Why UBI Can't Save Us

If AI can replace all human labor, the only way to make money will be by hoarding physical resources and gatekeeping access to them.

In an automated economy, the only meaningful form of power left is the ability to gatekeep access to the physical world.

This is why UBI alone won’t fix the economic shock of labor automation. People often propose Universal Basic Income as the solution to mass automation, but UBI doesn’t address the real bottleneck, which is the continued private control of scarce physical resources. As long as a small number of people can monopolize access to land, housing, water, raw materials, and distribution networks, UBI won’t change the underlying power imbalance.

Economists already point out the classic problem, “If you give everyone $1000, rents just rise by $1000.” And they’re right, because landlords still control the resource you need to survive and will optimize for maximum extraction.

If human labor becomes economically worthless while land and natural resources remain privately gatekept, then UBI simply becomes a transfer payment from the state to landlords and resource owners. It preserves the economic hierarchy of resource owners vs everyone else.

Imagine we reach a point where AI can design anything, robots can build anything, clean energy is cheap, and manufacturing is cheap.

In that world, the bottleneck is no longer expertise or labor. It’s access to physical space and physical inputs.

You could type a prompt and have a house built for you, but it doesn’t matter if you’re legally forbidden to put that house anywhere. If all land is already owned, and the owners can charge whatever they want for access, then individuals will forever be at the mercy of whoever owns the physical resources they require for survival.

Even if everyone received a generous basic income, resource owners could simply adjust prices upward until the cost of existing absorbed the full amount of an individual’s UBI. No one could ever accumulate assets, and everyone would remain dependent on gatekeepers.

UBI treats the symptoms of automation, but the real issue is the ability of a minority to monopolize essential resources and charge rent for access to them.

Right now, society tolerates extreme inequality because there’s a widespread belief that it’s possible to work your way out of poverty, accumulate assets, and become a resource owner yourself someday. This creates the illusion of fairness, or at least legitimacy. If people believe society is a meritocracy and some people are rightfully entitled to more because they worked hard for it, inequality feels fair and even inevitable.

But once automation removes the bridge between labor and survival, that illusion collapses. When people can no longer “work their way up,” the logic of, “I own everything because I inherited it or got here first” stops feeling morally acceptable or socially stable.

The hierarchy will suddenly stop making sense to anyone except the owner class.

Automating labor while maintaining the right to own unlimited private property means the balance of power is tilted completely in favor of resource owners. That is the true challenge of transitioning from what we have now to a fully automated post labor economy, and UBI fails to address it.