Then he laid out the particulars. “Every registered person will receive 2,280 shillings” — about $22 — “each and every month. You hear me?” The audience gasped and burst into wild applause. “Every person we register here will receive the money, I said — 2,280 shillings! Every month. This money, you will get for the next 12 years. How many years?”

“Twelve years!”

Just like that, with peals of ululation and children breaking into dance in front of the strangers, the whole village was lifted out of extreme poverty. (I have agreed to withhold its name out of concern for the villagers’ safety.) The nonprofit is in the process of registering roughly 40 more villages with a total of 6,000 adult residents, giving those people a guaranteed, 12-year-long, poverty-ending income. An additional 80 villages, with 11,500 residents all together, will receive a two-year basic income. With this initiative, GiveDirectly — with an office in New York and funded in no small part by Silicon Valley — is starting the world’s first true test of a universal basic income. The idea is perhaps most in vogue in chilly, left-leaning places, among them Canada, Finland, the Netherlands and Scotland. But many economists think it might have the most promise in places with poorer populations, like India and sub-Saharan Africa.

GiveDirectly wants to show the world that a basic income is a cheap, scalable way to aid the poorest people on the planet. “We have the resources to eliminate extreme poverty this year,” Michael Faye, a founder of GiveDirectly, told me. But these resources are often misallocated or wasted. His nonprofit wants to upend incumbent charities, offering major donors a platform to push money to the world’s neediest immediately and practically without cost.

A PR solution basically.

It's not income alone that increases or reduces poverty. Relative prices, monetary velocity, economic dimensions or worlds at play at any instance and other factors could reduce these incomes to present day levels of poverty, or even more poverty.

Comprehensive solution designs are needed. For example, distributed manufacturing can facilitate human-robotic co-working and income generation and distribution.

Robots could pay humans for tasks undertaken. Robots could be taxed ...

Maybe another important question may be of who owns the robots and how these owners can be taxed, and the proceeds distributed.

Who will be deemed to own the robots and how proceeds from taxation of owners can be distributed may as well be the important political issues of the future. But maybe there'll be much flexibility on how to integrate Ai and robotics to a population or state. Or maybe the right word is 'network' or 'netion state'.

I can imagine Bill Gates rationale, but I think it may be inefficient especially if the robots themselves are responsible for so many outcomes. I think the robots themselves should also be taxed and even charged for opportunities to work...