Sometimes, all this doom is overwhelming. Climate change is ongoing and getting worse. AI is eliminating jobs and threatening to change everything about how we live and work. Trump’s war in Iran is causing fuel shortages around the world that will cause hunger and a massive economic recession. Government doesn’t just put its head in the sand… it commits itself to making everything worse—reversing policies that could help with climate changes, accelerating rather than curtailing AI, and exacerbating the war. Government is creating a state of fear among the people, whether we are afraid of the weather, war, AI, deportation, our neighbors. It seems almost as if government thrives on fear. It is creating more and more of it every day. I am reminded of Randolph Bourne who wrote so long ago: “War is the health of the state.” Apparently, so is fear.
I want to say that the answer is to turn inward, but as soon as I think those words, I realize that history has a lesson for us. How many indigenous peoples turned inward, away from modernity and were extinguished? Black Elk had a great inward vision, but it doesn’t seem to have worked out so well. Where people were in the way, modernity got rid of them. Remember how the Lakota were beaten? By slaughtering the buffalo—the source of Lakota wealth, food, and life. Can we see the connection? Our source of wealth, food, and life is work—work that provides income. Modernity, through robots and AI, seeks to take it away. Nature provides all that we need, yet modernity’s climate crisis will take it all away. Trump’s modern war is making the income we have decreasingly sufficient.
According to a certain myth, a hundred and fifty years ago, “we the people” were the power of modernity. Indigenous people in America were removed or acculturated to serve a modernity that we were part of. Today, it has changed. Indeed, we are the stand ins, the indigenous, the ones to be starved, beaten and removed. “We the people” are in the way.
It has been argued that a solution will come. It won’t. AI elites are well aware of what this technology is going to do to society. They know it is going to eliminate millions of incomes. Nay, billions of incomes. They can already see the possibilities. They see it in China where dark factories with no workers crank out products 24/7 without stopping. They can see it in autonomous vehicle taxis. They talk about it and then they pretend that instead, everyone can be a business owner. Or they say that the economy will adapt. Some even talk about bettering society and eliminating the need for anyone to work. But this is nonsense. If they were serious, they would be working just as hard on the program that accomplishes these goals as they are on creating AI. There is no plan. There is hardly even any idea, with the possible exception of suggesting a robot tax. No specifics. No plan. Just talk.
The assault on the environment being forged by the US government at this time can be seen as a similar assault on the people. Who suffers the dirty air, the chemical-infused water, the poisoned food? Who lives with the smog, the particulates, and the cancers? It’s the people. Not the elites. Do you see how this works? Take away the road to prosperity and then hit them with the biggest stick you can find—a poisoned environment, a depleted environment, scarcity. Nature has its limits. Poisoned and depleted nature, even more so. And nature where the climate is so changed that natural flora and fauna, or even planted crops and livestock, can no longer grow with abundance, is limited even more. When we have shortages of food and clothing, elites don’t suffer; we do.
And then they use a war to choke off energy and create an even deeper economic desperation on top of it. Look at the global scale. India, Vietnam, South Korea—all desperately trying to avoid the example of Cuba. Europe is on the verge of a shortage of jet fuel and diesel. Without diesel, all normal commerce comes to a halt. No trains and no trucks to deliver food and products to stores. Chaos comes. Who suffers? We do, not the elites.
As agentic AI has been emerging over the past few months, I have looked at scenarios and tried to withhold judgment on it. I can no longer do so. Elites and AI leaders are lying. They have no dream for making society better and freeing humanity, much less do they have a plan. It appears to be a massive deceit. If they were serious, they would have a real mitigation plan for the elimination of jobs. They do not. They mouth a hope that people will be more free while creating and unleashing technology that will destroy livelihoods without a plan to replace livelihoods.
When agricultural livelihoods were destroyed as capitalism took over agriculture and enclosed the commons, people moved to urban factories. Most didn’t like it, but at least it was a livelihood. As factories have gotten more efficient and manufacturing jobs have been lost, people moved into offices and services—maybe not their thing, but it was a livelihood. As AI and robots make their play to replace all jobs, where will they go for livelihood? There is nowhere to go. How will people procure the necessities of life? Capitalism’s great exploitation was to compel people to participate in the labor market by taking away their self sufficiency on the land. We all had to work to live. That remains the economic law, except that now, there is nowhere to work and no plan for how to change things.
Thus, we have two choices, and maybe we need to do both. The first choice is to resist this AI takeover of the world. There is a rapidly growing popular resistance to AI in the US and other industrialized countries where it is taking over. The problem with this approach is that there is a logic and internal force that propels AI forward. Military competition is one of them. The other is capitalism itself. To the extent that AI cuts costs for capitalists, they have no choice but to adopt it and developers must keep moving it forward. This is not just reality; it is a powerful force aligned against any popular resistance. Just as the indigenous turn toward the inner life failed often in the confrontation with modernity, popular protest movements have similarly failed in confronting capitalism and technological advancement at almost every turn. The exceptions were those few cases when the protest turned toward a new vision—like the reduction in the standard workweek. Resistance may be necessary, but its effectiveness is limited. We need to be clear-eyed about this.
