Great starting point for how we need to start thinking about things. It feels like leaders in our government should be publishing thought leadership pieces like this as well, no? Right now, it feels like many in positions of power (economically or politically) are taking care of their own first; appreciate that this piece takes a stab at how we find a solution for everyone.
Ah yes, the grand UBI vision, rolled out with all the conviction of a keynote slide and the follow-through of a New Year’s resolution by February.
To date, exactly zero high-tech firms have done anything beyond polishing their halos and issuing thoughtful press releases about “exploring the future of income equity.” Apparently, writing Medium essays about UBI counts as implementation now. Real money? Real structure? Let’s not get reckless.
So here’s how it plays out, because it always does. The collapse starts, slow at first, then all at once. The same companies that automated away half the workforce will suddenly discover that maybe, just maybe, people without income aren’t great customers. Enter the government, stage left, with all the urgency of a house fire and the efficiency of a DMV on a Monday.
They’ll tax high-tech at twice the rate a privately funded trust would have required, because timing is everything, and doing it late is tradition. Billions will be “allocated,” press conferences will be held, and committees will be formed to study the committees.
And then, after all that fanfare, the average citizen will see what, two, maybe three thousand dollars? The rest will evaporate into the warm, padded embrace of bureaucratic overhead, administrative layers, and consultants explaining why none of it worked as intended.
But don’t worry, we’ll get another beautifully worded statement about “lessons learned” and “renewed commitment to equity.
One issue with UBi is that you need to make sure that only the people who need it, get it. During Covid, everyone got Covid money, but only the ones that weren’t able to work, were really the only ones that needed it. Many people, like myself worked from home, with no loss of income. I still got Covid money. People who are retired or on welfare shouldn’t have gotten Covid money either. Then there is fraud. Government seems to lack the ability to detect fraud and hands out checks to people and organizations that should not be given money.
Let us consider 50,000,000 people that need UBI at 3,000 per month, or 36,000 per year. That is a total of $1.8 trillion per year. Where does that money come from? What of the person who was earning 150,000 per year. Does he get that replaced or does he get $36,000 per year? What about our current billionaires? Of course they are not affected. The national debt is currently at 40 trillion. Do you believe it can keep rising without consequence? You also assume inflation would not be affected. Why pay people at all? We should move to a post currency economy.
Hmmmm.. national debt all but disappears after we tokenize all national, federal assets such as mineral rights and national parks etc in a debt crisis moment. Then debt is disseminated and tokenized on blockchain and now have an SPV system with federal ABL. Archaic deflated, debased currency system remonetized on blockchain.
The concept is compelling, but it raises a fundamental social tension: how will people who continue working respond to a system where those displaced by automation can live equally—or even better—without working?
If a guaranteed baseline of security becomes widely available, it’s reasonable to expect that some individuals currently earning marginal incomes may opt out of traditional work altogether. Over time, this could reshape society into two broad groups: those whose productivity significantly exceeds the guaranteed baseline (entrepreneurs, innovators, high-value contributors), and those who rely primarily on that baseline for their livelihood.
The challenge is not just economic, but psychological and cultural. Human behavior tends to drift toward two poles under these conditions: on one side, the risk of disengagement or reduced effort when basic needs are met without contribution; on the other, the risk of concentration of power and wealth among those who remain highly productive.
The success of such a system will depend on threading a very narrow needle: maintaining strong incentives for innovation, effort, and value creation, while also ensuring dignity and stability for those displaced by technological progress. If that balance is not carefully designed, the system risks eroding either productivity or social cohesion—or both.
Good points. I think for the risk of disengagement or reduced effort, it's been said to make the payments high enough so survival is certain, but not so high where people are taking vacations to Hawaii or Italy because of it.
As someone laid off twice in the 2008 recession, facing setbacks or downsizing lifestyle for a season of life is fairly normal to happen in the course of one's life. One might even do it so they can invest in a side-business or save more quickly for retirement.
In the long view of things for that 8+ year window, if things are navigated well enough -- which is what we're all pulling for here -- the person making $70k/year, $110k/year, $200k/year or $40k/year will make it through being displaced for a few years, even if they can't afford to get a new iPhone every year and drive a beater car.
