Jacob Coxon, 28, had worked at two frontier labs when The Daily Show asked how a jobless world would work. His answer: “The dividends from entirely automated economic production can be distributed among real humans.” It sounds like a promise. It is a question: whose dividends?
Sam Altman gave the plain version in Moore’s Law for Everything in 2021. As AI does the work, “even more power will shift from labor to capital.” His answer is a fund fed by 2.5 percent of large companies’ shares each year, plus a land tax, paid out to every adult. Whatever one makes of the fund, the diagnosis holds. When wages stop carrying most people’s share, it has to come from owning the machines or taxing their output.
A universal basic income is the taxing version, and I think it is necessary but not sufficient. An income meets need, not meaning, which Keynes saw in 1930 when he predicted a fifteen-hour week and asked “how to occupy the leisure”. That is a question for how we live; the question here is power. The tax base moves to capital, and capital can move. Dario Amodei expects a basic income to be “only a small part of a solution”. Income without ownership leaves power where the machines are, and concentrated wealth already shapes much of the law.
So ownership must spread as labor stops paying. Markets are tools, and automation is where their outcomes concentrate fastest. Public AI, Schneier’s condition, is one form of shared ownership. Altman’s fund is another.
Reforms that touch wealth face a higher bar. That is why this needs arguing more openly and more often in public, not only in the builders’ essays. The time to settle who owns the machines is before they do the work.