is coming.
People don’t engage with new ideas just because you want them to.
So if I want this policy known—if I want it heard, I’ll have to share it myself.
That’s why I’m putting my name on this.
What’s next?
Next week, I’ll walk through the core elements of the deal and my campaign plan. As soon as it is ready, I’ll share the website for the policy itself where you can read it in full, share it with friends, and donate to the cause.
Relevant Academic Works
Hall, R. P., Ashford, N. A., & Arango-Quiroga, J. (2019).
Universal Basic Income and Inclusive Capitalism: Consequences for Sustainability. Sustainability, 11(16), 4481.
Analyzes how UBI could counteract mass automation’s labor displacement and bolster sustainable economic systems.
Gordon, J. S., & Gunkel, D. J. (2024).
Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Work. AI & Society.
Explores the moral and structural impacts of AI automation and its link to UBI discourse.
Demir, C., & Çakmak, S. (2023).
Artificial Intelligence, Technological Change, and the Future of Capitalism. In Capitalism at a Crossroads. Springer.
Positions UBI as a frontline policy to maintain social equilibrium amid tech-driven disruptions.
Occhipinti, J. A., Prodan, A., & Hynes, W. (2025).
Artificial Intelligence, Recessionary Pressures and Population Health. Bulletin of the World Health Organization.
Discusses mental health and economic insecurity risks of job automation, recommending income guarantees.
Monteiro, M. A. S. C. (2023).
The Influence of Automation in Support for Universal Basic Income.
Explores how public opinion shifts in favor of UBI in countries with higher AI job risk perception.
Rodríguez-Rodríguez, I. (2024).
When Automation Hits Home: Job Risk and Support for Universal Basic Income. Social Science Information.
Empirical study linking automation anxiety with increasing public support for UBI.
Peppiatt, C. (2024).
The Future of Work: Inequality, Artificial Intelligence, and What Can Be Done. arXiv preprint arXiv:2408.13300.
Literature review addressing UBI, AI labor substitution, and inequality mitigation strategies.
Barbosa, C. E., De Lima, Y. O., & Costa, L. F. C. (2022).
Future of Work in 2050: Thinking Beyond the COVID-19 Pandemic. European Journal of Futures Research.
Predicts massive shifts in labor due to AI, and includes models of UBI as a stabilizer.
Kelly, L. (2023).
Re-politicising the Future of Work: Automation Anxieties and the End of Techno-Optimism. Journal of Sociology.
Questions utopian AI narratives and argues for more equitable frameworks like UBI.
Schwartz, M., & Ehrlich, M. (2018).
A Universal Basic Robot. In Computational Studies on Cultural Variation and Creativity. Springer.
Philosophically extends UBI to automated labor, arguing for ethical machine economics.
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