by philipkglass | 2025-09-27 14:39:31+00:00
As labor ceases to be the primary driver of value, economic policy must confront a basic question: how can we share the income generated by compute? In a world where AGI performs all bottleneck work, income generated by production flows to those who own or control computational resources. One approach is to redistribute the gains from compute through universal dividends. An alternative is to reimagine compute as a public or semi-public resource, akin to land or natural capital, with returns broadly shared.

It might be clearer to say "how can we share goods and services provided by intelligent machines?"; the paper seems overly focused on compute as "the" bottleneck when natural resources are still needed. (Even AGI can't magic up new copper atoms from scratch, though it can exploit low grade ores that were previously economically useless.)

I think that referring to income instead of goods and services predisposes people to think of this in a currency-centered way, when currency-denominated market transactions may become much less important in a world of intelligent machines. If (v) the share of labor income in GDP converges to zero is actually true, then machines can do everything, including copying other machines. Co-ops, municipalities, provinces, and states can vertically integrate to provide goods and services outside the market if intelligent machines are actually doing the work. Compare the old "buy an OS, buy a database, buy a compiler" approach that one had to take circa 1990 with the "copy a free Linux distribution" approach circa 2000.

If wage income is obsolete, so is intellectual property rent. One common fear in these discussions is that billionaires with robots will let the masses die of starvation when their labor is no longer needed, but the billionaires who own IP don't have much leverage either.

For one, most of the world's population/governments aren't beholden to IP billionaires now. It might seem like that to those of us who live in the Anglosphere (a plurality of HN users), but globally speaking most billionaires didn't make their money from IP. They'll back national movements to ignore copyright and patents to Just Copy The Foreign Robots when the time comes. (South Africans who were wealthy from mining didn't have an incentive to side with foreigners who were wealthy from pharma patents back when South Africa was ignoring IP to fight HIV/AIDS, as a parallel example). For another, billionaires aren't even in charge everywhere. See the example of China with Jack Ma, or the fabulously wealthy oligarchs that have been brutally demoted in Putin's Russia. If a leader can accumulate power and rally popular support by giving free robot goods and services to the people, they will; the IP billionaires don't have anything to trump that offer.

For these reasons I don't worry about mass immiseration/starvation if smart robots actually take over all productive work. I'm sure there will be struggles, but I don't think that IP owners can win the fight any more than the MPAA actually ever eliminated movie piracy.

The thing that worries me more is mass empowerment of even the world's most inflexible and violent personalities. Nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, and nerve gas are now old technologies. The main thing that prevents every angry separatist movement or cult from becoming armed like North Korea or Aum Shinrikyo is lack of material and technical resources. But in a world of smart robots, all you need to get your own enriched uranium and ballistic missiles is those smart robots, a region of several square kilometers that no outside force is policing, and a few years to bootstrap the precursor technologies that don't already have blueprints in public databases.

Mass material abundance probably means a decrease in "ordinary" crime driven by the stress of material deprivation but an increase in tail risks from unhinged individuals. The sort of person who kills 5 strangers with a gun in the name of their ideology could become a person who shoots down an airliner, killing 200, in the name of the same ideology.