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When will Universal Basic Income (UBI) start?

No country pays a full Universal Basic Income (UBI) today. What exists are pilots, dividends, and promises. Alaska has paid a yearly dividend since 1982, $1,000 per eligible resident in 2025 and 2026. Iran paid nearly every citizen about $45 a month from 2010, the biggest non-Western cash program on record. Inflation has eaten most of it since. Neither is the full national UBI I am talking about. The Romans called it bread and circuses 2,000 years ago. A government that pays your rent owns your vote. It is a power problem. The sellers sit in Silicon Valley. The buyers are governments on every continent. Elon Musk calls it universal high income. OpenAI proposed handing 5% of its shares to a US public wealth fund. A US senator wants a one-time 50% stock tax on the biggest AI companies. Futurist Ray Kurzweil, 13 years on Google's payroll and today chief AI officer of a humanoid robot company, says early 2030s. Peter Diamandis wants it deployed by 2028. I am independent. I take no money from anyone, not from Big Tech. I say later. Nobody can say what China, India and the Gulf will decide. Their choice sets the date of the world's first full UBI. My prediction: the first permanent pocket money arrives, Alaska style, in 1 or 2 countries by 2035. A full national UBI does not begin before 2040. And it is not a law of nature. If the people rise and refuse to be paid for their silence, there will be no UBI. Not in 2040, not ever. Digital slavery does not begin with a free check. It begins when the check becomes your only option.

Read my prediction: UBI 2040

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Answered by · independent futurist · 84% Prediction Accuracy Rate

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