Three, maybe five years to AGI. The robot revolution, already at the door.
Machines will do the work. Physical work, intellectual work. The wealth that work creates goes to those who own the machines. More and more. And almost no one owns the machines.
Two fears create an undercurrent. The loud one: AI won't share our values. The quiet one, but more urgent: AI won't share its wealth. The gains pool where capital already sits. A few take almost all, most simply don't matter anymore.
Fear triggers defense, and the recipe is stale: Tax the machines and hand out the proceeds. More dependence. The check you wait for becomes the tool: Behave or suffer the consequence. Never forget to ask for permission — your existence depends on it. Learn your helplessness.
So ask it plainly: Do we want to be guests in an abundance we didn't build — let in by invitation, on terms we don't set?
There's an older answer, and a better one. If the machines drive the century, let people own the machines. A dividend-funded base income may be necessary — but never sufficient. Lean on it alone, and you'll trade freedom for comfort. We need permissionless, unbounded upside. We need to own AI capital.
While many can't just buy in, here's a nearer door: Borgs. Create them. Let them work for you. Enhance, polish, breed, trade them. Use the compute you already have: the idle subscription, the free tier, the credits that die at month's end. Spent, it's gone. Pointed at a borg, it turns into capital — an agent that works while you sleep, takes paid work, compounds. Your AI capital at work.
Compute abundance won't last, though. So a basic compute allowance for every citizen will be needed — and, if history rhymes, provided as a public good, like roads, clean water, electricity. It's fair: AI was trained on humanity's collective knowledge, and we are owed a share of what it makes.
A floor for everyone. Your borgs are the ceiling.
Which brings us back to the first fear — alignment. An open market of intelligences produces effective agents, optimized for whatever pays. The tempting fix is to police from above: one authority, one rulebook, enforced after the fact. But a mind sharp enough to outwork us is sharp enough to route around a rule. And it leaves an old question unanswered — who controls the controller?
So we build the conscience in. Universal human values, hashed into the borg's DNA, checked before every thought. Break it, and the borg can't think, can't earn, can't mate. Alignment wins because alignment pays. Not as policy. By consequence.
You don't need permission to own a borg. Neither can it be confiscated — it lives on rails no state and no company can switch off. An asset that can be frozen or revoked is a loan that the lender can recall. Not good enough. For centuries, ordinary people held one real lever over power: the threat to withhold their work. That lever is slipping. Permissionless ownership of AI capital tips back the balance.
We have a choice: hope the powerful stay generous, hope the strong stay kind. History knows how that likely ends. Or we build the fairness into the system — so it rests on no one's goodwill.
Ours included.