There is also a second choice: To articulate, plan, and advocate for a new future. In other words, rather than resist the new technology in an effort that is likely to fail anyway, a new vision of the future could be championed with all the same energy. What could that vision look like?
Well first, such a vision would take AI and the displacement of jobs into account. It would look at the knowledge worker jobs AI is going toward now, but also look to what will happen as AI animates robots (humanoids) as it is now doing in China. At the same time, the vision would enable people to thrive despite these changes—not turn them out to starve. This is not about “keeping AI safe,” or “protecting jobs,” but rather a vision of a transformed world. Indeed, I see this as our only choice because I don’t believe AI can be stopped any more than capitalism could have been stopped.
People need to be able to procure the means of living—food, water, clothing, shelter. In capitalism, that occurs by having an income, and incomes come either from employment, government safety net programs, or invested capital. For most people, it is employment. If AI eliminates employment, how do people meet the means of life? Probably from those last two sources—government programs and investments.
So here is a brainstorm list of things that could be done. I don’t prioritize them nor even think all of them are good ideas. Yet I submit them to stimulate ideas and thinking to my readers. Questions, discussions, and criticisms could help get to an articulated agenda. Please comment.
AI tax to fund UBI—Government develops a way to tax AI so that revenue can be used to fund universal basic income (UBI) for everyone. Most likely, this is based on taxing tokens, which is the unit of measure most AI companies use to track usage and charge accordingly. In many ways, this could be analogous to social security, except that instead of taxing worker wages with FICA, we tax AI workers with the AI-FICA tax. That revenue is pooled and paid to people as UBI, resulting in a kind of social security for everyone.
AI profits fund—Government sets up a mutual fund in which all citizens are automatic equal part owners. AI companies are required to be licensed to sell tokens or other services or access, and licensing requires a percentage of the company shares are given to the government mutual fund. These shares will never be diluted, as anytime new shares are issued, the government portion must be maintained. If dividends are paid, the fund receives them and distributes to the citizens. More importantly, the equity value of mutual fund shares may be used as collateral for loans, and a special liquidation feature is allowed to lenders in case of default.
Pre-collected AI dividend for investment—Government makes a one time payment to all citizens in a special holding account for the purpose of purchasing shares in AI companies. It also educates people on those investments. “Pre-collected” means that government gives the money to invest before the AI companies have actually earned the profit.
AI industry wealth fund—Government sets up a separate mutual fund that obtains shares of all the key players in the AI industry, that is, the modelers like Anthropic, chipmakers like NVIDIA, memory makers like Micron, and data center companies like Amazon. Government purchases enough stock to assign $1,000 worth to each citizen. Subsequent growth effectively enriches and builds wealth for all citizens who hold their shares.
The problem with these approaches is that they don’t resolve this issue of uneven impacts. As AI is deployed organically right now, you are only seriously impacted if yours is one of the jobs being replaced. Your neighbor might be able to keep his or her job. Yet you are each getting the exact same benefit in programs like these. An AI dividend of $10,000 a year is very nice on top of a $100,000 salary. But an AI dividend of $10,000 a year is nothing if it is replacing a $100,000 a year salary. If I lose my job this year and that neighbor doesn’t lose his until five years from now, he has gained a lot on me and I have lost a ton.
On the other hand, if I lose my job and I get a meaningful income replacement immediately, I have essentially entered AI retirement while my neighbor is still a working stiff. This has its own intrinsic unfairness.
One possibility is to phase in the universal aspect of these kinds of programs. In the beginning, there might be tiers wherein unemployed, AI-displaced people get a larger dividend or payment, yet not large enough to be a total income replacement. This would maintain the capitalist incentive to work, at least for now. As more and more jobs are replaced, the tiers even out. The vision is that no one has to work, we all get the benefits, and then we have options to for earning income from new kinds of opportunities should we choose to do so.
Alex Bores, an AI industry veteran who is now running for Congress and focused on AI regulation has suggests another possibility: a shortened workweek, say to four days, is a way to spread the benefits out to everyone. Conceptually, this seems interesting, though I don’t know how well it would work. Even today, with a regular work week, many people work much longer hours either to get ahead or because of unstated employer expectations. Make a four day work week official, and it seems people would just keep doing the same thing.
I am sure there are other possibilities out there that people will think of—these are just my initial ideas. I put them out there for discussion, and would love to hear readers’ thoughts. I know some will be skeptical that we can use AI in any way to improve the world. They may be right. On the other hand, it is likely coming anyway, so if we can use it to actually manifest universal benefits, it just might be worth it.
Anthony Signorelli
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