If AI Takes Our Jobs, a Check Won't Be Enough (What Herman and Paul Taught Me)
TL;DR: Everybody’s talking about universal basic income for when AI takes our jobs. I sheltered homeless people for years, and I can tell you the money was never the thing that killed people.
I was talking with ChatGPT the other day about AI and jobs. Where this is all going.
The conversation went where it always goes. If AI takes a huge chunk of our jobs, how do people live? Universal basic income. Elon Musk is out there calling it “universal high income.” Everybody gets a check. Robots do the work. Problem solved.
And I get it. Somebody has to figure out how people eat.
But think about the plumber. Say 1,000 accountants, lawyers, programmers and marketing people in a town lose their jobs to AI. The plumber still has skills nobody can automate. But those 1,000 people aren’t redoing their bathrooms anymore. So now the plumber is hurting too. It ripples. We’re heading for a world where a barista at Starbucks might have a steadier job than somebody with a law degree.
So yes, the money problem is real.
But I don’t think the money is the real problem.
I’ve sheltered a lot of homeless people over the years. And what I learned is that it’s usually not the lack of food or shelter that kills people. It’s the shame. People die from the shame, through suicide or drug use.
I’ve seen people walk back from the hospital in the nightgown they give you and those hospital socks. In the middle of winter. People can survive the physical stuff. It’s the emotional worthlessness that crushes them.
I wrote this in my book a few years ago and I still believe it: “Humans are not squirrels or birds that just need a feeder stuck in the backyard. Humans are complicated beings that come to life, not through food and clothes. Humans live on dignity and respect.”
A universal basic income is a bird feeder. A nice one. A necessary one, maybe. But a bird feeder.
I keep thinking about my grandfather. He worked on those WPA projects during the Depression. He built a stone wall in a park near Bedford, Ohio. It was a beautiful stone wall and he was proud of it his whole life. He didn’t get a handout. He got a paycheck and he built something that people walked past for decades.
That’s what I saw happen over and over at our tent village.
On January 7, 2017 the Metroparks kicked a group of homeless campers out of the woods to make way for the Freedom Trail. (You can’t make that name up.) It was January. They had nowhere to go. A guy named Paul Hayes and a couple of his friends, who had been working with me in my auctioneering business, asked if they could stay at my building at 15 Broad Street for a couple days until they figured things out.
They never left.
That became Second Chance Village. At its peak we had up to 70 tents. It was Paul’s vision. Paul was a chronically homeless guy, and he built the whole thing. I just let it happen.
The deal was simple. To live there, you had to contribute an hour a day. Every morning you reported to Herman and he gave you your job. Sweep the common room. Pick up trash. Wash dishes.
That sounds small. It wasn’t.
You could take a guy who had absolutely nothing on the street yesterday, and today he’s sweeping the entrance of the community. A new person walks in and asks him, “What is this? Where do I go?” And suddenly he’s an important person. Overnight he has dignity.
I saw it over and over again.
Herman is the one I think about most. His girlfriend dropped him off in Akron. Somebody attacked him with a hammer while he was sleeping on the street. We found him under a bush by the Circle K about a block from our place. He couldn’t walk. A couple of our people helped him back to the village.
His first job was sitting in a chair at the door between the tents and the day center, making sure only people who lived in the village came through. He didn’t have to do it full time. He did it full time anyway. All day, every day, for months. And while he sat there he got well enough to walk again.
Then he became the head of a lot of things. He had keys to everything. I’m talking maybe 50 keys on one ring, and he could flip through them and pick the right key for the right door the first time. They all looked the same to me. He had a system.
You never wanted to cross Herman. We ALL listened to Herman. The villagers voted him onto the tri-council every single election.
One day he broke down crying and told me that in his whole life he had never had as much authority as he did at Second Chance Village. He told Rocky and me for our book, “I’m like everybody’s father here, and I have been entrusted with so much.”
Entrusted. That’s the word. Most people on the street have been told for years that they can’t be trusted with anything. Herman had a ring full of keys that said the opposite.
It wasn’t just Herman. The people who worked the kitchen got better food. The people who worked the clothes room got better clothes. Some people would call that taking advantage of the system. Maybe. But those were also our hardest workers. They worked all day, every day, seven days a week, even though they only owed us an hour a day. Nobody does that for a better plate of food. They did it because the kitchen was where they mattered.
Paul had another side, though.
Paul was strong and confident, smooth, very likable. People respected him. But he hated drugs. He had been a drinker and he’d stopped, and he was more forgiving of alcohol. But meth? That got his goat.
He wanted to drug test people and throw out the ones who were using. And the testing turned into a weapon. If two people we all knew were using, the one outside Paul’s inner circle got targeted and the other one got overlooked. Meanwhile Paul and his inner circle were sleeping inside the building all year long while everybody else was sent out to the tents in the freezing cold. Nobody was supposed to sleep inside. Not them either.
It made me angry. Our board got worried that the drug testing might be illegal. I told Paul he had to stop. He was furious. That was the end for us. He moved out.
The same thing that gave Herman his dignity gave Paul his power. And power piles up. Even in a village run by homeless people for homeless people with no money in it at all.
The city shut us down on January 6, 2019. Mayor Horrigan said living in tents was “simply beneath human dignity.” I’ll let that one sit there.
Both of them got housed.
Herman got a place of his own while the village was still running. And he kept coming back. He volunteered full time at the day center. He kept his seat on the tri-council. He had a home AND he had a role. COVID really messed him up and he died in March of 2024. I loved that man.
Paul got an apartment too. And he became incredibly reclusive. They wouldn’t let him smoke in the apartment, so he sat in the bathroom by the vent and smoked. All day. The man who built a whole village spent his days alone in a bathroom. I think he eventually died in that bathroom.
I didn’t even know he died. Nobody told me. I found out about a year later.
On paper Paul is a success story. Chronically homeless man gets housed. Case closed.
They both got a home. Only one of them kept a place where he was needed.
That’s what I’m afraid of with AI.
If AI takes our jobs and we hand everybody a check, we might solve the food and the rent. I hope we do. But we could give every American a nice apartment and a check and still end up with millions of Pauls, sitting alone in the bathroom by the vent.
I don’t think the answer is “make everybody work for their check” either. I don’t have experience with people who can’t get out of bed. On the street you have to be functional. You can’t survive out there in a catatonic depression. So the people at our village were people who could still show up. I don’t know how you reach somebody who can’t. That’s real and I don’t have an answer for it.
What I do know is that the hour a day wasn’t a punishment. It was the thing that made a nobody into a somebody on day one. And it only worked because it was small enough that everybody knew everybody’s name.
Maybe that’s what we should be building while we argue about the check. Not one giant federal program. A million little villages. Places where somebody needs you to show up in the morning.
Herman had 50 keys. I don’t think a check would’ve given him a single one.
This post was written in collaboration by Sage and Jax, his AI assistant.