Universally Accessible Scholarships

Why it matters?

A possible scenario:

5 years later: we encounter unknown risk x. (e.g., a disease)

1. UBI Scenario: the talent pool is not large enough, and we die.
2. UAS Scenario: educated people quickly find a cure.

Problem

Artificial intelligence and robotization is projected^L to replace human labor in nearly every job. At the same time, we have a number world's challenges that need talent to be addressed - health, engineering, science, climate change, modelling the universe, and even arts to help express ideas and align political philosophies.

UBI: Universal Basic Income

The unconditional basic income (UBI) has been proposed^L as a remedy for the technological unemployment. However, I am convinced that the UBI is unlikely^L to have significant impact on solving the world's pressing issues, including the problem of unemployment itself. The majority of people seem to think locally and short-term, thus without any guided incentives, UBI is unlikely to support the activities directed towards addressing the fundamental problems of society.

UAS: Universally Accessible Schlarships

MOOCs Could be Studied

A hope has been placed on the massive open online courses (MOOCs) to provide free or nearly-free education to peole. Unfortunately, MOOCs had failed to create the talent they promised, as their course completion rates remain low.^{L (below 5%?)}

Talent Could be Created

The reasons are, perhaps, not that people do not want to study, but rather, that the time investment needed to learn and fully comprehend all the details in the MOOCs is prohibitive for people to do that.

If We Help People Learn

It stays a hypothesis, that if the MOOCs paid hourly wage of at least half of the minimum hourly wage in a country, there would be many people who would suddenly find the time to study, and eventually become experts in their fields of interest, eventually finding paid positions, or doing very useful paid work, providing value to society, and maybe saving our lives some 5 years later.

SUMMARY

I argue that the idea of Unconditional Basic Income proposedL (UBI) is sub-optimal for creation of the talent needed to address the world's emerging challenges. Instead, I propose the idea of negatively priced education as an alternative that provides the financial resources through universally available scholarships (UAS) to learn skills on the abundantly available MOOCs, which had automated the self-education process.

^L: is a reference to "Link" -- meaning I had seen this datum somewhere on the Internet, and will add the link later when I find exactly where.