Pilot projects are key---they provide data which is key to establishing a planned basic income.

On the other hand, Andrew Yang, who is running for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination in the US, says the experiments that have already been run are enough to prove that basic income can be successful. “It’s wrong to think we don’t have information on this. We do,” Yang told MIT Technology Review. “There have been many implementations of basic-income-aligned programs over the last number of decades.”

He’s right in that this is not a new idea: various programs have been around for a while, including the Alaska Permanent Dividend Fund, which has been providing data on basic income since 1982. An earlier incarnation of the idea was supported by the conservative economist Milton Friedman in the 1960s, and both Richard Nixon and his Democratic opponent, George McGovern, supported some version of it during the 1972 campaign. It was a rare instance of bipartisan support.

For its advocates—and there are many, particularly in Silicon Valley—universal basic income is a radical idea that will not only alleviate poverty but also address the implications of further automation. But for others, it has the potential to shrink the labor force or cause the poorest in society to lose out.

This discrepancy isn’t something that can just be argued away. The only way the idea can ever be embraced on any sort of large-scale, meaningful level is with more data and bigger tests. Without that, no matter how much support it gets from Silicon Valley, it seems unlikely that the public, at least in the US, will ever come around.