This is 100 Years From Now, a weekly series. Once a week we skip a century and try to picture what life actually looks like when the stuff we're building now has had time to settle in.
This week: the billionaires who broke the economy want to pay you to shut up about it.
Last week, Elon Musk pinned a post to the top of his X profile: "Universal HIGH INCOME via checks issued by the Federal government is the best way to deal with unemployment caused by AI."
Sam Altman wants to go bigger — "universal extreme wealth", paid in compute tokens. Amodei says UBI may be "part of the answer." Khosla says it's a necessary safety net. All of them, in unison.
These are the guys who spent twenty years arguing that government should stay out of markets, that handouts breed dependency, that the individual should stand on their own. Musk literally ran a federal cost-cutting operation. And now they want the government to mail checks to every citizen.
Why? Because they broke the thing, and they know it. The people building the tools that eat the jobs are pre-emptively offering to pay for the damage — on their terms, through their platforms, using their math.
A universal basic income paid by the people who automated your job is not a safety net. It's a leash.
They take your job. They take the skills you spent a decade building. Then they offer you a monthly check — funded by taxes they'll lobby to keep low, distributed through digital systems they control. You become dependent on the same people who made you dependent. That's not a right. That's an allowance. And an allowance can be revoked.
What happens when the fund runs dry, or the tokens lose value, or the company pivots to something more profitable? You have no job to go back to. No skills they didn't already make obsolete. No leverage, because leverage requires something the other side needs, and they automated that too.
A peer-reviewed paper in Frontiers in AI called this exactly what it is: a "social license" play. The UBI pitch isn't charity. It's the price of public acceptance — just enough money to stop people from rioting while AI takes over everything else. The author uses Bourdieu's concept of "symbolic violence": domination that works because the dominated don't recognize it as domination. They think they're being helped.
Musk said the quiet part out loud:
"Probably none of us will have a job. The question will really be one of meaning: if a computer can do everything better than you, does your life have meaning? I do think there's perhaps still a role for humans in that we may give AI meaning."
In Musk's best-case scenario, humans exist to give AI meaning. We're the audience. The pets. And he wants to pay us for the privilege.
The whole libertarian argument was that dependency is corrosive — that people need agency, autonomy, the ability to walk away. And now the same people are building the most complete dependency structure in human history, and calling it freedom.
They're not even hiding it. Altman doesn't want to give you cash. He wants to give you compute tokens — a share of AI processing power you can use, sell, or pool. Your income denominated in access to their infrastructure. The day OpenAI goes down, your income goes with it. You're not a citizen with a bank account. You're a user with a balance.
A hundred years of this looks like a civilization where a handful of companies own the means of production, the means of thought, and the means of survival — and the rest of us live on whatever they decide to distribute.
We used to call that feudalism. They're calling it progress.
The lord doesn't give the peasant a check out of kindness. He gives it because a starving peasant can't work the field. The check is for the lord, not the peasant.
The lords are offering their terms. The question is whether we're desperate enough to take them.
Or dumb enough to call it a right.
— Alexis