Google's Demis Hassabis Echoes Elon Musk's Idea Of A Guaranteed Paycheck In The Future, Explains The Need For 'Universal High Income'

Demis Hassabis, chief executive at Google Deepmind, a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. GOOGL GOOG, says the wealth produced by artificial intelligence may one day require a "universal high income" so the gains "are distributed across the economy."

What Happened: In a CNN interview, Hassabis rejected Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's warning of a "job apocalypse" that could erase half of entry-level office roles within five years. "No, I don't," he said when asked if he shared that view.

"What we know for sure is there's going to be a huge change," comparable to the industrial revolution but compressed into "a shorter period of time, and it may be even bigger." For the next decade, he forecast that generative tools will act as "incredible enhancers for productivity," giving workers almost “superhuman” capabilities.

After that, he added, the question becomes how to spread the windfall: "We may need things like universal high income or some way of distributing all the additional productivity that AI will produce."

Why It Matters: The idea pushes the long-running debate over universal basic income into new territory. Hassabis's phrase echoes Elon Musk's prediction of a future "high" guaranteed paycheck for everyone, a view he repeated in February.

Other tech leaders, including OpenAI's Sam Altman and investor Marc Andreessen, have promoted broad cash transfers or price-deflation effects to offset wage pressure from automation.

Not everyone is convinced. Trump administration AI adviser David Sacks last week took to X to call such plans "fantasy" and said Congress will never fund them. Economists, speaking to the Financial Times, have likewise warned that universal stipends could require unsustainable tax hikes or deliver only token sums that fail to close inequality gaps.

Hassabis conceded that policy details remain distant while researchers race to make systems like Google's Gemini safer and more reliable. "The most important thing is to make sure it's done responsibly for humanity, given what's at stake," he still argued.

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