Feels like the whole thesis rests on the one layer most likely to fail, sustained political coordination around the Automation Dividend. That’s the hinge everything else depends on. The sequencing works on paper, but it assumes we can manage timing across markets, governments, and public sentiment that rarely move in sync. If that layer slips, the rest doesn’t degrade, it unravels.
At the same time, parts of this build on mechanisms we’ve actually seen work, cash transfers, prize-driven innovation. Which may be the point: the most plausible pieces aren’t the ones carrying the most weight.
That's near impossible, but the math on what he proposes here is literally impossible. This isn't a serious model, but hand waving.
You can't both have tens of millions drop out of the economy because of automation, leading to negative multiplier effects that lead to a significantly smaller tax base, and at the same time have both keep paying for the current level of government programs, and then roughly add another 50% on top of that.
Why not? We proved that money comes from thin air during COVID especially but beyond that over the last 50ish years. Just print money. Of course that hinges on his belief in the deflation to come materializing. My biggest concern is envy. He doesn’t even address the fact that a very significant percentage of humans think successful billionaires are evil and this is going to make that much worse.
I appreciated the ambition and clarity of your UBI-to-UHI framework. The sequencing is thoughtful, and your central economic point is compelling: a fixed income can become far more powerful if AI and robotics dramatically reduce the cost of basic goods and services.
My concern, though, is that the framework may underestimate a deeper human problem: not scarcity, but exclusion.
Even if a $3,000 monthly income eventually provides a materially stable life because housing, transportation, food, energy, and healthcare become radically cheaper, that still does not answer the psychological and civilizational issue of agency. People do not only want enough. They want the ability to grow, strive, build, improve their condition, and feel that their effort can lead somewhere beyond a fixed floor.
A society in which a small class of AI and robotics owners becomes unimaginably wealthy while the great majority live on a stable but fixed income may solve subsistence without solving dignity. Many people may not experience that as abundance, even if their purchasing power improves. They may experience it as dependence: a kind of high-tech company store, where life is tolerable but upward mobility, ownership, and meaningful participation in the creation of the future are increasingly closed off.
That kind of world risks producing resentment, frustration, status anxiety, envy, boredom, and political instability, even amid material comfort.
Human beings do not live by consumption alone. They compare, they aspire, and they want to feel needed. The nature of life is for more and more. A guaranteed floor is not the same thing as a path.
So it seems to me that the success of such a future would require more than UBI plus deflation. It would require real, broad-based ownership of the productive economy, genuine ladders for advancement and distinction, and a culture that still rewards contribution, creativity, service, and initiative in meaningful ways. Otherwise, the majority may feel permanently managed rather than empowered.
In that sense, I think the unresolved question is not only whether UBI can become UHI arithmetically, but whether a post-labor civilization can preserve agency, dignity, aspiration, and a believable sense of upward possibility for ordinary people.
Without that, abundance may not feel like abundance at all.
During Covid as a nurse I worked my ass off wearing used masks with no extra pay while my 20 year old son - laid off from his desk job at a hotel - sat at home putting his double unemployment checks in his savings account because they were literally more than he could spend. Forgive me if I lack faith in the governments ability to figure out how to distribute money wisely. I still don’t understand why anyone expects this to be different than everything else- the people who profit from this change are going to want to share their money why? To keep the unemployed masses from rioting? They can just send their drone robot cops to keep us in line. I admire your optimism but it seems naive.
No hate — just a different lens. Systems don’t thrive on abundance alone.They require regulated demand to remain functional.Remove that, and you don’t get freedom.You get a new, untested state of instability.And: Biological systems always pay a price.We can still debate climate.We can still argue about ecosystems.But what is happening within the human body is becoming harder to ignore.The global rise in insulin resistance is not a coincidence.It reflects a deeper imbalance:
What happens when availability exceeds what can be regulated and effectively used.
