New jobs offer little reassurance if machines can learn those too. Some people might still earn a living from work valued precisely because a human does it, but that is a fragile basis for everyone's income.

Machines building machines could make many goods far cheaper, although materials, energy and land would still constrain production. Since lower costs wouldn't guarantee lower prices, someone living on wages could lose their income faster than their expenses fell.

The firm replacing its warehouse staff can pass savings to customers or retain them as profit, but neither gives the displaced workers a share of the machines. If ownership stays narrow, the workers become dependent on what owners and governments choose to distribute, leaving abundance at the owners' discretion.

Call that fully automated luxury feudalism, a twist on the title of Aaron Bastani's excellent Fully Automated Luxury Communism, a book I highly recommend.

Competition could spread productive capacity through open weights and cheaper hardware, and yesterday's model can keep replacing human work even after a better one appears.

The danger is that the leading firms consolidate power faster than capabilities spread, using revenue from better systems to buy compute and control access to the systems developing the next generation. Expensive development and compounding progress make concentration plausible, though it isn't inevitable.

Work also buys bargaining power, but a strike has less force when production continues without the strikers. Governments could lose leverage too if they depend on a few providers for administration and security.

Elections and courts could still constrain those providers, but increasing dependence on them could make that harder. Waiting for mass unemployment to settle the argument would then mean negotiating from a weaker position.

Universal Basic Income pays everyone a regular, unconditional income, while Universal Basic Capital gives everyone a stake in productive assets. A public fund could combine the two by using its returns to pay a basic income.

Tax-funded payments depend on the state's ability to collect, while shares depend on enforceable ownership rights. Companies can retain earnings instead of paying dividends, and small shareholders may have little influence over that decision.

Ownership matters here when it gives the public power to appoint and remove those directing the machines, but if operators could ignore courts and governments, they could ignore shareholders too. Acquiring control early could help prevent that concentration of power, provided the institutions enforcing public ownership remain effective. Income support and ownership should therefore be built together, alongside public services that protect people as wages disappear.

Permission to develop and deploy the most powerful systems could come with a condition: a growing public ownership stake. A majority voting stake would give the public the power to replace management when its interests conflict with those of private investors. That majority would be secured before regulators approved deployment of systems capable of independently developing more powerful successors or running essential infrastructure autonomously. Independent capability assessments would determine the steps, since training compute alone would be too crude a measure.

The shares would sit in a public trust in which each citizen held an equal stake they couldn't sell or borrow against, with new citizens joining on the same terms. Adults would elect trustees who could appoint and remove company boards, with published rules governing payouts and investment reserves. The public stake would be protected against dilution or the transfer of assets into a different company.

Because this would reduce private returns and could drive firms elsewhere, it needs a legal basis, political support and coordination between host countries. It would also leave people outside those countries dependent on foreign owners, so international participation remains an unresolved part of the proposal.

Anthropic's economic policy framework calls for capital accounts before disruption becomes visible, potentially funded with AI equity. The Windfall Clause proposes a binding commitment to share exceptional future profits, which firms would voluntarily sign. Both could help distribute wealth, while public control addresses the further question of who directs production.

An economy that can run without most people's labour needs institutions in which those people still hold power, so their income doesn't depend on remaining useful to the owners.

On a more positive note, if people no longer depended on wages for their basic needs, they could spend more of their lives with those they love, raising children, sharing meals and caring for one another. There could be more time to spend in nature, grow food and develop a closer connection to the land and the seasons. The hope is that technological abundance could give more people the freedom to build a life around what they love.