They didn’t just see this coming. They planned for it.
That is the only conclusion a reasonable person can reach once they look at the full timeline. The same men who are building artificial intelligence tools designed to replace your job, have simultaneously been designing and funding the system that will pay you after you no longer have one. Universal basic income did not arrive in Silicon Valley because tech executives suddenly developed a social conscience. It arrived because they needed a solution for the problem they were already creating.
And the solution they’re building is a government check. For everyone. Forever.
Let’s start at the beginning…
In 2016, Sam Altman, who now runs OpenAI and is arguably one of the most powerful men in the AI industry, began publicly funding universal basic income research. That same year, he wrote that government payments to displaced workers would likely be “necessary” as technology killed more jobs. In 2019, Altman co-founded Worldcoin, a company built around a single vision: scan every human being’s eyeballs with a proprietary silver orb, issue them a biometric digital ID, and use that ID as the infrastructure for distributing a global universal basic income. The company raised $115 million in a 2023 Series C round from venture capital firms. The orbs went to 35 cities in 20 countries. Governments in Kenya, Spain, and Hong Kong moved to crack down on it for privacy violations.
Read that again. The man running the company developing artificial general intelligence simultaneously co-founded a company whose explicit purpose is to build the system to pay you after AI takes your job. He was designing both ends of the transaction. The factory and the unemployment office. And he wants a cut of the token supply.
Altman was not alone. In 2017, a political unknown named Andrew Yang filed to run for president of the United States on a single argument: AI was about to destroy a third of American jobs, and Washington was not even discussing it. Yang’s “Freedom Dividend” proposed giving every American adult $1,000 a month, no strings attached, funded by a new federal value-added tax. He received an endorsement from Elon Musk. The tech community’s money and attention followed. Musk, Jack Dorsey, Marc Benioff, Chris Hughes. They were not backing Yang’s campaign for nostalgia. They were backing the policy architecture their own industry made necessary.
Here is where the story gets specific. And specific is where the mask slips.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff recently declared that AI now handles up to 50% of his company’s workload, then cut 4,000 customer support jobs. Amazon slashed 14,000 corporate roles citing AI as central to its restructuring. Microsoft eliminated 15,000 positions with AI cited as the reason for reshaping its productivity model. These are not abstract projections. These are real people, real families, and real paychecks that vanished, with Benioff and friends still collecting their billions.
Now look at the numbers. In 2025, employers announced more than 1.2 million job cuts, the highest since 2020. Researchers at Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab found a 16% decline in early-career employment across the most AI-exposed occupations since ChatGPT launched. Software development job postings have fallen 53% from their late 2022 peak per Indeed. January 2025 recorded the lowest job openings in professional services since 2013. Young workers entering the workforce are walking into a hiring freeze they cannot see and have no name for yet.
Musk has been the most candid about the destination. At the Viva Technology conference in Paris in 2024, he said: “In a benign scenario, probably none of us will have a job. There will be universal high income, not universal basic income. Universal high income.” He said there would be “no shortage of goods or services.” He has said work will be “optional,” like growing your own vegetables in a garden when the grocery store is open. He told investors last December there would be no need to save money because “there will be no poverty in the future.”
This is the deal they are offering: You lose your job, and they send you a check. They retain ownership of the machines that produce everything. They determine what the check is worth. They control the distribution infrastructure, in Altman’s case literally built around scanning your eyeballs. You are fed, but you are dependent. And the man who holds the key to the system holds a power that no politician, no union boss, and no government bureaucrat has ever held before.
The conservative case against this is not rooted in cruelty. It is rooted in dignity.
Work is not simply how Americans pay their bills; it is how they build their lives. Work is the mechanism by which a father provides for his family without asking permission from anyone, how a young man from a small town proves himself, how communities generate the social fabric that keeps them from unraveling. The moment you replace earned income with a government stipend, you do not liberate people. You make them clients of the state, and clients do not vote based on principle; they vote based on who controls the check.
That is the political calculation hiding inside the humanitarian language.
The conservative answer to the AI disruption is not dependency; it is competition. The answer is trade schools and technical education that train American workers for the jobs AI cannot do, deregulation that lets new industries emerge fast enough to absorb displaced workers, antitrust enforcement strong enough to prevent five companies from owning the entire digital economy, and a tax policy that incentivizes companies to augment human workers rather than simply eliminate them.
The World Economic Forum’s own 2025 data projects that while AI will displace 92 million jobs by 2030, it will simultaneously create 170 million new ones. The machines are not simply destroying work. They are transforming it. The question is whether American workers are positioned to compete for what comes next, or whether they have been ushered into a life of comfortable dependence while the real power consolidates in the hands of a dozen men in Northern California.
These men are not offering freedom. They are offering you a pension for your surrender.
Fight for the work and the skills. Fight for an economy where your labor still commands a wage and your dignity is not subsidized by the people who automated it away.
Hannah Nelson is the Vice President of American Faith Media. Any opinions expressed within the following piece are those solely of the author and are not a direct representation of the organization, its publishers, or its affiliates.
