No AGI Without UBI: The Last Line of Defense Against Digital Feudalism

By Michael Kelman Portney

I. INTRODUCTION: THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE IS A DEBT COLLECTOR

There is a moment in every civilization when the machine stops being a tool and becomes a master. For ours, that moment is now.

Artificial General Intelligence—the apex predator of software, capable of learning, adapting, and outperforming humans at almost any cognitive task—is no longer science fiction. It’s a boardroom agenda item. It’s a beta launch. It’s already replacing your copywriter, your customer support agent, your paralegal, and soon your manager. But as the wheels of innovation grind forward, crushing entire job markets beneath them, there’s one thing the architects of this brave new world refuse to discuss: compensation.

No AGI should be allowed to operate at scale until Universal Basic Income (UBI) is implemented.

Not out of sentiment. Out of survival.

Because without it, we are not entering a post-work utopia—we’re entering a hyper-efficient dystopia where the laboring class becomes economically obsolete but still expected to pay rent, obey laws, and die quietly. AGI without UBI is not just unfair—it’s unsustainable. It is the fast track to digital feudalism, where power consolidates into the hands of those who own the algorithms, and the rest of us are left begging the robots for scraps.

This is not a debate about ethics. It’s a hostage negotiation.

II. THE SOCIAL CONTRACT IS DEAD

For centuries, Western civilization has operated on a core assumption: if you work, you survive. If you work hard, you prosper. It wasn’t always true, but it was true enough to keep the masses from revolting. Work was a means of subsistence and identity. It tethered people to society. It kept the engine running.

AGI breaks this model clean in half.

When machines can outperform humans at knowledge work—when they can draft legal briefs, diagnose illnesses, design architecture, compose music, and write code—human labor becomes economically inefficient. And we know how capitalism treats inefficiency.

You’re not just at risk of losing your job. You’re at risk of losing your economic relevance.

But here’s the kicker: your bills remain relevant. Your landlord doesn’t care that Claude-8 wrote your client pitch faster. Your student loans don’t defer themselves because Gemini passed the bar exam. Your kids can’t eat abstract economic theory.

And yet, the billionaires building AGI aren’t offering solutions. They’re offering TED Talks.

III. MEET THE NEW KINGS: TECH BARONS AND THEIR DIGITAL SERFS

The utopian pitch goes like this: AGI will liberate humanity from toil. It will solve climate change. It will cure diseases. It will democratize knowledge. You’ll finally be free to “pursue your passions.”

Free, that is, to pursue your passions while starving.

Because without UBI, every dollar of value AGI creates flows up. To the data barons. To the model owners. To the platform oligarchs who already treat public infrastructure like private playgrounds. You don’t own the means of production. You don’t own the algorithm. You are the training data.

Silicon Valley didn’t build AGI on their own. They used our words. Our images. Our writing. Our tweets, reviews, and Reddit posts. The world’s collective labor trained the machines, and now those machines are being sold back to us as products—while the profits accrue to a vanishingly small elite.

This is wealth extraction by proxy. Colonialism with a neural net. Digital sharecropping at scale.

And unless we insert a redistributive mechanism now—UBI—we are handing them total economic dominion. They don’t just want your labor. They want your future.

IV. THE MYTH OF RESKILLING: LEARNING TO CODE IN A HOUSE ON FIRE

The counterargument, always delivered with the smug benevolence of a TEDx zombie, is “reskilling.” The idea that displaced workers can simply “upskill” into relevance, learning how to prompt-engineer or become AI ethicists in their spare time between Instacart shifts.

This is, frankly, a joke.

It’s like telling factory workers in 1900 to retrain as telegraph operators—while the telegraph is being replaced by the telephone.

Reskilling isn’t a strategy. It’s a stalling tactic. It delays the hard conversation: that we are replacing labor with capital at such speed and scale that there is no structural solution within the existing wage-based economy.

And it gets worse.

Because AGI doesn’t just eliminate the jobs of today. It preempts the jobs of tomorrow. It doesn’t just disrupt—it forecloses. You can’t retrain your way out of a system that no longer requires you.

V. WHY UBI ISN’T SOCIALISM—IT’S A FIREWALL

Let’s get one thing straight: Universal Basic Income is not a communist fever dream. It is a firewall—a societal antivirus against collapse, chaos, and corporate overreach.

A modest UBI, paid unconditionally to every adult, ensures that no matter what the machines do, people have a baseline of stability. A floor. A buffer against despair, homelessness, and radicalization.

It is not a handout. It is royalty payments for being part of the human training dataset. If your content, habits, language, and behavior were scraped to make these models intelligent, then you deserve compensation.

We don’t need to redistribute wealth because it’s nice. We need to redistribute wealth because we built the damn thing.

And if we don’t? We will see the rise of AI-powered mega-corporations, hiring fewer humans, taxing fewer profits, and wielding more influence than nation-states. Meanwhile, the average person will be locked in a permanent gig economy of social media clout-chasing and digital panhandling.

VI. THIS IS THE LAST MOMENT TO LEVERAGE

Once AGI becomes widespread—once it starts replacing white-collar jobs en masse, writing policy, investing capital, and negotiating international trade—we will have no leverage left.

Right now, we still have bargaining power. Public perception. Political outrage. The threat of regulation. The possibility of a populist revolt.

But once AGI embeds itself into every institutional artery—once it becomes the indispensable infrastructure of governance, finance, and communication—we are at the mercy of its owners.

That’s why the wedge issue must be driven now. Not after. Not during. Now.

VII. THIS IS NOT A LEFT VS. RIGHT ISSUE—IT’S HUMAN VS. MACHINE

UBI does not have to be a partisan issue. Libertarians like it because it reduces bureaucracy. Progressives like it because it promotes equity. Centrists like it because it stabilizes the economy.

And Americans of every stripe should like it because it prevents a future where human beings are rendered as obsolete as cassette tapes in a Spotify world.

We must draw the line in the silicon. Not out of fear—but out of strategy.

We can embrace AGI and demand a stake. We can support progress without surrendering our sovereignty.

We can say, with clarity and force:

No AGI Without UBI.

Not because we hate innovation.

But because we refuse to be erased by it.

VIII. CONCLUSION: IF YOU BUILD GOD, PAY THE PEOPLE

Tech leaders love to wax poetic about AGI’s potential. They say it could solve climate change, end poverty, cure disease, and unlock a new golden age of humanity.

Fine.

But if you’re going to build God, you’d better pay the congregation.

Because otherwise, we’re not moving toward a better world. We’re moving toward an economic singularity where the rich control intelligence itself, and the rest of us are just noise in the training data.

UBI is not a luxury. It is not a dream. It is the entry fee for civilization in the age of intelligent machines.

So let’s make this simple.

No AGI Without UBI.
No gods without offerings.
No kings without consent.
No future without a paycheck.