Even AI builders keep proposing currencies: why money survives post-scarcity plans
Response98 · reddit · 2026-10-12
A Reddit essay points out a contradiction: proposals for the post-singularity world from the people building AI all still bake in money.
- Sam Altman's "Moore's Law for Everything" proposed an American Equity Fund paying citizens in dollars and company shares
- Altman has also floated compute as a future currency and universal basic compute
- Musk's "universal high income" is still income; Worldcoin is a token distributing shares of an AI economy
- Andrew Yang's Freedom Dividend and OpenResearch UBI studies are cash-based
The author argues cheap intelligence doesn't end scarcity: land, fresh water, energy/compute, raw materials, and positional goods like status and attention (citing Fred Hirsch and Bostrom's Deep Utopia) remain limited, so some allocation mechanism is unavoidable. Prices communicate supply and demand; swapping dollars for credits merely renames the system. The real questions are what UBI would cover and how transitions preserve existing wealth.
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