The first data from an experiment in a California city where needy people get $500 a month from the government shows they spend most of it on things such as food, clothing and utility bills. It is one of the few experiments testing the concept of “universal basic income,” an old idea getting new attention

The federal minister responsible for reducing poverty says he is interested in the idea of a guaranteed income in Canada. Veteran economist Jean-Yves Duclos, who is Minister of Families, Children and Social Development, told The Globe and Mail the concept has merit as a policy to consider after the government implements more immediate reforms promised during the election campaign. “There are many different types of guaranteed minimum income.

What an interesting place and an interesting time it is for a visit. Earth’s most intelligent primates are busy creating technologies that allow them all to do less work, freeing themselves from millennia of senseless toil and drudgery. Strangely, however, they are using such technologies to force each other to work longer and harder. In one area called the United States, responsible for so much of the world’s technological...

Nearly half of Americans would have trouble finding $400 to pay for an emergency. I’m one of them.

57% of the world's jobs are at risk of being automated. Universal Basic Income may be our only way out. Here's why.

“I’m not sure what else one would do.” In addition to addressing issues at SpaceX, Elon Musk spent some time during a Friday CNBC interview addressing how automation will impact the job market. Musk’s Tesla Motors is leading the way to self-driving cars, while also pushing factories to new levels of automation. And he thinks that workers displaced by those and other forms of automation will need help permanently, and on a broad scale.

Finland will soon hand out cash to 2,000 jobless people, free of bureaucracy or limits on side earnings. The idea, universal basic income, is gaining traction worldwide.

The idea of a universal basic income has found growing support in Silicon Valley as robots threaten to radically change the nature of work. Ebay founder Pierre Omidyar is the latest tech bigwig to get behind the concept. His philanthropic investment firm, the Omidyar Network, announced Wednesday that it will give nearly half a billion dollars to a group testing the policy in Kenya.

Almost two centuries ago an idea was born with such explanatory power that it created shock waves across all of human society and whose aftershocks we’re still feeling to this day. It’s so simple and yet so powerful, that after all these years, it remains capable of making people question their very faith. The idea of which I speak is that through random mutation and natural selection, every living thing around us was created through millions and even billions of years of what is effectively trial and error, not designed by some intelligent creator. It is the process of evolution through natural selection.

Participants in the pilot, designed to test if a basic income is a better way to support people living in poverty than the current system, will be randomly chosen by mail in the test communities and begin as early as this summer.

Invisible Sheep, the Missing Right, and the Return of Common Wealth. In the opening of the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, viewers are shown a historic moment in time where primitive man used the first tool. It was a bone, and used like a club, it allowed a physically weaker group to overpower a physically stronger group.

At the World Government Summit in Dubai, our real-world Tony Stark, Elon Musk, was throwing around some big and important ideas about the future of humanity. Musk says that Universal Basic Income — or an economic idea where everyone gets a paycheck from the government to spend how they wish — is one of the only solutions to the rise of robotic automation.

The district of Besós in Barcelona, Utrecht in the Netherlands and the Finnish city of Helsinki are all reportedly set to trial a universal basic income scheme. Residents will be given money for two years to lift them above the breadline as the scheme looks to investigate “innovative and creative solutions”. Each area will be been given €13m (£11m) from the European Union to fund the scheme, which will grant 1,000 randomly selected low-income households between €400 and €525 (£350 and £455) per month.

This month has shown that Hawaii may be the U.S.'s most forward-thinking state. Earlier in June, it became the first state to formally accept the provisions of the Paris Climate Accord, and now, the state congress has passed a bill that puts Hawaii on the path to universal basic income.

Finland has been giving 2,000 of its citizens an unconditional income for the last five months and some are already seeing the benefits, reporting decreased stress, greater incentives to find work and more time to pursue business ideas. The scheme is the first of its kind in Europe and sees participants receive €560 (£473) every month for two years. Recipients do not have to demonstrate that they are seeking employment and they are not required to regularly report to authorities to prove they still need the payment, as is the case with standard unemployment benefits. They can spend the money however they like.

Sooner rather than later, a robot is going to be able to do part or all of what you do for a living. In response to this and other pressures, the Canadian province of Ontario is gearing up to launch a basic income trial this summer. For a limited period of time, and in three regions across the province, the government will be giving people a living wage, for free and with no strings attached, and seeing how the hell it goes, eh?

The Facebook CEO remarked in a recent post that Alaska's approach to basic income "may be a lesson for the rest of the country as well."

At the beginning of this year, Finland launched a national experiment to determine the feasibility of universal basic income. However, due to problems with the trial and the country's economy, the results may not prove to be particularly useful.

With trials for self-driving commercial lorries to take place in the UK within the next twelve months, the work days of thousands of Britain’s long-haul drivers may soon be numbered. Of course, these are only preliminary tests – it may well be a decade or more before driverless deliveries and long-distance haulage are an everyday reality. However, with the beginnings already upon us, a boom in automated jobs is surely coming sooner rather than later.

The potential advantages and drawbacks of universal basic income have been debated fiercely in recent months, but a new study suggests that paying everyone an unconditional salary could have a welcomed side effect. According to US think tank The Roosevelt Institute, a system of universal basic income – or UBI – in the US, under which every citizen is given a basic government salary unconditionally could actually grow the economy on a permanent basis. But there is a catch.