“The outsourcing of governmental services is the road to tyranny.”
Trenz Pruca
Every few months, usually after a spaceship launch or a media tantrum, Elon Musk appears on a stage somewhere and predicts that Artificial Intelligence will soon make work obsolete. It is said with the confidence of someone who has both the money and the screen time to assume he is narrating the future. The pitch is always the same: the robots will toil, the humans will rest, and life will be a kind of perpetual vacation in which creativity replaces labor, and abundance replaces struggle. Humanity, freed from the tyranny of the paycheck, will finally flourish.
It is a lovely vision. Uplifting, forward-looking, and—crucially—economically incoherent.
Musk’s scenario contains a hole large enough to drive a Tesla Semi through, and it is the very hole that medieval peasants understood instinctively: who pays for the life of leisure? Who funds this weekend that never ends? Who provides the food, the shelter, the electronics, the clean water, the medical care, the transportation, the housing, and all the material necessities that allow one to live at all?
Musk skips over this question because it is the fatal flaw in the utopia. If humans no longer work, they no longer earn income. And if they no longer earn income, they can no longer consume. And if they can no longer consume—well, the entire structure of the modern economy collapses. Unless, of course, someone else pays for everything.
And that someone else, if we follow Musk’s own logic, would have to be the owners of the AI platforms themselves.
Not the public. Not the government.
The owners.
People like him.
Which raises the next question: will Musk and his class of platform barons voluntarily redistribute the unimaginable wealth they stand to gain from automating the global economy? Will they forgo their place atop the new order in the name of fairness, democracy, or compassion?
Don’t bet your universal basic income on it.
If the past is any guide—and the past is always a better guide than techno-prophecy—then the most likely future is not a world of universal abundance, but a world in which the owners of AI become the modern equivalents of medieval lords: a tiny elite whose control of the means of production leaves everyone else dependent, compliant, and grateful for whatever subsistence the lords choose to allow.
The question Musk avoids is the very one we must face: will AI create a democratic economy—or a new feudal one?
I. The Core Economic Omission: The Vanishing of Income
Our economy has always rested upon a simple compact: people offer labor in exchange for money, and that money in turn allows them to consume what the economy produces. This reciprocal loop—labor to income, income to consumption, consumption to profit, profit to investment—is the beating heart of capitalism. Without labor, the system has no pulse.
When Musk says AI will eliminate the need for human labor, he is effectively proposing to sever the first artery of the system without explaining how the others will remain intact. After all, if robots do the work and humans do not, then where do the humans get the money necessary to buy what the robots produce?
The answer cannot simply be “the government will pay for it.” The government’s money must come from somewhere—ideally, from the massive productivity gains created by AI. But that means taxing the owners of AI. And here we encounter the second silence in Musk’s prophecy: he never mentions taxes. He never mentions public ownership of AI. He never mentions a social wealth fund, cooperative control, or any democratic claim over the platforms that will dominate the 21st century.
Instead, he gestures vaguely toward “universal basic income,” a political concept with no mechanism attached. Universal basic income does not create itself. It must be funded through some combination of taxation, redistribution, or the public capture of technological gains. None of this, to put it mildly, is part of Musk’s worldview. His economic philosophy, expressed through action rather than rhetoric, fights unionization, fights regulation, fights taxation, and fights the political authority necessary to ensure a fair distribution of technological prosperity.
The truth is that Musk and his cohort are not proposing the end of work. They are proposing the end of your work—and the consolidation of their ownership.
II. The Platform Lords and Their Castles
To understand where Musk’s vision leads, it is helpful to examine where we already are. The past decade of platform capitalism has shown a clear pattern: ownership concentrates at the top, income stagnates at the bottom, and the people who actually feed the system—drivers, couriers, content creators, warehouse workers, data-labelers, gig laborers—gain none of the benefits and bear most of the risk.
Uber drivers, for example, do not own Uber. They do not own any part of the infrastructure their labor depends on. They simply rent access to a platform that dictates their earnings, monitors their behavior, and can banish them without recourse. The same is true for Amazon warehouse workers, TikTok creators, Etsy sellers, and countless other micro-entrepreneurs dependent upon platform ecosystems that extract more value than they distribute.
