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Mark 2's avatar

Really thought-provoking piece—thanks for sharing it.

One idea I keep coming back to is that the only way this all stacks up long-term is if large groups of humans become true stakeholders in the peanut butter company (or whatever version of the AI-powered, fully-automated production pipeline we're talking about).

If the process no longer requires human labour, then the value it generates must flow back to people in some other way—ideally through ownership.

In that sense, it almost doesn't matter if humans are removed from the production process, as long as they benefit structurally from it.

We may be seeing the early seeds of this in the crypto and DAO space—these models let communities co-own and co-govern value-generating systems. It’s not perfect yet (governance is still hard), but the direction is promising. It shifts participation from labor to stakeholding.

Framed a certain way, this could evolve into a decentralized form of UBI—not state-sponsored and centralized, but emerging from networks or protocols created by philanthropic or mission-driven founders. For me this is the most palitable form of UBI: opt-in, free to exit, distributed, community-owned, and less susceptible to top-down control.

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