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AI Is A Gateway to the Welfare State

AI Is A Gateway to the Welfare State

Last updated on: October 8, 2026 at 1:38 am by Keith Giles

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AI Is A Gateway to the Welfare State 2026-10-08T01:38:22+00:00 Keith Giles

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There’s a story being told about artificial intelligence that sounds, at first, like a story about liberation: AI will free us from boring jobs, make us more productive, give us more leisure time and usher in an age of abundance for everyone.

Maybe it will, but what if AI doesn’t liberate us from the system? What if it creates a welfare state that all of us are completely dependent upon?

This is what I don’t hear enough people sounding the alarm about.

In fact, I really don’t understand why the same people who keep saying “America will never be a socialist state” whenever they’re trying to demonize Democratic Socialists like Bernie Sanders or New York Mayor Mamdani, aren’t the ones screaming bloody murder about the way Tech Billionaires want to use AI to turn America (and the World) into a Welfare State.

Some of the most prominent voices in AI have warned that AI could dramatically reshape the labor market, deepen inequality, and concentrate enormous amounts of wealth and power in the hands of a relatively small technological elite.

And what will the byproduct of this new redistribution of wealth create? A new Universal Basic Income (UBI) system.

My question is, “What if Universal Basic Income (i.e. “Socialism”) isn’t merely a necessary byproduct of the AI revolution? What if UBI is the entire point of the development of AI.?”

The Billionaires Are Coming to Save Us

Imagine you’re a Tech Bro billionaire.

You own one of the biggest companies currently developing AI technology.

As your AI gets better and better at writing, coding, accounting, manufacturing, logistics, customer service, research, design, transportation, and eventually a whole lot of other things we haven’t even thought of yet, your company becomes hugely profitable.

There’s just one problem: the people who used to earn money doing those jobs are no longer employed. And if millions of people don’t have jobs, they eventually stop having money.

(Stay with me here). So…if millions of people stop having money, who exactly is going to buy all the wonderful products and services your machines are producing?

This is where Universal Basic Income comes in.

While your machines produce everything, the government takes the money they receive from taxing the Tech Bros and just give enough money to everyone so they can consume what the machines produce.

The end result is that the people who own the machines become the richest people on earth, and the rest of us become slaves to the new Welfare State.

It’s a remarkably elegant system that works for those at the top, but not so great for the rest of the unwashed masses (like you and me), at the bottom.

Welcome to the Welfare State

Try to imagine a future where the problem isn’t that some people temporarily can’t find work. No, the biggest problem in this future is that our economic system simply doesn’t need human workers…at all.

Some economists describe the possibility of an “economic singularity”—a moment when traditional economic structures buckle under mass technological displacement.

At that point, UBI isn’t merely a safety net. It’s the operating system.

If that future ever comes to pass, we’re all screwed.

Because no one is free in a society where everyone depends on their rulers for basic income.

The only “freedom” we’ll enjoy is the freedom to spend the money we’re given by the Tech Billionaires who own literally everything on earth.

We’ll all be free to do absolutely nothing but wake up, consume, and serve the Welfare State.

The New Socialist Overlords

I find it ironic that, for decades, we’ve been warned about the evils of socialism as an economic system where the government distributes resources to everyone, and now all the Capitalists are busy designing a system where the people don’t own anything, but the Tech Billionaires own it all.

Our “never socialist” American President just told us to trust the Tech Bros to regulate themselves as they create a new economy where they set up the bread lines.

Call it whatever you want, but that’s not Capitalism.

If AI becomes the means of production, then we’ve created a very strange economic arrangement where the machines do the work, the corporations own the machines, the government taxes the corporations so they can pay ordinary citizens like us who do nothing but buy what the corporations produce.

In that scenario, the corporations earn back the money they paid in taxes whenever we buy their products.

It’s a win-win-win, right?

Wrong. Because the more dependent people become upon a centralized system for their basic survival, the more power that system has over them.

This scenario doesn’t require a conspiracy. It doesn’t require some secret meeting in a dark room where a dozen billionaires plot to enslave humanity. It simply requires incentives, and right now, the Tech Billionaires who are self-regulating their own AI industry have all the incentives necessary to accelerate this process dramatically.

So, what’s the solution? Other than regulating this technology and reigning in the development of Artificial Intelligence, maybe we should start trying to build an economy that actually values human beings.

A New Humanist Economy would allow people to do the work they love and receive fair compensation (a livable wage) from doing that work; work that benefits the community in a meaningful way.

That would be a much more radical idea.

But, I’m guessing no one is interested in investing in anything like that. ** My latest book, HARD VIDEO, is a new Science Fiction novella set in the near future where everyone is addicted to a device that knows their every thought and anticipates their needs. But what happens when someone decides to turn off their device and take a look around? What happens when someone begins to ask, “Why don’t we make reality a place no one needs to escape from?” Available now on e-book and paperback wherever books are sold, from Pink Beam Press. Keith Giles is the best-selling author of the Jesus Un series. He has appeared on CNN, USA Today, Coast To Coast with George Noory, BuzzFeed, and John Fugelsang’s “Tell Me Everything.” He co-hosts the Heretic Happy Hour Podcast.

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