A thought experiment. If everyone ends up earning an average income — call it UBI — after AI thoroughly does its thing (if), then we want to own what average really wants to buy or subscribe to, and can also afford. What is that?
Separately, I pasted identical words into Bard, having tried them elsewhere, and one felt free to discuss them while the other didn’t want to get into it. Clearly. Bard, as it happens, dropped its waitlist today and opened to “over 180 countries and territories,” so anyone can now run the same experiment and collect their own refusal or their own essay.
The premise isn’t fringe. Sam Altman laid it out two years ago in “Moore’s Law for Everything”: an American Equity Fund, capitalized by taxing large companies and privately held land, under which a decade on each of America’s 250 million adults “would get about $13,500 every year.” It’s the founder of the company that makes the thing, proposing how to pay for the people the thing displaces. Whether that number, or that mechanism, is remotely right is not my point. The point is that the people building the technology are already sketching the cheque.
So suppose the cheque arrives, and suppose it lands somewhere near today’s middle. The Census Bureau puts real median household income at $70,784 for 2021. That’s the household, not the person, and it’s before any cheque — but it’s the right order of magnitude for average. Average, in other words, is not poor and not rich. It has rent or a mortgage, a phone, a car, a couple of subscriptions it forgets about, and a fixed amount left over each month that it spends carefully.
If AI does its thing thoroughly, that fixed amount is what everyone will be fighting over. The luxury market shrinks toward irrelevance and the mass market becomes the whole market. So the interesting question stops being what the rich want, since they can have anything, and becomes what the median household chooses to spend on when the choosing is theirs — and what it keeps paying for, month after month, without being asked twice.
What is that?
