Silicon Valley executives used to complain about “the Great Resignation” to justify replacing people with machines. Now, they have suddenly changed their tune to sound like generous givers. Figures like Sam Altman and Elon Musk now claim that artificial intelligence will culminate in a liberated society characterized by truncated 32-hour workweeks and Universal Basic Income (UBI). In their view, automation is a tool that will finally free humans from the need to work to survive.

Stripping away this corporate talk reveals a simple paradox for AI: if automation destroys human jobs, it also destroys the customer base needed to buy AI subscriptions like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini.

The sudden trend of supporting universal cash payouts does not come from a kind heart. It comes from self-preservation. Looking at history, this plan is just a modern version of the same economic tricks used in the 19th century to turn workers into forced consumers.

Rebranding the cost of labor #

To understand why elites love UBI today, we have to look at what happened after slavery ended. In the early 19th century, forced labor was the ultimate way for business owners to make money without paying wages. When slavery was legally abolished across European colonies, the old economic system did not disappear. It simply changed its name to keep power in the same hands.

A perfect example happened in the French colony of Réunion after the 1848 abolition decree. The government paid former slave owners for losing their “property,” but gave the freed workers abstract legal freedom without any money or land to survive. Because freedom without money is just another way to stay trapped, the sugar plantations quickly created the engagisme (indentured labor) system.

Former slaves were replaced by workers tied to strict five-year contracts. They were paid in a tightly controlled mix of tiny wages and basic food. Trapped by manufactured debt and harsh laws, their exploitation never actually ended. The British Empire did the exact same thing after its 1833 abolition act, replacing Caribbean slaves with waves of contract workers from India and China. This proves that moving from slavery to contract labor was just a modern way to keep extracting wealth from workers.

The creation of the working consumer #

As the industrial revolution grew, Western factories ran into a major bottleneck: machines were making huge amounts of goods, but the working class was paid too little to buy them. From this crisis, elites realized a foundational rule of modern capitalism: to keep selling goods, the worker had to be turned into a consumer.

This shift is often romanticized as an act of kindness by early industrial titans, especially Henry Ford’s creation of the five-day workweek and the five-dollar daily wage. However, historical data demonstrates that Ford’s adjustments were entirely transactional optimization strategies designed to solve catastrophic employee turnover and secure an adequate domestic market for mass-produced vehicles. Workers needed both free time and cash to buy the very cars they were building on the assembly lines.

When wages stopped growing naturally in the late 20th century, corporations kept this buying loop going by building a massive system of debt. This allowed the working class to keep buying goods today by borrowing against their future labor.

The closed-loop feudalism of the AI era #

The modern rise of large language models and AI agents is the next step in this history. As corporations replace human workers with AI to cut costs, they hit a major capitalist contradiction: an economy devoid of salaried workers is an economy devoid of aggregate demand.

This mathematical problem explains the true purpose of UBI. When tech billionaires push for a government allowance, they are not trying to redistribute wealth fairly, but they are designing an emergency money injection to stop the consumer market from collapsing.

In an AI economy where a few massive tech giants own all the tools and data infrastructure, UBI is just a closed loop. The government hands cash to displaced people, who immediately send that money right back to the tech companies to pay for subscriptions, automated food delivery, or digital entertainment.

This plan shows a complete lack of real bravery. Instead of sharing the ownership of AI, the tech elite wants to build a modern version of technofeudalism. Just like the contract workers of 1848 who were legally free but forced to spend their wages at the plantation store, modern citizens under this system are freed from work only to be permanently trapped as captive consumers.

The tech formula #

The tech sector is currently solving its profit problem in three clear steps:

• eliminate human labor using scalable AI systems to maximize corporate profits,
• launch UBI as an economic cushion, ensuring people have just enough cash to keep buying products and subscribe to services,
• lock down control of capital, keeping the core code, hardware, and billions in profits in private hands.

The real issue is not whether machines will take our jobs, but why we should accept a system where we only exist to pass cash back to tech corporations. These AI systems were trained on data created by the collective history of human knowledge.
Because of this, the wealth generated by automation should be treated as something that belongs to the public, rather than a private monopoly. Instead of accepting a small allowance handed down by Silicon Valley to keep us quiet, we should view the benefits of automation as a shared resource that belongs to everyone.