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South Korea Floats 'Citizen Dividend' Using AI Profits 94

Posted by BeauHD from the universal-basic-ai-income dept.
South Korea's presidential policy chief is calling for a "citizen dividend" that would return some AI-driven profits and tax revenue to the public. The Straits Times. From the report: Presidential policy chief Kim Yong-beom said in a Facebook post that a portion of the profits and tax revenue derived from the artificial intelligence boom "should be structurally returned to all citizens." That is because, Mr Kim argued, the economic gains from AI are based at least partly on industrial infrastructure built by the country over five decades. Mr Kim's comments come after tens of thousands of people gathered outside Samsung's main chip hub in April to demand employees get a greater share of AI profits. The company's labour union wants 15 per cent of operating profit handed to chip-division employees.

The union has threatened an 18-day strike starting May 21. Workers have pointed to rising payouts at SK Hynix, which in 2025 agreed to allocate 10 per cent of its annual operating profit to a performance bonus pool, as evidence they deserve more pay. "Excess profits in the AI era are, by nature, concentrated," Mr Kim wrote. Memory companies, core engineers and asset holders are highly likely to receive substantial benefits, while much of the middle class may experience only indirect effects.

South Korea Floats 'Citizen Dividend' Using AI Profits More | Reply

South Korea Floats 'Citizen Dividend' Using AI Profits

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  • When the bubble collapses, are they going to bill everybody?

    • Re: fuck ai sayo! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by AvitarX ( 172628 ) <me&brandywinehundred,org> on Tuesday May 12, 2026 @07:39PM (#66140797) Journal

      I think the concept is that if a company announces mass layoffs because AI yountax them per employee.

      I assume what would actually happen is honesty in layoffs, notbtax revenue.

      • Re: fuck ai sayo! (Score:5, Interesting)

        by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Tuesday May 12, 2026 @08:19PM (#66140831)

        If you punish companies for firing, you get less hiring.

        Countries with inflexible labor markets tend to have higher unemployment.

        • Re: fuck ai sayo! (Score:3, Insightful)

          by fortfive ( 1582005 )

          But better quality of life overall for regular folks.

          • Including unemployed people

            • So still better overall then.

              • Yes, that was my point. I'd rather be unemployed in Europe than struggling to make ends meet with two jobs in the US. Don't get me started on healthcare.

                • Yes, that was my point. I'd rather be unemployed in Europe than struggling to make ends meet with two jobs in the US. Don't get me started on healthcare.

                  I'd rather work in the US, with all the opportunities to be found here.....either director or actual 1099 contract working....where I can make more than a comfortable living.

                  I have good insurance and have access to the best and most modern health care options in the world here in the US....I wouldn't want to live anywhere else. Life if GREAT here.

                  Every

                  • It's great that it works for you. I didn't try to convince you otherwise. We can all be happy that you are where you want to be. There's many people who have a different take than you.

                    and when a serious illness hits you in the EU or Canada why do you try your best to get to the US for treatments that your socialize medicines won't or can't cover?

                    I don't know about Canada but I haven't heard about Europeans doing this. That being said, if you have enough money, I think the healthcare is good in the US, so I wouldn't be surprised if some rich Europeans did that. But rich people are not a concern, they're going to be fine no matter what. For most people, US healthcare is

                  • > and when a serious illness hits you in the EU or Canada why do you try your best to get to the US for treatments that your socialize medicines won't or can't cover?

                    Why are so many Americans taking âoemedical vacationsâ in Mexico and elsewhere?

                    And to your point about immigration, just because things suck worse other places doesnâ(TM)t mean America still sucks for many. Iâ(TM)m well off atm, but Iâ(TM)m also a just person, and I can see how my lifestyle is supported by extractive

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by mjwx ( 966435 )

          If you punish companies for firing, you get less hiring.

          Countries with inflexible labor markets tend to have higher unemployment.

          If you don't punish companies for firing, you end up with both less hiring and more firing... And those that are left have to do the work of 3 people because if they don't, they'll be fired too.

          Countries with strong labour protection tend not to have higher unemployment but they do have a better quality of life.

          • And the company in your example goes out of business due to poor management. That's the "punishment". Fire everyone and you go out of business.