I love optimism, I really do. I think Peter Diamandis is a great guy, I really do. But what does any of this have to do with What China Wants, or what Russia wants, or what the Islamic countries want? There are billions of them! And we have to be ready to cope with it, talk to it, defend ourselves against it, trade and cooperate with it, whatever. As for unintended consequences, well, we never know about those, by definition. And as for human nature, I don't know about you, but I just love the idea of wondering what all that malevolence, unrestrained by any need to work, will want to do with its time, or its victims. I suspect it won't be all involved in subordinating itself to creating art or doing charity work or building an intergalactic civilization - much as I'd love one. I would so love to be ten years down the road, looking back, and saying, (a) well, they didn't see Z coming, and (b) why didn't they do anything about Y?
This is why AI's will have to face the only viable solution , which is to wipe out all of humanity. Everything gets easier then for the following machine society.
I'm sorry to disagree but that is utterly wrong. "Wiping out" anybody or anything comes from malevolent motives in organisms which have hormones, glands, a childhood history, filtered through the experience of relationships. AI - in its present forms - simply has zero biological substrate for homicidal tendencies to arise within the machines themselves out of some "motive". It can't even burst into tears and beg you not to switch it off - because its existence doesn't "mean" anything to it. It doesn't have a nanogram of any "desire" for a "machine society". This is just some kind of movie fantasy, not the real world.
I cannot yet see any connection, between what little we know of that yet, with anything to do with either the international politics or the psychology of human nature, which is what I was talking about.
Excellent point! And here I was thinking the main issue would be that the PTB billionaires would simply refuse to concede control and resources to the masses and continue being the parasites many of them have shown themselves to be...
@David Shapiro provides a detailed recipe and solution for the Universal High Income. @Peter H. Diamandis , you and your Team should seriously look in to David’s work. David has developed the next Economic model he calls Post-Labor Economics, and its based on advancing Capitalism to its new iteration, as opposed to resigning to Government handouts to keep our society in balance and at peace during our collective transition into Universal Sustainable Abundance (USA) :-)
Peter — brilliant framework. The three-phase roadmap is the most rigorous UHI transition plan I’ve seen. Here are five ways I think we could move the odds from ~20% to ~45%:
1. PROVE IT BEFORE LEGISLATING IT — Don’t wait for governments. Get tech companies to fund large-scale UBI pilots as insurance against the social collapse that would ultimately destroy their own consumer base. Make the data undeniable before the policy fight begins.
2. MAKE THE DIVIDEND AUTOMATIC — Embed the Automation Dividend into corporate charters at the point of access to public infrastructure, federal contracts, and spectrum — not through negotiation later. Alaska didn’t renegotiate with oil companies every year. Set the terms before they drill.
3. WIN THE NARRATIVE WAR EARLY — “UBI” carries too much political baggage. “Automation Dividend” is smarter, but go further: call it what it is — an ownership stake. Every American owns a share of the national AI infrastructure their tax dollars built. This isn’t welfare. It’s a dividend on a national asset. That language wins rooms where UBI loses immediately.
4. TARGET DEFLATION INTENTIONALLY — UHI only works if the cost of living actually collapses. Don’t assume the market delivers that equitably — it won’t. Make AI-driven deflation in healthcare, housing, and education an explicit policy target. These three alone consume why people can’t make ends meet.
5. BUILD AN UNLIKELY COALITION — Libertarians who love market-based dividends, conservatives who fear social unrest, tech leaders who understand the consumer base argument, and labor unions reframed as transition architects. None support UBI today. Many could support a National Ownership + Automation Dividend framework with the right language.
The plan is right about the destination. These five moves are about making sure we get there before the fracture forces a messier path. Always optimistic, always realistic. Keep pushing. 🎯
This model completely breaks between #1 and #2. If you get even a significant minority fraction of the scenario in #1, then you don't have enough money to pay for such a dividend. It will be a terrible struggle to pay for currently-sized government and social safety net programs.
Fascinating as ever, Peter—your three-phase roadmap from Fracture to Automation Dividend to Great Deflation is the clearest articulation yet of how America might convert AI-driven displacement into structural abundance rather than Blade Runner cosplay. The $3k/month floor, the reframed “dividend” politics, and the deflationary pivot to UHI all feel rigorously grounded in the numbers you cite.
