The Wall Street Journal reports that several of “Silicon Valley’s elite” believe the artificial intelligence boom will generate massive wealth even as it displaces millions of workers, leaving them unemployed. Their solution to this unemployment crisis is to use the newly generated wealth from AI to provide a universal basic income for everyone.

It’s a terrible idea for several reasons. But it could be tweaked to address a huge public policy problem: funding Social Security.

The idea of a universal basic income has been around for decades. While proposals vary, the basic plan is a taxpayer-funded redistribution scheme: providing everyone with a designated amount of money — usually between $500 to $1,000 per month — with no strings or work attached.

Wall Street Journal reporter Josh Reich notes that Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes have used their own money to set up limited universal basic income, or UBI, pilot programs to see if they work. And they aren’t alone. Stanford University’s Basic Income Lab tracks UBI programs around the........

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