This article continues a thread woven into the early days of this blog: the profound, world-shifting impact of AI on how our societies function and thrive. In AI Anxiety: Will You Lose Your Job?, I explored the immediate disruptions AI brings to the workforce; in The Grand Dream: AI for Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner, I examined the ultimate horizon—a future in which production is fully automated and the notion of “work” has all but vanished. Today, I want to confront a deeper, more philosophical question underlying both stories: In a world where machines provide for virtually every need, how is wealth distributed? Who benefits from the enourmous well of prosperity AI and automation can bring?
Under the Current System: The Concentration of Wealth
This is not a purely academic exercise—the answer to this question will dictate whether our automated future feels like paradise or dystopia. Let’s stretch our imaginations to their limits: production, from resource extraction through complex manufacturing, has been captured by robotics and AI. Human labor is barely required, not out of inefficiency, but redundancy. This might sound like science fiction, but automation is advancing along a spectrum, inching us toward this seemingly extreme endpoint with every passing year.
Now, imagine that the levers of automation are largely held by global private enterprises. Under the rules of today’s economy—especially those of Western capitalism—ownership of productive capital becomes the only ticket to wealth. If automation entirely replaces labor, then work ceases to be the means through which most people can earn a living. Instead, wealth pools among corporate shareholders, those who own the means of automated production. Without any need for human effort, only people who already hold shares in these institutions can hope to ascend above a potentially paltry universal basic income, possibly distributed by some government entity in the name of social stability. This scenario offers a bleak outlook: widespread abundance generated by machines, yet only a small elite enjoying true prosperity while inequality becomes ever more deeply entrenched by inherited wealth and the erosion of social mobility. The opportunity to build value through one’s labor, to climb the economic ladder, fades away.
An Alternative Vision: A Data-Based Economy
Is there an alternative? Let’s imagine a future grounded in an entirely different principle for distributing prosperity—one that does not rely on ownership or labor. In a world run by intelligent machines, data is the new oil and each of us is a wellspring. Recent headlines—like Reddit’s lawsuit against Anthropic for unauthorized use of its data—highlight how every individual, knowingly or not, is already creating something of enormous value for tech behemoths. Every click, scroll, comment, or post we make is a drop in the vast ocean fueling the AI engines that power tomorrow’s economy. What if, instead of handing this value over for free, we demanded a share in the wealth it helps produce? What if data—your data—became the basis for a new, fairer redistribution of wealth in a fully automated world?
This vision echoes core ideas behind the Web3 economy—a movement built on decentralized digital ownership and blockchain technologies. In Web3, users are not just passive consumers but active stakeholders: they own their digital identities, control the data they generate, and earn tokens or governance rights by participating in decentralized platforms. Unlike the status quo, where tech giants extract value from user activity without compensation, the Web3 paradigm promises a new social contract in which data producers are also beneficiaries. If applied at scale, a data-based economy inspired by Web3 principles could shift the dynamics of value creation, giving individuals direct economic agency over their contributions and fostering a more equitable distribution of the immense wealth that automation and AI make possible.
To Cite This Article
@misc{SadouneBlog2025g,
title = {The End of Work and the Future of Wealth Redistribution},
author = {Igor Sadoune},
year = {2025},
url = {https://sadoune.me/posts/data_economy/}
}