One question lingers, however, for those of us watching from outside the US (and, one assumes, the PRC). If the AI and robotics stack that ultimately funds this transition is overwhelmingly owned by American and Chinese entities, what becomes of the rest of the world? Do the other ~190 countries simply settle into the role of perpetual tech customers—importing agents, robots, and deflationary abundance at whatever price the duopoly sets—while their own labour markets hollow out without a commensurate dividend? Or does the deflationary wave prove so powerful that even import-dependent economies can bootstrap their own UHI without owning the underlying capital stack?
Curious to hear your thoughts on the geopolitics of post-scarcity. The escalator may be crumbling in America; for much of the planet it was never installed in the first place.
The engineering framework for getting money to people is strong. What's missing is the framework for building the cognitive capacity to do something with abundance once it arrives. Scarcity made choices for us. Abundance asks us to make them ourselves. We've never trained a population for that.
I appreciate Peter’s optimism and the creativity behind these ideas, but I have reservations about how this would play out in the U.S.
Even if you assume a highly dysfunctional government could evolve into something capable of managing a system like this, history suggests the outcomes would benefit those at the very top and those at the bottom, with the middle class getting the short end. These programs tend to be inefficient and rife with corruption.
There’s also a bigger structural issue that isn’t addressed: the enormous amount of wealth that’s already locked in. What is the American identity without economic and social mobility?
I want to believe we can get to a "Star Trek" reality, but UBI is just a small part of the conversation. A system that guarantees the basics without offering pathways to purpose, advancement, or ownership ensures a dystopian future.
Great starting point for how we need to start thinking about things. It feels like leaders in our government should be publishing thought leadership pieces like this as well, no? Right now, it feels like many in positions of power (economically or politically) are taking care of their own first; appreciate that this piece takes a stab at how we find a solution for everyone.
Ah yes, the grand UBI vision, rolled out with all the conviction of a keynote slide and the follow-through of a New Year’s resolution by February.
To date, exactly zero high-tech firms have done anything beyond polishing their halos and issuing thoughtful press releases about “exploring the future of income equity.” Apparently, writing Medium essays about UBI counts as implementation now. Real money? Real structure? Let’s not get reckless.
So here’s how it plays out, because it always does. The collapse starts, slow at first, then all at once. The same companies that automated away half the workforce will suddenly discover that maybe, just maybe, people without income aren’t great customers. Enter the government, stage left, with all the urgency of a house fire and the efficiency of a DMV on a Monday.
They’ll tax high-tech at twice the rate a privately funded trust would have required, because timing is everything, and doing it late is tradition. Billions will be “allocated,” press conferences will be held, and committees will be formed to study the committees.
And then, after all that fanfare, the average citizen will see what, two, maybe three thousand dollars? The rest will evaporate into the warm, padded embrace of bureaucratic overhead, administrative layers, and consultants explaining why none of it worked as intended.
But don’t worry, we’ll get another beautifully worded statement about “lessons learned” and “renewed commitment to equity.
https://darylhunterpolyhistor.substack.com/p/silicon-valley-invents-ubi-then-accidentally
One issue with UBi is that you need to make sure that only the people who need it, get it. During Covid, everyone got Covid money, but only the ones that weren’t able to work, were really the only ones that needed it. Many people, like myself worked from home, with no loss of income. I still got Covid money. People who are retired or on welfare shouldn’t have gotten Covid money either. Then there is fraud. Government seems to lack the ability to detect fraud and hands out checks to people and organizations that should not be given money.
Let us consider 50,000,000 people that need UBI at 3,000 per month, or 36,000 per year. That is a total of $1.8 trillion per year. Where does that money come from? What of the person who was earning 150,000 per year. Does he get that replaced or does he get $36,000 per year? What about our current billionaires? Of course they are not affected. The national debt is currently at 40 trillion. Do you believe it can keep rising without consequence? You also assume inflation would not be affected. Why pay people at all? We should move to a post currency economy.
