23/09/2026
With AI Here to Take Away Your Jobs, It’s Time to Make Survival of the Weakest the Top Priority
Why India Must Prepare for the Age of Universal Basic Income, Health & Education
By
For centuries, the social contract rested on a simple bargain: work, earn, survive. Technology is beginning to change that, and India—along with the rest of the world—has to take the possibility seriously before events force the issue.
AI is here, and most of yesterday’s education will soon be useless and replaceable. Millions across the world are expected to lose their jobs, and the fear of a looming recession is absolutely genuine. The combination of economic uncertainty, artificial intelligence and a changing structure of work is serious enough for governments to design responses now rather than wait for a crisis. India has particular reason to do so. Hundreds of millions of people ultimately depend on finding and keeping paid work. AI is already reaching occupations that earlier waves of automation left relatively untouched, including skilled and non-routine work. The IMF estimates that about 26 per cent of Indian workers are in occupations with high AI exposure, with roughly 12 per cent in roles where displacement risk is especially pronounced.
The question is not whether every exposed job will vanish. It is what happens to society when growth can be produced with fewer human beings. That is the point at which welfare itself has to be rethought.
The Industrial Revolution destroyed occupations and created others. The computer revolution did the same on a larger scale. AI may differ in degree because it can substitute for parts of cognitive, creative, administrative and professional work, not only physical labour. The ILO has warned that AI adoption, weak investment and other structural pressures are making decent work harder to expand. Its 2026 assessment puts the global jobs gap at around 408 million people. That does not mean 408 million jobs are about to disappear. It means the world already has a vast mismatch between people who need productive opportunities and the opportunities available. AI could widen that mismatch in some fields even as it generates large productivity gains in others.
The paradox is sharp: firms can become dramatically more productive while millions of individuals become more insecure.
That will not so much be a failure of technology as a failure of how its gains are distributed.
This is why the case for a universal basic income, health and education becomes stronger. The premise is straightforward: people should not have to earn the right to survive. Work can still provide income, purpose and dignity. Survival itself should not depend on a job. If ten people can one day produce what a hundred once produced, it is not enough to tell the remaining ninety to look elsewhere. Some will find new work; some will not. When society can generate abundance with less labour, the better question is why technological progress should leave people poorer rather than freer.
Universal Basic Income is not merely another poverty scheme. It is a possible social contract for an economy in which employment is less predictable. A genuine UBI would provide every person with a cash floor without requiring them to prove poverty, unemployment or moral desert.
The World Bank describes it as a universal, unconditional transfer and notes potential advantages in coverage, reduced exclusion errors, less stigma and greater security, while also stressing unresolved questions of cost, inflation, financing and its relationship with existing programmes.
India has already debated the idea at the highest level. The Economic Survey 2016–17 treated UBI as conceptually attractive because of its universality, unconditionality and respect for individual agency, while flagging fiscal and administrative difficulties. Under the assumptions used then, a transfer large enough to bring poverty close to 0.5 per cent was estimated to cost about 4–5 per cent of GDP. That conversation needs to be reopened, this time with AI and automation in the foreground. The issue is no longer only how to abolish poverty. It is how to guarantee economic security when work itself may become less secure.
Income is not sufficient. A monthly cash transfer that leaves a household ruined by cancer, heart disease, an accident or major surgery is not security. Healthcare has to be the second pillar. Universal Basic Health means essential care without financial catastrophe. The World Bank estimates that some 4.6 billion people worldwide still lack essential health services and that about two billion face severe hardship because of medical spending. In India, a single serious illness can wipe out decades of family savings. If AI and automation eventually raise productivity significantly, part of that dividend should be converted into longer, healthier and more secure lives—not simply more luxury for those who already have it.
The third pillar is education, and in an age of AI that cannot mean merely placing children in classrooms. It has to mean lifelong access to quality education and reskilling. The system must prepare people not for one occupation but for a working life in which occupations appear and disappear. If the skills the economy demands change every few years, education cannot stop at 18, 21 or 25. Citizens will need to learn, unlearn and relearn. That is why education should be treated as infrastructure, not charity.
A civilisation should be judged not only by the wealth it creates but by what happens to the weakest person when the system shifts. My principle of “Survival of the Weakest”, which I elaborated in my book The Great Indian Dream, inverts the familiar Darwinian phrase. A society possessing extraordinary technological and economic power should use it so that those with the least control over events are not crushed by them. AI should not become another mechanism for shifting wealth from labour to capital. It should become a way of turning productivity into human freedom.
That raises the hardest practical question: who pays? A universal floor cannot rest on slogans. It requires revenue, which means a serious look at taxation. If AI, automation, intellectual property and concentrated ownership allow a relatively small number of firms and individuals to capture a rising share of gains, tax systems designed for a labour-intensive economy may no longer be adequate. The aim need not be to punish wealth. It is to ensure that extraordinary returns made possible by public infrastructure, an educated workforce and shared institutions contribute enough to keep society stable. Progressive taxes on income, capital gains, wealth, inheritance, property and economic rents all belong in the discussion. Those who capture the largest gains from a highly productive economy can reasonably be asked to contribute a larger share towards the floor that keeps the economy itself from fracturing. That is insurance as much as redistribution.
Money transferred to people living close to the edge is also more likely to be spent. A person at the top of the distribution cannot consume ten thousand times as much food, clothing or basic care as someone struggling to survive. That additional demand becomes income for shopkeepers, farmers, manufacturers, transport workers, doctors, teachers and other service providers. Well-designed social protection can therefore support domestic demand. Both the World Bank and the ILO have pointed to broader gains from such systems: lower poverty, stronger human capital, higher productivity and better protection against shocks.
Waiting for a collapse before building a safety net would be short-sighted. Social systems, tax reforms, hospitals and schools all take years. People who lose their livelihoods cannot wait years for a solution to be invented. Preparation has to come first.
India should therefore open a national argument about a progressively designed basic income; universal essential healthcare; high-quality education that continues through adult life; AI literacy and reskilling; stronger protection against unemployment and disability; ways of sharing productivity gains from automation; and tax arrangements capable of financing a social floor without becoming unsustainable as the nature of work changes.
The highest achievement of capitalism and technology should not be that an algorithm makes a billionaire richer by replacing ten thousand workers. It should be that those ten thousand people can live better because society has become far more productive. The promise of AI is not only that machines will do more of the work. It is that human beings may eventually have to do less work merely to survive. That prospect is frightening if the gains accrue only to capital. It can be liberating if they are shared.
The choice is political, economic and philosophical. India and the world should start making it now.
Universal Basic Income, Universal Basic Health and Universal Basic Education are not charity, nor are they an excuse to stop working. They are the possible foundations of a society in which technological progress produces security, freedom and a measure of happiness rather than redundancy.
If machines become capable of extraordinary abundance, the decisive question will no longer be how many jobs we can create. It will be how we ensure that every human being shares in the abundance civilisation has produced. That, more than how high the strongest can climb, is a better measure of progress: how securely the weakest can live.