This structure is not accidental. It is inherent in a model built around a single principle: he who owns the platform owns the world.
In such a world, AI becomes the ultimate platform—one capable of performing not merely physical labor but intellectual labor as well. And the owners of AI systems become the new aristocracy. They control the tools. They control the data. They control the productivity gains. They control the distribution of income. And they can, if they wish, distribute just enough to the public to maintain stability without ever relinquishing their own power.
If feudalism was based on control of land, AI feudalism is based on control of algorithms and infrastructure. The peasants of old tilled the soil; the peasants of tomorrow will feed data to the machine. They will not starve, but neither will they thrive. They will be fed enough to continue generating the clicks, the eyeballs, the content streams, and the behavioral patterns that fuel the platforms. Their “income,” if it comes at all, will resemble the medieval subsistence allotment: a grant, not a right; a benefit, not a wage; a gift, not a claim earned through labor or political power.
And like medieval gifts, it can be revoked at any time.
III. History’s Warning: Elites Do Not Share Wealth Voluntarily
One of the more persistent myths in modern political imagination is that technological progress naturally leads to social progress. But history tells a different story. Every major technological transition—from the agricultural revolution to the printing press, from industrialization to automation—has triggered a power struggle over who controls the new wealth.
Modern billionaires like Musk frame themselves as benevolent technocrats who will give back to the people a share of the riches that AI produces. But this has never happened voluntarily. Not once. Not in any century. Not in any continent.
Aristocrats did not redistribute land unless forced.
Industrial capitalists did not shorten workdays unless forced.
Robber barons did not break up their monopolies unless forced.
Contemporary billionaires do not pay taxes unless forced.
Why, then, should we believe that the coming era of AI will be different?
In fact, Musk’s own business behavior suggests the opposite. He has resisted unionization efforts with unusual ferocity. He has fought against regulatory oversight. He has repeatedly expressed disdain for democratic institutions. And he has surrounded himself with an ideology that casts wealthy entrepreneurs as the rightful leaders of humanity’s future—a modern version of the divine right of kings.
If you take Musk at his actions rather than his proclamations, the conclusion is obvious: he sees AI not as a means of distributing wealth, but as a means of consolidating it.
IV. The New Feudal Order: A Society Without Work and Without Power
Imagine, for a moment, that Musk’s prophecy comes true: AI eliminates 70 percent, 80 percent, maybe even 90 percent of all jobs. What follows is not a utopia but a mass political destabilization unparalleled in human history. Hundreds of millions of people would wake up to discover that they have no economic role and no political leverage. A population with no labor power has no bargaining power. And a population with no bargaining power is a population that must depend on the goodwill of its rulers.
This dependency is the essence of feudalism.
The peasants of medieval Europe did not volunteer to be peasants. They were bound to the land because the lords controlled the land. Without access to that land, they could not eat. Modern peasants may be bound not to land, but to platforms. Without access to the platforms, they cannot participate in the economy. Their dependence is total, and their rights are conditional.
This is the future Musk’s utopia hides.
It is a future in which human beings become clients of platform owners, living on whatever allowance the lords see fit to distribute. It is a future in which political rights degrade into consumer rights, and consumer rights degrade into terms-of-service agreements. It is a future in which citizenship itself becomes a subscription model.
And like all subscription models, it can be cancelled without notice.
V. The Real Question: Who Will Own the AI?
If AI truly becomes the engine of the global economy—which it almost certainly will—the most important political question of the 21st century is not whether AI will replace jobs, but who will own the replacement.
Ownership, not intelligence, will define the future.
If AI is owned by a handful of companies, then society will divide into lords and dependents. But if AI is publicly owned, cooperatively owned, or regulated to ensure democratic distribution of its gains, then the elimination of work could indeed lead to a society of abundance rather than a society of servitude.
The struggle that lies ahead is not between humans and machines, but between human oligarchs and human democrats. The machines are merely the tools through which that struggle will unfold.