            • I don't seem to remember many McD's or BK's closing, and they do exactly that... lobby guy also works the "grill" and the fries and assembles the burger and everything... what used to be 3-4 peoples jobs done by one, for the same money.
              All businesses were starting to go that way, now it's s***-can everyone and fire up the AI.

              • Having worked at one of those, I can tell you that the number of employees on the clock is determined by the time of day. I was a closer, so I made food for a couple of hours then cleaned the kitchen. I would be there with one or two other employees and a manager. During lunch, there were about a dozen people working.
        • to do anything that inconveniences Rich assholes. -



          By: some rich asshole. "

          I have said it before and I will say it again, if the Private industry refuses to make the economy go the government should step in and do it. If Private industry will not hire then we have to organize together and form organizations that will hire. That organization is called government. It's the name of the organization that isn't private and is composed of basically everyone.

          You can't just keep saying that everything
          • We tried that. Specifically, FDR tried it. It failed. Government trying to give everyone busywork ended up prolonging and worsening the Great Depression. The market wasn't able to reset and correct.

            The only places where it worked at all were totalitarian states, where the state was already making the employment and industrial decisions. So, Hitler and Stalin got some benefit, but it just didn't work in free markets.

            • I rarely look at comment moderation, but that someone said I was trolling there is simply pathetic. But, in the end, meaningless. I'll just go back to ignoring those notes as I don't actually care.

          • You mean unionize, rsilvergun?
            Works great until you unionize at a place that is hostile to unions that will fire anyone who tries to organize or just make their life a living hell until they quit (not to mention, the places that allow it, always have the union in their pocket, coming up with new rules and stuff in midnight sessions that the workers don't vote in because they didn't know about it).

            Or, do you mean overthrow the current government? That'll go over real well. Or, just write to your Senator/Co

        • If you punish companies for firing, you get less hiring.

          I want companies to think before hiring so that they do less firing. That naturally means they're going to do less hiring. But firing causes chaos and overhiring masks actual unemployment. If you're not employed for long enough to get out of a hole, it doesn't count in terms of the nation's economic health, but it looks like it does because it reduces unemployment statistics.

          • That's what they do. You don't hire people just for the heck of it, you hire because you believe you'll need more people. Sometimes, the things you thought you'd need more people for don't pan out.

            • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

              by drinkypoo ( 153816 )

              That's what they do. You don't hire people just for the heck of it, you hire because you believe you'll need more people.

              Or you hire lots of people and expect to get rid of the ones you like least. Or you hire people you know you don't need for long because you'll be downsizing soon. Or you hire people to keep them away from your competitors. Or several other reasons you don't know dick about but still think you're qualified to run your mouth.

        • And, you get more companies replacing those jobs that were occupied by humans with a single computer running a whole department from a broom closet.

          How about countries without a labor market because AI does everything?

      • How do you decide if a job was lost due to AI? What happens when this generation dies and the next generation cannot fathom that some specific work was done without AI and therefore has to now be compensated?

        • How do you decide if a job was lost due to AI? = Did AI take your job... that's the point, that AI took your job. Whether it's AI controlling a robot that took your job or AI filling in the charts you used to fill in or AI coding something that you used to code... AI took that job. That's what losing a job to AI means.

          Well, Big Business could decide not to compensate people for jobs that were lost to AI, and we all starve in the streets, a la a 1929.
          I'd rather be compensated for not being able to find any

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Nugoo ( 1794744 )
        Why do you think this? I don't see anything in the article or summary that suggests companies will be taxed per layoff.

    • AI or no AI there is a massive automation push (Score:5, Interesting)

      by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Tuesday May 12, 2026 @09:43PM (#66140889)
      And it's going to result in permanent unemployment. It's debatable how much but we're not ever going to see full employment ever again. Not with this much automation.

      To be thoroughly honest we are cooking the books using sub minimum wage gig work to pretend that we aren't already well below full employment. I don't know South Korea's numbers but here in America there is only one good job for every five americans. A good job here being defined as paying enough that you can afford a modest house, reliable transportation, healthcare and to save for retirement when you're too old to physically work anymore. No extravagant luxuries per se. But what people used to call a working class living. Basically 50 years and you get to die in peace.

      That kind of living is only available to one in five Americans.

      We're going to have to do something and I suspect that something is going to be world War 3. It's not a coincidence that world War II kicked off when unemployment hit 25%..