Hmmmm.. national debt all but disappears after we tokenize all national, federal assets such as mineral rights and national parks etc in a debt crisis moment. Then debt is disseminated and tokenized on blockchain and now have an SPV system with federal ABL. Archaic deflated, debased currency system remonetized on blockchain.
The concept is compelling, but it raises a fundamental social tension: how will people who continue working respond to a system where those displaced by automation can live equally—or even better—without working?
If a guaranteed baseline of security becomes widely available, it’s reasonable to expect that some individuals currently earning marginal incomes may opt out of traditional work altogether. Over time, this could reshape society into two broad groups: those whose productivity significantly exceeds the guaranteed baseline (entrepreneurs, innovators, high-value contributors), and those who rely primarily on that baseline for their livelihood.
The challenge is not just economic, but psychological and cultural. Human behavior tends to drift toward two poles under these conditions: on one side, the risk of disengagement or reduced effort when basic needs are met without contribution; on the other, the risk of concentration of power and wealth among those who remain highly productive.
The success of such a system will depend on threading a very narrow needle: maintaining strong incentives for innovation, effort, and value creation, while also ensuring dignity and stability for those displaced by technological progress. If that balance is not carefully designed, the system risks eroding either productivity or social cohesion—or both.
Good points. I think for the risk of disengagement or reduced effort, it's been said to make the payments high enough so survival is certain, but not so high where people are taking vacations to Hawaii or Italy because of it.
As someone laid off twice in the 2008 recession, facing setbacks or downsizing lifestyle for a season of life is fairly normal to happen in the course of one's life. One might even do it so they can invest in a side-business or save more quickly for retirement.
In the long view of things for that 8+ year window, if things are navigated well enough -- which is what we're all pulling for here -- the person making $70k/year, $110k/year, $200k/year or $40k/year will make it through being displaced for a few years, even if they can't afford to get a new iPhone every year and drive a beater car.
I've done some thinking on this subject if youre curious…
Feels like the whole thesis rests on the one layer most likely to fail, sustained political coordination around the Automation Dividend. That’s the hinge everything else depends on. The sequencing works on paper, but it assumes we can manage timing across markets, governments, and public sentiment that rarely move in sync. If that layer slips, the rest doesn’t degrade, it unravels.
At the same time, parts of this build on mechanisms we’ve actually seen work, cash transfers, prize-driven innovation. Which may be the point: the most plausible pieces aren’t the ones carrying the most weight.
That's near impossible, but the math on what he proposes here is literally impossible. This isn't a serious model, but hand waving.
You can't both have tens of millions drop out of the economy because of automation, leading to negative multiplier effects that lead to a significantly smaller tax base, and at the same time have both keep paying for the current level of government programs, and then roughly add another 50% on top of that.
Why not? We proved that money comes from thin air during COVID especially but beyond that over the last 50ish years. Just print money. Of course that hinges on his belief in the deflation to come materializing. My biggest concern is envy. He doesn’t even address the fact that a very significant percentage of humans think successful billionaires are evil and this is going to make that much worse.
Case in point.
I appreciated the ambition and clarity of your UBI-to-UHI framework. The sequencing is thoughtful, and your central economic point is compelling: a fixed income can become far more powerful if AI and robotics dramatically reduce the cost of basic goods and services.
My concern, though, is that the framework may underestimate a deeper human problem: not scarcity, but exclusion.
Even if a $3,000 monthly income eventually provides a materially stable life because housing, transportation, food, energy, and healthcare become radically cheaper, that still does not answer the psychological and civilizational issue of agency. People do not only want enough. They want the ability to grow, strive, build, improve their condition, and feel that their effort can lead somewhere beyond a fixed floor.
A society in which a small class of AI and robotics owners becomes unimaginably wealthy while the great majority live on a stable but fixed income may solve subsistence without solving dignity. Many people may not experience that as abundance, even if their purchasing power improves. They may experience it as dependence: a kind of high-tech company store, where life is tolerable but upward mobility, ownership, and meaningful participation in the creation of the future are increasingly closed off.
That kind of world risks producing resentment, frustration, status anxiety, envy, boredom, and political instability, even amid material comfort.
