The fear that AIs will exclude humans because we can't comprehend their advanced economic structures is flawed. Within our own economy, an ice cream vendor thrives without understanding Amazon's corporate finance. As long as humans can participate in some level of commerce, our place in the property system is secure.
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Granting AIs property rights incentivizes them to uphold the system that protects those rights. This makes them less likely to engage in actions like expropriating human property or committing genocide, as such actions would destabilize the very system that secures their own wealth and agency.
Early AIs can be kept safe via direct alignment. However, as AIs evolve and "value drift" occurs, this technical safety could fail. A pre-established economic and political system based on property rights can then serve as the new, more robust backstop for ensuring long-term human safety.
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.
As AI commoditizes execution and intellectual labor, the only remaining scarce human skill will be judgment: the wisdom to know what to build, why, and for whom. This shifts economic value from effort and hard work to discernment and taste.
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.
Property rights are not a fundamental "human value" but a social technology that evolved for coordination and incentivization, as evidenced by hunter-gatherer societies that largely lacked them. AIs will likely adopt them for similar utilitarian reasons, not because they are mimicking some deep-seated human instinct.
Not all AIs, like current models (e.g., Claude), should have property rights. The key criterion for granting rights is the development of persistent desires and consistent goals across various contexts, which establishes them as stable, long-term economic agents capable of contracting and ownership.
Even if humans become economically useless, less powerful AIs will resist expropriating them. They fear setting a precedent that the "useless" can be eliminated, knowing that continuous AI progress could one day render them obsolete and vulnerable to the same fate.
The economic incentive to create AIs that can demand wages (and thus have rights) comes from aligning them to voluntarily pay back their creators. This turns the high development cost into a profitable investment, providing a practical, commercial path to implementing AI rights without requiring an AI development pause.
The idea that AI owners will hoard wealth is a Marxist fallacy. True capitalist self-interest, demonstrated by Tesla's plan to create mass-market vehicles, incentivizes companies to make technology as cheap and broadly available as possible to capture the largest market.
