COBURNICUSI’ve spent my whole life around computers. I watched them go from expensive toys to the thing that runs everything. I’m not afraid of AI, and I think a lot of what it changes will be good. Cheaper medicine. Robots doing the work that breaks people’s backs.
But I kept noticing something about the way this future gets sold. The people building it talk constantly about how much wealth the machines will create. They talk a lot less about who gets it.
Every robot on a factory floor has an owner. Every data center has a deed and a board of directors. When an automated system makes something valuable, the money lands with whoever owns it. So the film asks one question. If the machines really do produce abundance, who owns it?
The people at the top have said it out loud
Elon Musk told a tech conference in Paris in May 2024 that “probably none of us will have a job,” and that we’d have “universal high income.” Last November, at the U.S.-Saudi Investment Forum, he said “my prediction is that work will be optional” and that money “will stop being relevant.”
Sam Altman was more specific, back in March 2021. In an essay called Moore’s Law for Everything, he wrote that as AI improves, “even more power will shift from labor to capital.” Labor is people who earn a living by working. Capital is people who own things. He also proposed a fix he called the American Equity Fund: tax large companies 2.5% of their market value each year, paid in shares, and tax privately held land at 2.5% of its value. He estimated that within a decade each of the 250 million adults in America could get about $13,500 a year.
Most people selling the future never ask who gets paid. Altman did. But it’s an essay. Nobody has passed it, and no company has volunteered to start paying it.
Dario Amodei, who runs Anthropic, has been blunt about the transition. In May 2025, Axios reported his warning that AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within a few years. That’s Axios’s summary of what he said. His own words were: “We, as the producers of this technology, have a duty and an obligation to be honest about what is coming.”
So I don’t think they’re hiding the problem. What’s missing is the protection. The productivity is coming whether anyone agrees on a plan or not. The plan for people is still a pile of essays and podcast answers.
What the data shows so far
It’s early, and the numbers are mixed.
The International Labour Organization estimated in May 2025 that about one in four workers worldwide is in a job with some exposure to generative AI, with clerical work the most exposed. Their main conclusion was that most jobs will change rather than disappear.
Researchers at Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab have been tracking payroll data. Their August 2026 update found that employment for 22 to 25 year olds in the most AI-exposed jobs is now 19% below where it would be if it had kept pace with peers in less exposed work. That’s a relative gap. It does not mean 19% of those jobs vanished, and the same researchers say they see no evidence yet of widespread job loss across the whole economy. It’s showing up first at the bottom of the ladder, in the entry-level jobs where people used to learn.
We’ve run this experiment before
The historian Hardy Green estimates there were around 2,500 company towns in the United States. The company owned the mine, and also your house, the doctor’s office and the store. Families who needed to eat before payday got credit in scrip, tokens stamped with the company’s name. The Smithsonian notes scrip could only be spent in company stores, often at a high markup. A miner could work all month and end it owing the company money.
The law caught up. Under the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, as the Labor Department interprets it, scrip is not a proper way to pay wages.
In the film I describe a made-up company. No company I know of is doing this. It owns the automated farms, the warehouses and the store, and it offers everyone in its network monthly credits that only work in its marketplace. It sets the prices and can close your account. That’s company scrip with a nicer app. Compare it with a cash dividend guaranteed by law. Both are a monthly payment. With cash, you can walk away.
A few more numbers from the research
Some of these show up briefly in the film as charts. They’re worth sitting with.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks labor’s share of income in the nonfarm business sector as an index (FRED series PRS85006173). In the second quarter of 2026 it hit its lowest level since the series began in 1947.
The Federal Reserve’s Distributional Financial Accounts for the second quarter of 2026 show the top 10% of households owning 88.1% of corporate equities and mutual fund shares. The bottom half holds 2.3% of all household net worth. If the machines end up inside public companies, that is roughly who owns the machines today.
There’s also a small working example of the alternative. Alaska amended its constitution in 1976 to put a share of oil money into a permanent fund, and nearly every resident has received a yearly dividend since 1982. This year it was $1,000 plus a $200 energy payment. It isn’t enough to live on, and politicians fight over the amount every year. The principle is easy to follow. The oil belongs to the public, so the public gets a cut.
The question I’m left with
The film also covers the jobs we were told were safe, the H-1B fight, and a hard chapter on what happens at the bottom when work disappears, from the Supreme Court’s 2024 ruling in Grants Pass v. Johnson back to the Black Codes and convict leasing. I’d rather you watch that part than read my summary of it.
I want AI to succeed. If we can build a world that makes more than enough for everybody, we should build it. But nobody has written down how the rest of us share in it. There’s no law that says so, and no contract.
So here is the question I can’t answer yet, and I’d like to hear yours. If a company’s AI ends up producing most of what your town needs, what would you want to own a piece of, and who would you trust to guarantee it?
Sources
- Sam Altman, “Moore’s Law for Everything” (March 16, 2021): https://moores.samaltman.com/
- Dario Amodei, “Machines of Loving Grace” (October 2024): https://www.darioamodei.com/essay/machines-of-loving-grace
- Fortune on Amodei’s Axios interview (May 28, 2025): https://fortune.com/2025/05/28/anthropic-ceo-warning-ai-job-loss/
- Stanford Digital Economy Lab, “Canaries in the Coal Mine” (updated August 2026): https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/publication/canaries-in-the-coal-mine-six-facts-about-the-recent-employment-effects-of-artificial-intelligence/
- ILO, Generative AI and Jobs: A Refined Global Index of Occupational Exposure (May 2025): https://www.ilo.org/publications/generative-ai-and-jobs-refined-global-index-occupational-exposure
- Smithsonian NMAH, company scrip: https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object/nmah_872961
- 29 CFR 531.27 (scrip not a proper medium of wage payment): https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-29/section-531.27
- Hardy Green, The Company Town (2010)
- BLS Nonfarm Business Labor Share, FRED PRS85006173: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PRS85006173
- Federal Reserve, Distributional Financial Accounts (2026 Q2): https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/
- Alaska Permanent Fund history: https://apfc.org/about/history/
- City of Grants Pass v. Johnson (2024): https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-175_19m2.pdf
- Gallup on socialism and capitalism (September 2026): https://news.gallup.com/poll/714653/socialism-positive-rating-tops-first-time.aspx
- Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism (2023)
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