Artificial intelligence, as it stands today, is the culmination of centuries of human innovation. The transformative breakthroughs of the last few years have built upon extensive groundwork laid by countless scientists, researchers, and thinkers over, not centuries, but millennia. But you wouldn’t think this by looking at big tech today. The major tech corporations have profited greatly from their recent innovations, and this has created many millionaires and billionaires. This is to be expected with capitalism, and in many ways, it represents progress because it has helped to push the field of technology forward and provided many people around the world with a range of free IT and AI services. But the playing field is now changing. Tech companies are building giant datacenters that will house multitudes of supergenius AIs fine-tuned to control the mouse and keyboard, specifically to do the work of human workers. These AIs, and the robots that will accompany them, are going to break capitalism by making human labor unnecessary. We will soon be living in a post labor world. The genies are almost out of the bottle, but, importantly, we can't allow anyone to own the genies. Everyone deserves an equal portion of the coming bonanza because progress in AI has been contributed to by humanity as a whole.
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The entire history of human work, effort, and progress, has
laid the foundation for the development of Artificial General Intelligence
(AGI). Since humans were hunter gatherers, the division of labor has allowed
individuals to specialize in increasingly complex tasks. This was accelerated
through agriculture, industrialization, and automation. Human specialization
enabled fields like computer science to emerge and thrive. We would not have
smart phones if it weren’t for the manual laborers of the 1800s. Virtually
every person who has ever worked, in any form, has helped support the broader
economic systems that funded the scientific advancements of the modern age.
Mothers working at home, nurturing and educating their children—are arguably
one of the most important parts of the chain that has led to the development of
complex technologies. In many senses, AGI will represent the collective
culmination of all human labor, thought, and creativity. While a free and open
market has driven much of this progress by enabling competition and
incentivizing innovation, there’s a compelling argument that its role is
reaching a natural endpoint.
The notion that AI-created wealth should be monopolized by a
handful of corporations is increasingly difficult to defend when one considers
the extensive public and communal contributions to the field. Today, major tech
companies, such as Google, Open AI, and Anthropic, are refining language
modeling which has been in gestation for several decades. Much of their
progress, even in the last year, stems from the collective intelligence of
academic communities and open-source collaboration. But new state-of-the-art AI
foundation models and techniques are being released every week now. The models
are generating sizable private profits, and Big Tech is reinvesting these
profits so that they can win big in the near future.
The wealth generated by AI should not belong to the tech
executives who just happened to be in the right place at the right time. Returns
on AGI innovations should be shared broadly. AI-generated wealth and the labor
of robots should be taxed and automation dividends and universal basic income
(UBI) should be enforced. But when should this kick in? Should that decision be
made now or soon? It is clear that this productive fly wheel is still
benefiting greatly from capitalism. Without capitalism, we may not be able to
end capitalism. I believe that AGI will be reached this year, artificial
superintelligence (ASI) will be reached soon thereafter, and massive automation
will occur just a few years after that. I believe UBI should probably start as
soon as the money exists to fund it, and definitely by the time AI is put in
control of the automation. This may all be clarified a bit by my rough estimate
for a timeline:
2026: Artificial General Intelligence
2027: Massive Knowledge Work Automation
2028: Artificial Superintelligence
2029: Massive Robotic Automation and Job Replacement
2030: General World Models are Integrated with LLMs
2031: AI Implements the Brain’s Algorithm for Working Memory
2032: Machine Consciousness
2033: High Level Recursive Self-Improvement
2034: Intelligence Explosion
2035: Instatement of UBI Begins
2036: Nanobiotechnology Breakthroughs
2037: Mind Augmentation Begins
2038: Radical Life Extension Begins
2039: Mind Uploading Begins
2040: Transhumanism and Cyborgification Begins
2041: Longevity Escape Velocity
Let’s take a quick look at post-labor economics. First, companies will pursue full automation to eliminate their costliest liability, which is human workers. No one will want to take subsidized pity jobs and do work that a machine is better suited for. So, when wage payments disappear across the economy, so does consumer purchasing power, which will collapse the demand for products. This leaves the government with two options, 1 heavily taxing corporations benefiting from computerized labor and redistributing it to citizens or 2 allowing the citizenry to collectively own all automated production systems.
The windfall of automation should be used first to stabilize
the economic instability from job replacement. For instance, it should help
support the truck drivers who lose their jobs to self-driving big rigs. It should
then be used to help people who have lost their jobs to upskill. Even after
desk jobs and knowledge work is over, it will take several years to produce a
billion robots to handle all of human physical labor. But soon after all jobs
will disappear. At that point, AI should work to help people find new purpose
in life and new ways to be creative. ASI will radically democratize creative
expression. We will be upskilling, not to remain employed to pay the next month’s
rent, but to learn how to use new generative technologies for fun and
amusement. People will be prompting their own movies, documentaries, novels,
avatars, and autobiographies.