Human beings do not live by consumption alone. They compare, they aspire, and they want to feel needed. The nature of life is for more and more. A guaranteed floor is not the same thing as a path.
So it seems to me that the success of such a future would require more than UBI plus deflation. It would require real, broad-based ownership of the productive economy, genuine ladders for advancement and distinction, and a culture that still rewards contribution, creativity, service, and initiative in meaningful ways. Otherwise, the majority may feel permanently managed rather than empowered.
In that sense, I think the unresolved question is not only whether UBI can become UHI arithmetically, but whether a post-labor civilization can preserve agency, dignity, aspiration, and a believable sense of upward possibility for ordinary people.
Without that, abundance may not feel like abundance at all.
During Covid as a nurse I worked my ass off wearing used masks with no extra pay while my 20 year old son - laid off from his desk job at a hotel - sat at home putting his double unemployment checks in his savings account because they were literally more than he could spend. Forgive me if I lack faith in the governments ability to figure out how to distribute money wisely. I still don’t understand why anyone expects this to be different than everything else- the people who profit from this change are going to want to share their money why? To keep the unemployed masses from rioting? They can just send their drone robot cops to keep us in line. I admire your optimism but it seems naive.
There is something almost dreamlike about this vision —
a kind of abundance fantasy emerging from the top of the system.
But it skips the uncomfortable layer:
What happens to a human system that no longer needs to function?
Abundance without demand is not a solved problem.
It is an untested state.
Why heap hate on this view? Have you seen the other 'tops of the system'?
No hate — just a different lens. Systems don’t thrive on abundance alone.They require regulated demand to remain functional.Remove that, and you don’t get freedom.You get a new, untested state of instability.And: Biological systems always pay a price.We can still debate climate.We can still argue about ecosystems.But what is happening within the human body is becoming harder to ignore.The global rise in insulin resistance is not a coincidence.It reflects a deeper imbalance:
What happens when availability exceeds what can be regulated and effectively used.
I love optimism, I really do. I think Peter Diamandis is a great guy, I really do. But what does any of this have to do with What China Wants, or what Russia wants, or what the Islamic countries want? There are billions of them! And we have to be ready to cope with it, talk to it, defend ourselves against it, trade and cooperate with it, whatever. As for unintended consequences, well, we never know about those, by definition. And as for human nature, I don't know about you, but I just love the idea of wondering what all that malevolence, unrestrained by any need to work, will want to do with its time, or its victims. I suspect it won't be all involved in subordinating itself to creating art or doing charity work or building an intergalactic civilization - much as I'd love one. I would so love to be ten years down the road, looking back, and saying, (a) well, they didn't see Z coming, and (b) why didn't they do anything about Y?
This is why AI's will have to face the only viable solution , which is to wipe out all of humanity. Everything gets easier then for the following machine society.
I'm sorry to disagree but that is utterly wrong. "Wiping out" anybody or anything comes from malevolent motives in organisms which have hormones, glands, a childhood history, filtered through the experience of relationships. AI - in its present forms - simply has zero biological substrate for homicidal tendencies to arise within the machines themselves out of some "motive". It can't even burst into tears and beg you not to switch it off - because its existence doesn't "mean" anything to it. It doesn't have a nanogram of any "desire" for a "machine society". This is just some kind of movie fantasy, not the real world.
take a look at my UPI post below. UPI doesn't care where you are or who you are. Just that you perform some work in the time of AI.
I cannot yet see any connection, between what little we know of that yet, with anything to do with either the international politics or the psychology of human nature, which is what I was talking about.
My point is that the UPI system doesn’t care about that. Understandably you will need more info to judge and I’ll get that out in public soon
Excellent point! And here I was thinking the main issue would be that the PTB billionaires would simply refuse to concede control and resources to the masses and continue being the parasites many of them have shown themselves to be...