      I have seen multiple people who got forced to come back into the office complaining about coworkers that work from home or get to go home and finish their day out. Instead of those people demanding work from home for themselves they demand the people around them also are forced to come into the office. Even though the extra traffic on the streets makes their commute worse and means that they don't get the nicest parking spots.

      But if it's one thing I've seen over and over and over again it's that for the sake of feeling like it's all fair people cheerfully stab themselves in the back. The animalistic urge for fairness is easily exploitable. Gets us all into a nice little crabs in a bucket situation.

      Meanwhile Elon Musk is getting ready to do a massive stock scam worth almost 2 trillion dollars and it's going to get dumped in all our retirement plans at some point.
      • Where are your numbers? You say 1 in 5 have a "good job", under a loose definition that you seem to have invented yourself. Prove it?

        You're also wrong about the conditions leading to WWII. German unemployment had fallen considerably by the time they started invading their neighbors (US unemployment was irrelevant, we aren't in Europe and didn't start it). But reducing unemployment is easy in a command economy. For a while.

    • When the turkey dies, do you wait until Christmas to eat it? Or do you eat it while it's fresh?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Nugoo ( 1794744 )
      Yes, but this is going to happen anyway.

  • The Profits should be competed away (Score:3)

    by Bruce66423 ( 1678196 ) on Tuesday May 12, 2026 @07:13PM (#66140769)

    As other companies sell the same things and all of them compete the price down. Of course the software industry has done a great job of preventing this from happening; Microsoft and Apple ensure that operating systems haven't got cheaper etc. etc. By contrast the crippling of the US car industry by foreign companies demonstrates how even the most apparently secure can be humbled, and the fading of such past giants as IBM is similarly a warning.

    • Foreign automakers sell better products at better prices. The US industry shot itself in the foot because they see the short term dollar signs selling $100k trucks that never leave pavement. Gas hit $5 a gallon here and the domestic companies are tooling up to sell the new 2027 6000 SUX.

    • An OS costs under $200 in 2026 dollars.

      Seems to have gotten pretty cheap.

    • Are you kidding man? Apple hardware has never been cheaper and the os is included.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Tom ( 822 )

      Microsoft and Apple ensure that operating systems haven't got cheaper etc.

      errr... Apple doesn't charge for its operating system. macOS literally doesn't have a price.

      • Or they charge quite a lot for it and just roll that into the price of the hardware. You could, if you like, compare the price of a Mac to a similarly specced PC, and call the difference the price of the OS. Not very accurate, but you could do it.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Tom ( 822 )

          Not just not accurate but wrong.

          That's like saying the price of the battery in an electric car is that car's price minus the price of a comparable ICE car. No, it isn't. There are more differences than just the battery.

          And yes, of course they recoup their development costs. But that doesn't mean that the OP is right in this context.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by EvilSS ( 557649 )
      If demand keeps up at the levels it is now, they will. The problem is no one wants to invest in new capacity for a bubble, which makes sense. Eventually either the demand or the supply will right-size. It's just going to be a painful period until they do.

  • Agreed (Score:3)

    by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Tuesday May 12, 2026 @07:22PM (#66140779)

    ... a portion of the profits and tax revenue derived from the artificial intelligence boom "should be structurally returned to all citizens. ... the economic gains from AI are based at least partly on industrial infrastructure built by the country over five decades.

    AIs were trained on information generated by people. Where's our (collective) dividend? What's our benefit? And being made redundant, after training our AI replacement, doesn't count. Granted, some people created more information than others, but everyone played some part. For example. the guy cutting a researcher's lawn allowed the the latter to spend more tome and concentration on his work.

    Mr Kim wrote. Memory companies, core engineers and asset holders are highly likely to receive substantial benefits, while much of the middle class may experience only indirect effects.

    That's going to work out for the former only so long, before the rest of the people tire of cake.

    • The "collective dividend" is the product itself. You may as well ask what the collective dividend of the internet is. Hint - it's the internet. The railroads made some people incredibly rich and were built with considerable help from the government (policy and eminent domain). What was the public dividend? Railroads.

      Korea put a lot of money into power and network infrastructure, now they have AI infrastructure as well. That's the dividend.