A large number of burgeoning tech fields are complementing
and amplifying each other. 3D printing, AR/VR, computer hardware, AI, cloud
computing, genomics and many others are working synergistically now. This is
transforming more goods and services into information technologies, allowing
them to benefit from accelerating returns and exponential trends. The growing material abundance and
technology-driven deflation will make food, housing, transportation, and
healthcare much cheaper. Before we know it, living luxuriously will be free. We
can expect literacy, education, sanitation, life expectancy, clean energy, and
democracy to increase and for poverty and violence to decrease dramatically. As
Ray Kurzweil says, “as AI unlocks, unprecedented material abundance across
countless areas, the struggle for physical survival will fade into history.”
But for this to happen, we must make AGI sovereign, not the proprietary asset
of a few corporations, and hold it in trust for the public.
Should this exist as a socialist AGI world government, or
should we have a capitalist system of AGI corporations that compete with each
other to provide us with the best products and services? Well, I believe that
artificial superintelligence may not need or benefit from competition. People need the promise of future rewards if
they are to remain motivated. But this may not be the case for an emotionless
artificial intelligence system that is expert at optimization.
Capitalistic competition may become unnecessary after the
emergence of artificial superintelligence (ASI), primarily because the
motivations and incentives that make capitalism effective for humans might no
longer apply. Humans require promise of future rewards to stay motivated. They
need both intrinsic and extrinsic rewards, such as profit, social status, or
personal satisfaction, to drive innovation and productivity. However, an
artificial superintelligence could efficiently achieve its programmed objectives
without the need for psychological incentives. Corporate rivalry, another key
element that fuels capitalism by encouraging innovation, reducing costs, and
enhancing products and services, might also become irrelevant. An ASI could
continuously optimize outcomes without any external competitive pressure.
Moreover, capitalism inherently carries inefficiencies,
including redundancy, duplication of efforts, competitive secrecy, and the
inevitable market instabilities such as bubbles or crashes. A centralized
system directed by an ASI could significantly minimize these inefficiencies, as
a single intelligent entity would streamline resource allocation, strategic
planning, and production more effectively and comprehensively than multiple
competing entities. Of course, it may not be a single monolithic system, but
perhaps many systems tuned to cooperate, working in unison.
Our current economy is particularly well-suited to managing
scarcity—allocating limited resources efficiently to fulfill human
neuroeconomic needs. However, superintelligence will profoundly reduce
scarcity, leading to an abundance of essential goods and resources. In such a
scenario, capitalism’s primary advantage—the efficient management of
scarcity—would diminish or disappear entirely, rendering the system obsolete. Also,
capitalism tends to favor short-term gains because human actors have finite
lifespans and immediate concerns. An ASI could execute stable, long-term
planning strategies, thinking in terms of decades or centuries rather than
quarters or years.
Finally, capitalism naturally tolerates inequalities because
success partly depends on chance, initial conditions, and varying personal
motivations. In contrast, a superintelligent system could explicitly optimize
for ethical outcomes such as fairness. This might eliminate the need for
capitalism's built-in tolerance for inequity, leading society toward a
fundamentally superior economic organization.
I believe that humans should be able to retain some form of
capitalist or market-driven structure, that enables them to enjoy the fruits of
their labor, creativity, and personal endeavors. Maintaining a modest level of
private ownership ensures that people feel secure in their contributions,
knowing their work, innovations, or creative pursuits won't be arbitrarily
redistributed or appropriated. By allowing people to reap the personal and
social rewards of their efforts and passions—whether in arts, craftsmanship,
invention, or specialized hobbies—a small-scale capitalist framework could
coexist harmoniously with a broader superintelligence-driven economy. However,
the invention of AGI itself should be shared, not patented, restricted, or hoarded.
Ultimately, the argument for taxing and redistributing the
gains from AI is rooted in the belief that the progress of technology is a
shared human achievement. Even in its present form, AI is more a product of
everyone that has died than it is everyone alive today. You could make the
argument that the coming largesse has belonged to all humans since we started
making tools. Tool creation and use set us on this path. But given that tool
use actually began tens of millions of years before humans arose, shouldn’t artificial
superintelligence be dedicated to the wellbeing of all animals?
Before AI reshapes the economic landscape, it is imperative
to acknowledge that its foundations lie in the collective efforts of billions and
in the ongoing collaborative spirit of the global community.
