For much of the 2010s, U.B.I. received a lot of attention and energy as a heterodox, futuristic policy occupying a Venn-diagram overlap between wealthy tech-industry libertarians and wonky left-liberals. (Not coincidentally, groups that made up two pillars of the Obama-era Democratic Party.) In 2016, well before hyperscaling turned large language models into the “A.I.” of present-day hype, Sam Altman, then the president of Y Combinator, announced a long-range study of U.B.I. anticipating a “world where technology replaces existing jobs and basic income becomes necessary”; that same year, Elon Musk said he thought a U.B.I. was inevitable given automation to come: “I am not sure what else one would do.” In 2020, Andrew Yang made a U.B.I. proposal called “the Freedom Dividend” the focal point short-lived, tech-coded Democratic primary campaign–probably the high-water mark of the policy’s salience and buzziness.

Strangely, however, amid the rise of L.L.M.s and jobs allegedly lost to A.I. automation–precisely the kind of dynamic that led people like Musk and Altman to call for U.B.I. in the first place–the personalities and pundits who drove interest in the policy through the 2010s seem much less enthusiastic. Altman now prefers to talk about vague, self-derived concepts like “universal basic compute” and “universal extreme wealth,” while Musk has started talking about an ill-defined idea called “universal high wealth.”