The problem isn't abundance. The problem is who owns the abundance.

My founder vision is pretty simple.

Save the world.

I realize that’s the sort of sentence that can go sideways quickly, so let me explain.

The vision isn’t Synthetic as a Service.

It isn’t StoinNet.

It isn’t artificial intelligence, synthetic intelligence, agents, DAOs, blockchains, productivity software, or any of the other technology I’m spending an unreasonable percentage of my waking hours thinking about.

Those are tools.

The vision is freedom.

More specifically, I want technology to increase individual free will rather than slowly remove it.

I am a libertarian’s libertarian.

I don’t mean Republican with a different bumper sticker. I don’t mean Democrat who likes cryptocurrency. I mean that I’m deeply suspicious of concentrated power regardless of who has it.

Government.

Corporations.

Billionaires.

Algorithms.

Political parties.

Me.

If somebody has enough power over your life that you cannot meaningfully tell them no, I think we should examine the architecture that gave them that power.

And artificial intelligence is about to make that question much more important.

The abundance problem

For most of human history, our problem was scarcity.

Not enough food.

Not enough energy.

Not enough knowledge.

Not enough labor.

Not enough productive capacity.

AI may flip parts of that equation.

We are beginning to manufacture intelligence.

That should be incredibly hopeful.

A world with vastly more available intelligence should be capable of curing diseases, teaching people individually, creating businesses, designing better systems, accelerating science, and solving problems humans have struggled with for generations.

I want that world.

The problem isn’t abundance.

The problem is who owns the abundance.

Anthropic recently modeled several possible AI economic futures through 2030. They aren’t predictions, but the pattern is worth paying attention to. In its modest scenario, labor still receives about 59% of GDP. In its substantial scenario, that drops to roughly 56%. In its extreme scenario, labor’s share falls to 45.2%, while capital receives 54.8%. Knowledge-worker wages decline by more than 10% even while the overall economy becomes dramatically larger.

Think about that.

The world gets richer.

And that does not automatically mean the average human becomes more powerful.

Those are different things.

Who owns the machines?

Capitalism is extraordinarily effective at creating productive systems.

I am a capitalist.

But capitalism contains a mechanism we shouldn’t be afraid to acknowledge:

capital compounds.

Own productive assets, and successful productive assets generate more capital.

AI potentially accelerates that mechanism enormously.

Imagine that a company once needed 10,000 employees.

Eventually, perhaps ten humans supervising thousands of synthetic workers can produce the same output—or far more.

That’s spectacular productivity.

But who owns the synthetic workers?

If the answer is a handful of corporations, funds, and already-wealthy shareholders, we could produce one of the strangest outcomes in economic history:

Extraordinary material abundance alongside declining individual economic power.

The usual answer is income

The increasingly common response to that future is some form of redistribution.

Universal Basic Income is probably the cleanest version.

And I don’t hate UBI.

It may prove useful during periods of enormous economic disruption.

But as a long-term answer, I think it asks the wrong question.

UBI asks:

How do we make sure everyone can consume?

I’m asking:

How do we make sure everyone can own?

Those aren’t the same thing.

A guaranteed payment can help someone eat, live, and participate in society.

But it does not inherently give them ownership of productive assets.

It doesn’t automatically create capital appreciation.

It doesn’t necessarily provide governance power.

And it leaves an uncomfortable question hanging in the air:

Who controls the payment?

My definition of freedom includes the ability to say no.

That’s hard when your survival depends entirely on someone else’s continued permission.

And I don’t want the opposite extreme

The traditional answer to excessive concentrations of private capital has often been greater state ownership or control.

That begins from a legitimate observation.

Concentrated private power can become dangerous.

Where I disagree is the solution.

Moving ownership from a tiny corporate group to a centralized government doesn’t solve my underlying problem.

It changes who holds the keys.

I don’t want five companies to own humanity’s intelligence.

I also don’t want the government to own humanity’s intelligence.

So maybe we’re asking the wrong question.

What if we broaden ownership itself?

What if the investor owns some of the future because they risked their capital?

And the worker owns some because they built it?

And the customer owns some because their purchases, feedback, data, referrals, and participation made the network more valuable?

What if people who contribute knowledge continue participating in the value generated from that knowledge?

What if technological progress didn’t merely make every human a better consumer?

What if it helped make every human a capitalist?

That’s what I mean by Universal Basic Ownership.

Not a guaranteed outcome.

A guaranteed opportunity to participate.

Not subsistence.

Agency.

Not dependency.

A stake.

And the economic philosophy we’re developing around that idea has a name.

Stoinism.