This may be the single most important question raised by the disruption of labor, and the stakes are extremely high. Handled well, the answer unlocks a future of shared abundance in which ordinary people are materially better off than the wealthiest individuals alive today. Handled badly, it produces mass deprivation in the middle of plenty, along with all the instability, hardship, and unrest that would follow. The very same technology that could free humanity from scarcity could instead concentrate the gains in a few hands and leave billions with no way to support themselves. Everything turns on the choices we make.
And those choices cannot wait. Disruptions of this kind unfold over roughly 15 to 20 years rather than over generations, and humanoid robots will be deploying at scale within this decade. We have only a brief grace period before the displacement of human labor begins in earnest, and that window is precisely the time to work this out. The cost of getting the answer wrong, or of putting the question off until the transition is already upon us, would be measured in human suffering on an enormous scale. Society needs to confront this now, and get it right.
It helps to recognize that this is fundamentally a distribution question, not a production question, and that distinction changes everything. In a world where AI and humanoid robots drive the cost of labor toward zero, the economy produces more than ever before. The challenge is no longer a scarcity of goods and services. It is that the mechanism societies have relied on for two centuries to put purchasing power in people's hands, namely paying them for their labor, stops working once labor is no longer scarce or commercially valuable. A society can grow far richer in aggregate at the very same moment that most individuals lose their traditional means of claiming a share of that wealth.
If nothing changes, the default outcome is clear and troubling as the gains will flow to whoever owns the robots and the capital. Labor's share of national income has drifted downward for decades and recently hit its lowest level on record, a trend researchers link in part to automation, while the returns to capital and business ownership have risen. That is a preview of the default trajectory at small scale. Extended across the whole economy, an outcome in which output explodes while income concentrates among a narrow group of owners, leaving the majority without a livelihood, would be both unjust and dangerously destabilizing. This is exactly why our central principle is to protect people, not jobs, firms, or industries. The aim is to ensure people share directly in the prosperity the disruption creates, rather than to preserve obsolete jobs or prop up incumbent industries, both of which we expect to fail. It means letting go of the deep assumption, built into our current social contract, that a person's right to a share of society's output should depend on selling their labor.
Unfortunately we do not have a single blueprint to answer this question at present, and we are skeptical of anyone who claims to. What we insist on is that the social contract, and ultimately economics itself, will have to be rethought, because notions like scarcity and the link between work and income no longer hold the way they once did.
Several mechanisms are on the table for the conversation we need to have: universal basic income, broad or citizen ownership of robotic and productive capital so the returns are widely held, social dividends paid from collectively owned assets, and direct public provision of goods and services that have become extremely cheap. Each carries real trade-offs, and the design details matter enormously. Superabundance makes a good outcome possible for the first time in history, but it does not make it automatic. Which path we take is a decision, and it is one we have to start making today.
In the span of just fifteen years, the working horse went from providing the vast majority of road travel to a tiny fraction of it. The automobile had arrived, and the fate of the horse was sealed. We are now on the cusp of a disruption every bit as swift and complete, except this time, we humans are the horses.
A convergence of sensors, computing, actuators, and batteries now gives humanoid robots the capability to perform both cognitive and physical work. AI is already taking on cognitive tasks once reserved for people, and humanoid robots are bringing the same capability to physical tasks. For the first time, the supply of available labor can expand as fast as machines can be built and trained. These systems are already approaching cost parity with human labor across much of the global economy, and their cost will keep falling while their capability keeps rising.
This is about far more than cheaper labor. Robots will create an entirely new and vastly larger labor system in which the marginal cost of labor approaches zero. The result will be a sweeping tide of falling costs, rising quality, and explosive productivity that forms the foundation of an era of superabundance. The nations, industries, and individuals who recognize this early, and who choose to protect people rather than jobs, will be best positioned to navigate the transformation and capture its extraordinary benefits.
Learn more about the disruption of labor and its implications for jobs, society, and the economy.