A concept in formation
UBIConf is a proposed conference on the future of income — a serious, cross-partisan conversation about universal basic income, automation, and what people are owed when the link between a job and a livelihood starts to loosen.
Status: gathering interest. No date, no venue, no tickets — yet. That part is deliberate, and explained below.
Every year, more of the world's work is done by software and machines, and more of its income concentrates in fewer hands. Whether your answer is a universal basic income, a negative income tax, sovereign dividends, shorter weeks, or none of the above — the question underneath is now unavoidable: how does a society organise income when it can no longer organise it entirely through jobs?
UBIConf is being formed to hold that conversation in one room: researchers who run the trials, economists who model the funding, technologists building the automation, policymakers who have actually administered cash programs, and the people whose working lives are being rearranged. Agreement is not the goal. Contact with reality is.
These are the conversations the conference is being designed around. They are themes under exploration, not a published program — no speakers have been announced, because none have been booked.
Basic-income trials have run on several continents, at scales from villages to cities. What did they measure, what did they find, and what did they fail to test? An evidence-first session, including the unflattering results.
AI and robotics are changing which human hours the market pays for. What happens to bargaining power, to entry-level work, and to the assumption that a job is the default delivery mechanism for a living?
Every income-floor proposal meets the same wall: the arithmetic. Tax design, consolidation of existing programs, sovereign and resource dividends — the funding models, stress-tested in public, including by their critics.
Care work, creative work, community work — the labour the market prices at zero. If income partly decouples from employment, what happens to status, purpose, and how people spend a life?
Inflation risk, labour-supply effects, political durability, the danger of dismantling targeted support for a universal floor that proves too thin. A conference that cannot host its own strongest critics is a rally, not a conference.
Payment rails, eligibility, fraud control, interaction with existing benefits. The unglamorous machinery that decides whether any income policy survives contact with the real world.
This is an honest interest-capture page for a conference in the process of being formed. The size and shape of the response to this page will help decide whether UBIConf happens, at what scale, and in what format — in-person, virtual, or both.
This isn't a ticket sale. There is no date to announce, no venue to reveal, and no speaker list to show you, because none of those exist yet. Any conference page that promises you famous speakers before it has booked them is selling you a poster, not an event — we would rather build the real thing slowly than market a fiction quickly.
If the interest is there, registered readers will be the first to hear the real announcements: the format, the program as it is genuinely confirmed, and early access to registration when — and only when — there is something real to register for.
Tell us the conversation matters to you. One email when there is real news — the confirmed format and program — and nothing else.