In the previous article I wrote that instead of waiting for the threshold, it’s better to govern what is already changing from next Monday. At the beach, though, the maths has already been done — and it always ends up in the same place.
Universal basic income.
The reasoning flows smoothly. AI produces in an instant what we produce with time and effort. So stuff is abundant. So there’s enough for everyone. So they’ll give us an income, and we’ll live better working less.
It’s not the first time anyone has thought this way. In 1930 Keynes predicted that thanks to technology his grandchildren would work fifteen hours a week. Nobody ever saw those fifteen hours.
I don’t make my living from economics, so from here I’ll lean on those who know more than I do. The mistake isn’t in the last step — it’s in the third. Abundance and wealth are not the same thing. Rich means having something others don’t. You don’t make everyone rich by making everything abundant.
You’re at the beach? You’re in the right place to check this. The sea is free and infinite, there’s enough for everyone — and it’s never made everyone rich. The sun lounger in the front row costs twice as much as the one in the fourth row, and it’s the same lounger. Abundance and scarcity have always coexisted under the same sun umbrella, and the price sits entirely on one side.
Economics doesn’t study abundance — it studies scarcity. Alex Imas, who teaches behavioural economics at Chicago Booth, frames it this way: the right question isn’t what will become free, it’s what will remain scarce. When AI makes something free, the value doesn’t evaporate — it changes address. It moves to what can’t be replicated. The time of a real person, which stays at twenty-four hours each. Energy and computing power, because the machine’s thinking is paid for in electricity. Trust, which in a world full of plausible content becomes rare. And accountability — someone who decides and puts their name to it.
The question that never gets asked at the beach remains. “The value produced by AI will be distributed.” Read it again: it’s a passive construction, and the passive exists to avoid saying who. No villain is needed. Value produced by capital goes to capital, the way water runs downhill.
Daron Acemoglu won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2024 for studying how the wealth of nations is born, and in Power and Progress he writes that technical progress doesn’t bring widespread prosperity on its own: it has brought it, over two centuries, only where it found a counterweight strong enough to force it. Distribution isn’t the natural trajectory — it’s a deviation. And to deviate you need an engine: contracts, taxes, governments. That engine today weighs less than the corporations that own the machines.
How it will all end, I don’t know — and anyone who treats it as settled, in either direction, is doing beach weather forecasting. Serious people hold opposite views, with real arguments on both sides.
But the question to take home isn’t how they’ll divide the abundance.
It’s what will remain scarce. And who already has it.