Nouriel Roubini said on TV on Friday that AI and robots will replace a large chunk of the population within the next 20 to 25 years, and that governments will eventually have to provide some form of universal basic income. He said raising the retirement age will not be enough to absorb the shock.
That warning lands now because the debate over AI and jobs is no longer theoretical. The Social Security trust fund is due to run out of money by 2032, and Roubini tied that deadline to a future in which many workers and retirees would need income support even as machines take over more work.
Roubini said the shift would not be limited to a small group of workers. He described a future in which people would receive universal basic income both while they are working and after they retire. He also said the economy could move either through ex-post distribution, meaning universal basic income after growth has already been created, or through ex-ante distribution, which he described as some form of socialism. In that scenario, he said, the government would take over some fraction of big tech firms.
He framed the forecast as optimistic, not gloomy. Roubini said the AI revolution is the most important in human history in terms of technological innovation and argued that AI will develop into artificial general intelligence. He said GDP could rise from 2% to 4% by the end of the decade, reach 6% by 2040 and climb to 10% by 2050, adding that the result would be “machines doing all the work.”
That optimism sits beside an uncomfortable contradiction. Roubini’s own answer for a world of mass displacement — universal basic income or some form of socialism — is the same kind of policy response that has already been floated by others as AI threatens to disrupt the labor market. The idea has also been discussed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and by the U.K. government, while Elon Musk has said working could become optional in less than 20 years.
The next fixed marker in this story is 2032, when the Social Security trust fund is due to run out of money. If Roubini is right about the pace of AI, the question is not whether income support will be discussed again, but who pays for it when the machines arrive faster than the system can adjust.
