Meet the woman running Sam Altman’s universal basic income study to find out how cash payments can mitigate AI-related jobs losses

– Open research. Elizabeth Rhodes was finishing up her PhD in social work and political science and looking for jobs in 2016 when she saw a blog post from Sam Altman, then the leader of Y Combinator. He announced his plan to support a study of universal basic income, the system in which people receive unconditional monthly payments.

After seeing the post, Rhodes applied to a position leading the study and became the research director for YC Research, which was renamed OpenResearch after Altman moved to OpenAI. At the time, she knew little about Altman, Y Combinator, or Silicon Valley. Once she got the job, she learned fast.

She ran Altman’s pilot program and now oversees the full universal basic income study. For three years, the study provided 3,000 participants with either $1,000 per month or $50 a month. It recently finished providing cash transfers to recipients in two states and plans to release its first findings later this year.

Courtesy of Open Research

The organization has remained quiet throughout its research; Rhodes has rarely done interviews. Altman is still chair of OpenResearch but has “given us total independence,” Rhodes says. (She “watched from afar” last year’s OpenAI drama.) OpenResearch is one of many side projects for the OpenAI CEO.

Altman’s interest in universal basic income is related to his work as CEO of OpenAI—if AI eliminates jobs, could guaranteed cash help workers who lose their income? In 2021, Altman said he believed AI could generate enough wealth to pay every U.S. Adult $13,500 a year. “He was definitely thinking about future labor market changes—not just what happens if robots take jobs, but also a recognition of the challenges we’re facing today with distribution of resources and opportunities across the population,” Rhodes says.

Rhodes brought a more traditional social work perspective to the research. “We did everything sort of the opposite of ‘move fast,'” she says. “We didn’t move slow for slow’s sake, but thinking through different challenges and ‘what ifs.'” Indeed, the study was sometimes criticized for moving too slowly.

In the years since Altman first expressed an interest in UBI, others have devoted more research to the idea. “At the time, no one was talking about it,” Rhodes says. A recent experiment in Washington, D.C. Sent cash payments to new moms. In 2022, a study found that similar payments to moms improved babies’ brain functioning. OpenResearch’s study is one of the largest on this topic (and one of the largest privately funded studies in the U.S.).

When OpenResearch begins sharing the results of its research, it plans to cover study recipients’ time use, mental and physical health, decision-making, crime, politics and social attitudes, and effects on children.

Emma Hinchliffe
[email protected]
@_emmahinchliffe

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