Elon Musk’s proposal of ‘universal high income’ to combat AI job losses baffles economists: ‘So wrong on this’

Elon Musk's latest prescription for AI-driven unemployment—a "universal high income" that he argues would replace traditional welfare—has drawn withering criticism from economists who say the billionaire has fundamentally misunderstood both the scale of job displacement and the mechanics of economic security. The proposal, vague on funding and implementation, arrives as artificial intelligence threatens to disrupt labor markets far faster than existing safety nets were designed to handle, leaving policymakers scrambling for answers that Musk's half-formed idea seems unlikely to provide. What began as a conversation about technology's disruption of work has become a test case in whether Silicon Valley's most influential figures can meaningfully shape policy debates they don't fully gra

New York Post·May 2