Universal Basic Income

05/05/17 • 41 min

Scott Santens is a writer and an advocate for universal basic income. His articles have been featured in TechCrunch, the Boston Globe, and Politico, among other places. Scott has coauthored two books: What Do We Do About Inequality? and Surviving the Machine Age: Intelligent Technology and the Transformation of Human Work. He also moderates the sub-Reddit /r/BasicIncome.

Scott talks about why he believes “citizen’s salary” is a necessary measure for our societies to deal with tech unemployment by providing an independent income floor. He finds it paradoxical that we keep on developing technology to help us do more, while also being afraid of tech taking over our jobs. In these circumstances, he notes, a new model of ownership needs to be implemented, with everyone starting from the same point.

For further reading on Scott’s work and UBI, visit:

For further reading on Scott’s work and UBI, visit:

Previous Episode

How Music Could Take the Place of Drugs

Marko Ahtisaari is the CEO and cofounder of The Sync Project, a collaborative venture of scientists, musicians, technologists, and patients, working toward developing functional music that responds to each individual body and serves as precision medicine.

Marko is also a director’s fellow at the MIT Media Lab, working on the Open Music Initiative to develop a new distributed ledger system to identify and compensate music rights holders and creators. He was the executive vice president of design at Nokia and worked on award-winning N9 and Lumia products. His startup Dopplr was acquired by Nokia.

Marko presents ideas and undergoing projects born out of the vision that in the near future people will use non-drug modalities to heal, enhance well-being, and assist in therapy. He guides us through the recent experiment Unwind.ai, which uses your heart rate to select the tracks that will bring you peace of mind — at least for 5 minutes.

For further reading on the Sync Project and music in medicine, please see:

Understanding Music as Precision Medicine
Sync Music Bot (cutting-edge music recommendation technology)
UNWIND.AI (using biometric data to generate music for sleep)
Studies in neuroscience reveal music’s effect on the reward system
Using music to manage pain
Using music to support physical activity and sports training
More on music recommendation/analysis technology in general

Next Episode

Code as the Key Driver of Human Development

For the tech community, code has an almost exclusively uniform meaning: a set of instructions, until recently written only by humans, that specify any action a computer should execute.

In his most recent book, The Code Economy: A Forty-Thousand-Year History, Philip Auerswald talks about “code” in a broader meaning of the word — it is the “how” of human productivity, the manner in which we create, refine, and implement the infrastructure that forms a human society. The advancements of code, from the Neolithic era to the modern times, have driven identity and work reinvention. Philip argues that we are at one of those crucial stages now, and his book offers a guide to the future.

Auerswald is an associate professor of public policy at the George Mason University Schar School of Policy and Government and a coeditor of Innovations, a quarterly journal about entrepreneurial solutions to global challenges. He currently leads the Global Entrepreneurship Research Network, an initiative of the Kauffman Foundation.