‘I think of the productivity gains and the wealth that AI can create, but we also need to think of the … 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.’
Lord Stockwood, UK Investment Minister
Lord Stockwood, the former businessman who helped run Travelocity and lastminute.com, was appointed last September as Investment Minister, and he has already made clear his view that Universal Basic Income (UBI) could provide the solution for the new era of mass unemployment which Sir Sadiq Khan — and many others — envisages as a result of the widespread adoption of Artificial Intelligence.
Lord Stockwood has suggested in the past that tech companies could be required to pay a windfall levy in order to fund UBI, but there is an inherent illogicality in this proposition. With the great majority of tech company wealth being created outside UK borders, why should they submit to such a levy?
The solution for this dilemma must not only be global but must also incorporate both carrot and stick. Funding UBI with a taxation levy would not only be impractical on a global basis — there are no other examples of globally-applicable taxes — but it's all stick, and no carrot.
Furthermore, the very concept of UBI heralds an era of still more welfare subservience, a highly unattractive future for most people. We already have quite enough welfare culture in the UK.
We need an alternative to UBI, and research work supported by Share Alliance and King’s College, Cambridge is well on the way to that brighter prospect for the future.
There are several key outcomes which make Share Alliance’s concept of ‘Stock for Data and Creativity’ so attractive. The first is, of course, the ability for people to share in the very tech wealth creation which has resulted from the harvesting of their data and creativity. Rather than relying on taxation levies, participation in stock ownership will deliver both dividends and capital growth: the latter being enabled by holding stock for defined lock-in periods.
Individual ownership is so much better than welfare payments because it develops a sense of participation — and therefore responsibility — in these huge developments in technology which are driving economic development across the world.
But it's also a very positive development for the tech companies themselves. They need the feedback and involvement of people who are contributing their data and creativity. In contrast to simply being asked to pay massive amounts of tax by foreign governments, these companies will be empowered by the huge phalanxes of individual shareholders, many of whom will develop a real interest in steering their strategy going forwards.
A couple of years ago, we opened a conversation with Meta on this subject. They were very interested in the concept of ‘distributed governance’, as they described it; and similarly, many of the tech leaders know that just sitting on huge concentrations of wealth cannot be the long-term outlook for their industry.
Another outcome which should be of real interest to economists will be to maintain the velocity of money circulation as participation in tech wealth spreads across the world. Central banks are very aware that it is not just money supply which is important in steering away from inflation and deflation; it is also the turnover of that money within economies. Maintaining money circulation helps everyone to benefit from that activity, in a way that simply paying out UBI welfare payments could never achieve.
Share Alliance’s initial report on ‘Stock for Data and Creativity’ was prepared in August 2024, describing its discovery structure and proposing the way forward. We are now working with Capital Economics in order to provide economic modelling for the concept, including an analysis of some of the key tech companies which harvest data and creativity in various fields of activity, and alternative arrangements for potential stock recipients.
It is the global and pervasive spread of technology which makes universality so relevant in this respect. It would, of course, be understandable for people to think that allocation should be applied to direct users only, but this would involve increasingly complex algorithms in order to track down the harvesting process; and, as Artificial Intelligence continues to dissolve creativity across such a huge range of systems, targeted allocation would become less and less justifiable.
Universality is therefore a key part of our ‘Stock for Data and Creativity’ proposals, although there will still be some defining criteria for allocation. One of the most important of these will be segmentation by age: there is no doubting the fact that young people are most impacted by these developments, as capital control of technology pushes labour aside. This point comes through strongly at the end of Lord Stockwood’s quote.
We would therefore like to see universal participation being assessed as a real alternative to UBI and, once our work with Capital Economics is complete, to convene working groups to explore how it can overcome challenges of global application, administration (including ID verification), regulation and communication.
This is a realistic way to transform world economics in favour of individual participation, while continuing to encourage tech development — let’s hope governments will also take it seriously as we plan the way forward.
Gavin Oldham OBE
Share Radio