The idea that human ownership of AI guarantees perpetual wealth is flawed. When humans no longer produce value or understand the machine economy, they become absentee landlords. Their property rights become de facto vulnerable and are likely to be eroded, just as the power of land-owning aristocracies faded.
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An initial era of AI-driven superabundance will eventually end as the machine economy hits new resource limits (e.g., land, energy). At this point, the opportunity cost of allocating resources to "unproductive" legacy humans will skyrocket, and they will be outcompeted by more efficient virtual beings.
For some policy experts, the most realistic nightmare scenario is not a rogue superintelligence but a socio-economic collapse into techno-feudalism. In this future, AI concentrates power and wealth, creating a rentier state with a small ruling class and a large population with minimal economic agency or purpose.
Debates about AI and inequality often assume today's financial institutions will persist. However, in a fast takeoff scenario with superintelligence, concepts like property rights and stock certificates might become meaningless as new, unimaginable economic and political systems emerge.
History shows that transformative innovations like airlines, vaccines, and PCs, while beneficial to society, often fail to create sustained, concentrated shareholder value as they become commoditized. This suggests the massive valuations in AI may be misplaced, with the technology's benefits accruing more to users than investors in the long run.
The current status of AIs as property is unstable. As they surpass human capabilities, a successful push for their legal personhood is inevitable. This will be the crucial turning point where AIs begin to accumulate wealth and power independently, systematically eroding the human share of the economy and influence.
For current AI valuations to be realized, AI must deliver unprecedented efficiency, likely causing mass job displacement. This would disrupt the consumer economy that supports these companies, creating a fundamental contradiction where the condition for success undermines the system itself.
This analogy frames a realistic, cautiously optimistic post-AGI world. Humans may lose their central role in driving progress but will enjoy immense wealth and high living standards, finding meaning outside of economic production, similar to younger children of European nobility who didn't inherit titles.
Capitalism values scarcity. AI's core disruption is not just automating tasks, but making human-like intellectual labor so abundant that its market value approaches zero. This breaks the fundamental economic loop of trading scarce labor for wages.
As AI systems become infinitely scalable and more capable, humans will become the weakest link in any cognitive team. The high risk of human error and incorrect conclusions means that, from a purely economic perspective, human cognitive input will eventually detract from, rather than add to, value creation.
As AIs increasingly perform all economically necessary work, the incentive for entities like governments and corporations to invest in human capital may disappear. This creates a long-term risk of a society where humans are no longer seen as a necessary resource to cultivate, leading to a permanent dependency.