  • can you imagine trump up there declaring to pay everyone a public dividend for the data centers that have been shat all over our country?

    • can you imagine trump up there declaring to pay everyone a public dividend for the data centers that have been shat all over our country?

      Is that likeTrump promising $2,000 tafiff dividend payments [abcnews.com]?

    • Could you imagine someone saying that about the railroads 140 years ago? It's pretty obvious now what the public dividend was - an economic boom. Yeah, a small number of people became fabulously wealthy in the process, but everyone benefitted.
      • to say everyone will benefit from datacenters is misinformed at best and dishonest at worst. leaving the environmental impact aside for a moment, all this "economic boom" has done thus far is to hire transient labor, not local labor, to build these monstrosities. the big tech firms and the remoras the suck onto them are getting wealthy, but the rest of us are seeing record inflation and wages that don't keep up with that. Plus basically everyone's job is sort of on the the chopping block now. So yeah, a

  • Wealth redistribution? (Score:3)

    by marcle ( 1575627 ) on Tuesday May 12, 2026 @07:55PM (#66140817)

    People talk about it like it's a Commie plot, but if we don't even out the inequality at least a little, it's gonna be bad for the economy and bad for all of us.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mjwx ( 966435 )

      People talk about it like it's a Commie plot, but if we don't even out the inequality at least a little, it's gonna be bad for the economy and bad for all of us.

      Why is it, when my wealth is transferred to the already wealthy it's never called "wealth redistribution". Like class warfare... it's only called that when we fight back.

      • Because people have been convinced that having people pay for things, let alone necessities, is the natural order. But before money was invented, there was another natural order, and it was equity — not equality. We know this because we've studied hominid skeletons from prehistoric times and found that people were caring for each other, they didn't just abandon the inconvenient, despite health insurance not having been invented either.

        • Well, no, not really. Resource pooling in hunter/gatherer tribes is not "equity", it's the most basic group survival strategy. And it tends to fall apart when you get to around 30 people.
      • What, you mean when you buy some good or service from a wealthy person?
    • There are cycles involved. The moment is irrelevant, nothing is permanent.

      • There are cycles involved.

        Why don't you get the fuck on yours and pedal the fuck out of here, bootlicker?

        • Why do you react so angrily to disagreement? You act like being challenged is a direct insult against everyone you hold dear. I don't understand why you respond with such intense hostility to completely benign comments. It doesn't look good. It comes across as you having such little faith in what you are saying that you can't actually defend it, only lash out at whoever almost made you think about it.

          No matter the reason, I'm still praying for you every night. I promise you that letting Jesus into yo

          • Why do you react so angrily to disagreement?

            Oh look, you're morally bankrupt and stupid. Already knew that, though.

            I promise you that letting Jesus into your life will make it better.

            Oh, THAT is the specific kind of creeper dipshit you are. I wondered. I do not want or need Jesus to save me from what Jesus is going to do to me (send me to hell) if I don't love him. Your god is the most pathetic abusive substitute for an abusive spouse ever imagined by sad little men.

            • Still, anger towards someone who bears none for you. Why?

              Have you considered that perhaps you're reacting with such anger because your position was an emotional one and now I'm asking you to think about it instead? I'm well aware of how uncomfortable that can be. As much as I want to not cause you discomfort, I have to wonder if maybe a little now will save you from worse in the future.

              You're laboring under so many misapprehensions. Jesus will save you from what you're doing to yourself. Look at you

  • While universal basic income is a useful policy tool and I think we WILL reach it eventually, there are economics papers out there that demonstrate that, sans Pigouvian transaction tax, AI is a race to the bottom.

    The AI Layoff Trap by Brett Hemenway Falk and Gerry Tsoukalas is still sitting on my desktop. A quick Google search reveals they are not the only ones who are pursuing this line of thinking.

    BUt here in the U.S. "muh freedumb" will ensure that we run that race till the bottom falls out. Hopefully As

  • ...what profits?

  • Stop giving the distractions and news to divide people a mention.

    The first headline and policy issue should be "How to make South Korea a livable country, where people start families in their early 20s, most families stay together for decades, and where parents can raise their own children without working at the office + home for 90 hours a week?"

    Decades of ignoring 50% of the population and paying/handouts to the other half the population have not increased family formation or reduced the number of childle

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