Why We Don't Need to Fear the AI Future
We are on the verge of an upheaval that is reaching a new quality through the convergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robotics, fundamentally challenging our previous understanding of work and everyday life. Warnings from insiders in the tech industry are accumulating: In a few years, this technology will be able to take over a massive part of our cognitive work. What began in industry with robots is now hitting offices, law firms, administrations, and creative professions. The consequence that is often painted on the wall is bleak: mass unemployment, an unprecedented concentration of power among a few tech corporations, and millions of people suddenly considered “useless” to the labor market.
The helplessness in the face of these forecasts is palpable. How are we supposed to survive this? Who will pay our income when the jobs are gone? Should we hope for an unconditional basic income from tech billionaires? This concern is understandable. However, it is based on an old way of thinking that we have become accustomed to over generations. We have internalized that we must passively wait for an employer, a bank, or the state from the outside to allocate money to us so that we may participate in life. If the job disappears, the money disappears – and we freeze in an inability to act. We confuse the lack of money with a lack of real wealth.
The Change of Perspective: We Ourselves Are the Value
What if this development is not a crisis at all, but rather merely an organizational problem?
The real world does not disappear because of AI. The people are still there. Their manual, nursing, social, and creative skills are there. And our human needs – the desire for good food, for a repaired roof, for care and genuine human attention – remain as well.
If the old money is missing from the wallet because AI has taken over the office job, that might be a major challenge, but it does not stop our ability to do something for others. We might then merely be lacking the tool for settlement.
As soon as we realize that we ourselves are the actual value, everything changes. It is not the numbers on a bank account that bake the bread or comfort a child, but the human being. Money was always just a social agreement, a piece of information about who provided what to whom. If access to the conventional means of payment stalls, there is no reason to despair. We can simply agree anew and organize the exchange of our services differently.
When people start to connect directly again on a local and regional level, spaces for new tools emerge. They then use, for example, concepts like Human Money (securitized promises of performance), which do not come from a central bank but are backed by the skills and trust of the people themselves. As long as we can do something that others need, and we can agree on an exchange, we are capable of acting – completely independently of what the financial markets do.
The Objection: “But what about electricity and hard resources?”
Anyone who hears this concept for the first time inevitably stumbles over a seemingly logical objection. The thought goes: “That’s nice for neighborhood help and buying vegetables. But what about the big things? The owners of the power grids, the resource monopolists, and the AI billionaires will never accept our homemade vouchers or barter agreements. To get real resources, we need hard money!”
The Refutation: The Illusion of “Hard” Money
This objection reveals a deep fallacy. There is no “hard” conventional money. The money we use today has no intrinsic value of its own. Its power consists entirely in the fact that we all believe we have to have it.
A tech billionaire doesn’t amass billions because he can taste digital zeros on a screen. He does it because he assumes he can buy the labor, services, and products of other people with it.
What happens now when a large number of people – freed from the old labor market by AI – begin to organize their needs among themselves through their own agreements and new means of exchange? The moment the baker, the plumber, the nurse, and the farmer agree to settle their services directly among themselves, the accumulated money of the monopolists drastically loses traction in this real community.
The tech giant cannot eat his data centers. And even the richest tech billionaire will presumably find at the end of his life that when sick or in old age he would much rather be cared for by a real, empathetic human being than by a cold, soulless robot. At the end of every value chain is always a human being of flesh and blood. If we stop chasing unconditionally after the old money, we literally force the supposedly powerful to adapt. They will have to accept our forms of exchange if they want to continue to partake in our irreplaceable human services.
In addition, we underestimate our own creative power: A village or a region often does not need an outside investor to found an energy cooperative or build a bridge. Even if we take a little longer without the latest technology: If the material, the knowledge, and the capable hands are locally present, one only has to agree on how to fairly settle the time spent with one another.
Conclusion: Almost Too Good to be True
It sounds almost too simple. It sounds utopian because over decades we have learned to feel dependent on abstract financial flows.
But we do not need to be afraid of AI automation. On the contrary: This technological upheaval could be exactly the healing nudge we need. It forces us to become creative and to finally rediscover our own creative power. AI and robotics even help us by taking over inhuman routine tasks and thus making life easier. What more could we want?
Freedom and real wealth begin exactly where we stop waiting for a miracle from above. We merely have to realize that we ourselves are the solution, and start reorganizing our exchange on a human level with one another.