VI. The Danger of Techno-Optimistic Prophecy
There is a political purpose behind Musk’s prediction. It is not merely economic speculation; it is ideological grooming. By proclaiming that AI will bring universal abundance, Musk seeks to normalize the notion that the public should rely on technological overlords for economic security. He aims to position platform owners as benevolent stewards whose wealth concentration is not only harmless but necessary.
This is a classic move in power politics: redefine elite privilege as public necessity. Portray those at the top as guardians of the future. Paint critics as Luddites or reactionaries. And frame inequality as the unfortunate but unavoidable cost of progress.
Once this narrative takes hold, resistance becomes harder. People begin to think of AI as something too complex for democratic control, something only geniuses like Musk can manage. This is the first step in the psychological architecture of neo-feudalism.
VII. The Democratic Future Is Still Possible
Despite all this, the future is not predetermined. There are mechanisms—political, economic, and social—by which AI’s gains can be shared equitably. These include:
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Progressive taxation of AI-driven profits
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Public ownership stakes in AI firms
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Social wealth funds funded by automation taxes
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Cooperative AI models owned by users
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National and global regulatory frameworks
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Digital labor rights
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Public data trusts
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Universal basic services (healthcare, housing, transportation)
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Constitutional protections for economic rights
These solutions require political will, not technological innovation. The technology is the easy part. The hard part is the ownership.
Musk is correct that AI could make work obsolete. But he is dangerously wrong in assuming that this will automatically create a better world. Whether AI liberates humanity or simply reorganizes oppression under a new banner will depend on whether democratic institutions seize control of the tools—or whether they allow the tools to seize control of them.
VIII. The Real Prediction: Feudalism or Democracy
Musk’s prophecy is, in the end, a fork in the road disguised as a straight line. We can have a world in which AI leads to universal prosperity—but only if wealth is democratized along with labor. Or we can have a world in which AI leads to universal dependency—where the lords of Silicon Valley replace the barons of medieval Europe and the rest of us live on digital serfdom.
The future, in other words, is not written in code; it is written in law, politics, and public will.
If we do nothing, we know precisely where the path leads. It leads to a world in which a handful of men live richer than kings, while the rest of humanity is left to negotiate for access to basic services controlled by algorithms. It leads to a world with no jobs, no income, and no power—except that which trickles down from the platforms.
Musk’s prediction that AI will eliminate work may one day be correct. But unless the ownership question is confronted now—directly, forcefully, democratically—the elimination of work will not be the beginning of human freedom. It will be the beginning of a digital Middle Ages.
And this time, the castles will be in the cloud.
Sources & Further Reading
1. Erik Brynjolfsson & Andrew McAfee – “The Second Machine Age” (2014)
A foundational work on automation and inequality.
https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393239355
2. Daron Acemoglu & Simon Johnson – “Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity” (2023)
A historical analysis supporting the argument that technological progress does not automatically benefit society.
https://www.publicaffairsbooks.com/titles/daron-acemoglu/power-and-progress/9781541702530/3. Shoshana Zuboff – “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” (2019)
On platform ownership, data extraction, and the emerging asymmetry of power.
https://www.publicaffairsbooks.com/titles/shoshana-zuboff/the-age-of-surveillance-capitalism/9781610395694/4. Aaron Benanav – “Automation and the Future of Work” (2020)
Argues that joblessness is driven less by automation and more by lack of investment—but warns of structural dependency.
https://www.versobooks.com/products/2279-automation-and-the-future-of-work5. Jaron Lanier – “Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now” (2018)
Discusses platform control and user dependency.
https://us.macmillan.com/books/97812501966826. The Economist – Various articles on AI, inequality, and productivity (2019–2025)
Useful for understanding mainstream economic narratives.
https://www.economist.com7. UNCTAD – “Technology and Innovation Report 2021: Catching Technological Waves”
Shows how technological revolutions amplify inequality without governance.
https://unctad.org/system/files/official-document/tir2020_en.pdf8. IMF – “Digitalization and the Future of Work” (2023)
Global analysis of the labor transition.
https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/fandd/issues/2023/06/digitalization-future-of-work