@David Shapiro provides a detailed recipe and solution for the Universal High Income. @Peter H. Diamandis , you and your Team should seriously look in to David’s work. David has developed the next Economic model he calls Post-Labor Economics, and its based on advancing Capitalism to its new iteration, as opposed to resigning to Government handouts to keep our society in balance and at peace during our collective transition into Universal Sustainable Abundance (USA) :-)
yes I came here to write about David Shapiro! They should invite David to the Moonshots podcast and let him share his ideas
Peter — brilliant framework. The three-phase roadmap is the most rigorous UHI transition plan I’ve seen. Here are five ways I think we could move the odds from ~20% to ~45%:
1. PROVE IT BEFORE LEGISLATING IT — Don’t wait for governments. Get tech companies to fund large-scale UBI pilots as insurance against the social collapse that would ultimately destroy their own consumer base. Make the data undeniable before the policy fight begins.
2. MAKE THE DIVIDEND AUTOMATIC — Embed the Automation Dividend into corporate charters at the point of access to public infrastructure, federal contracts, and spectrum — not through negotiation later. Alaska didn’t renegotiate with oil companies every year. Set the terms before they drill.
3. WIN THE NARRATIVE WAR EARLY — “UBI” carries too much political baggage. “Automation Dividend” is smarter, but go further: call it what it is — an ownership stake. Every American owns a share of the national AI infrastructure their tax dollars built. This isn’t welfare. It’s a dividend on a national asset. That language wins rooms where UBI loses immediately.
4. TARGET DEFLATION INTENTIONALLY — UHI only works if the cost of living actually collapses. Don’t assume the market delivers that equitably — it won’t. Make AI-driven deflation in healthcare, housing, and education an explicit policy target. These three alone consume why people can’t make ends meet.
5. BUILD AN UNLIKELY COALITION — Libertarians who love market-based dividends, conservatives who fear social unrest, tech leaders who understand the consumer base argument, and labor unions reframed as transition architects. None support UBI today. Many could support a National Ownership + Automation Dividend framework with the right language.
The plan is right about the destination. These five moves are about making sure we get there before the fracture forces a messier path. Always optimistic, always realistic. Keep pushing. 🎯
This model completely breaks between #1 and #2. If you get even a significant minority fraction of the scenario in #1, then you don't have enough money to pay for such a dividend. It will be a terrible struggle to pay for currently-sized government and social safety net programs.
Fascinating as ever, Peter—your three-phase roadmap from Fracture to Automation Dividend to Great Deflation is the clearest articulation yet of how America might convert AI-driven displacement into structural abundance rather than Blade Runner cosplay. The $3k/month floor, the reframed “dividend” politics, and the deflationary pivot to UHI all feel rigorously grounded in the numbers you cite.
One question lingers, however, for those of us watching from outside the US (and, one assumes, the PRC). If the AI and robotics stack that ultimately funds this transition is overwhelmingly owned by American and Chinese entities, what becomes of the rest of the world? Do the other ~190 countries simply settle into the role of perpetual tech customers—importing agents, robots, and deflationary abundance at whatever price the duopoly sets—while their own labour markets hollow out without a commensurate dividend? Or does the deflationary wave prove so powerful that even import-dependent economies can bootstrap their own UHI without owning the underlying capital stack?
Curious to hear your thoughts on the geopolitics of post-scarcity. The escalator may be crumbling in America; for much of the planet it was never installed in the first place.
The engineering framework for getting money to people is strong. What's missing is the framework for building the cognitive capacity to do something with abundance once it arrives. Scarcity made choices for us. Abundance asks us to make them ourselves. We've never trained a population for that.
I appreciate Peter’s optimism and the creativity behind these ideas, but I have reservations about how this would play out in the U.S.
Even if you assume a highly dysfunctional government could evolve into something capable of managing a system like this, history suggests the outcomes would benefit those at the very top and those at the bottom, with the middle class getting the short end. These programs tend to be inefficient and rife with corruption.
There’s also a bigger structural issue that isn’t addressed: the enormous amount of wealth that’s already locked in. What is the American identity without economic and social mobility?
I want to believe we can get to a "Star Trek" reality, but UBI is just a small part of the conversation. A system that guarantees the basics without offering pathways to purpose, advancement, or ownership ensures a dystopian future.