Universal Basic Income is an opportunity for the end of Oligarchic Inequity.

"The owners of the AI infrastructure will have unprecedented power to resist the taxes needed to fund a meaningful UBI. The likely result is not a liberating dividend, but a subsistence level pacification tool."

"The global inequality in access to human capital remains enormous today, likely a much wider gap than most people would imagine. Average education spending per child in Sub-Saharan Africa stood at around just €200 (purchasing power parity, PPP), compared with €7,400 in Europe and €9,000 in North America & Oceania: a gap of more than 1 to 40, i.e., approximately three times as much as the gap in per capita GDP. Such disparities shape life chances across generations, entrenching a geography of opportunity that exacerbates and perpetuates global wealth hierarchies."

"In our in-progress research, we discovered that AI tools didn’t reduce work, they consistently intensified it. In an eight-month study of how generative AI changed work habits at a U.S.-based technology company with about 200 employees, we found that employees worked at a faster pace, took on a broader scope of tasks, and extended work into more hours of the day, often without being asked to do so."

"Surveillance capitalism and its rapidly accumulating instrumentarian power exceed the historical norms of capitalist ambitions, claiming dominion over human, societal, and political territories that range far beyond the conventional institutional terrain of the private firm or the market. As a result, surveillance capitalism is best described as a coup from above, not an overthrow of the state but rather an overthrow of the people’s sovereignty and a prominent force in the perilous drift toward democratic deconsolidation that now threatens Western liberal democracies."

"In the age of AI, pandemics, and global unrest, the richest minds in tech are not just thinking about the next iPhone or Mars mission, they are planning their escape from civilisation. Meet the billionaires quietly building luxury doomsday bunkers that redefine survival."

"For the last half century, identity has been dematerializing, shifting from what we own to the networks we belong to. The AI revolution will trigger a great reversal. As digital networks become infinitely dense and dominated by AI, authenticity becomes the new scarcity. Human identity, having moved from land to production to networks, will reverse course. It will re-ground itself in the tangible, the local, and the embodied. A 'post-digital materialism' focused on unique physical creation and experience, not mass consumption. The most valuable signal of your unique Diversity Capital (D) will be a thing you made with your hands that an AI cannot perfectly replicate."

"The 'general intellect'—collective knowledge in all its forms—is being privatised. As its role increases in post-industrial capitalism, wealth accumulates out of all proportion to the labour expended in its production. The result is the gradual transformation of profit generated by the exploitation of labour into rent appropriated through the privatisation of knowledge."

"The use of AI agents is like 'putting your brain in a jar.' This new paradigm of computing—where AI performs tasks on users' behalf—has profound issues with both privacy and security."

"The power of AI... has made it possible to design genetic sequences encoding for proteins that form the building blocks of materials stronger than steel, or personalized cancer treatments. Caltech researchers have invented a new technology to write long sequences of DNA with groundbreaking accuracy. The invention, a method called Sidewinder, utilizes the conceptual equivalent of page numbers for DNA, enabling researchers to stitch together any arbitrary number of short pieces of DNA... in the correct order to create a much larger piece—up to the scale of a gene or potentially an entire genome."

"With respect to machines I feel it important to recognize that we, ourselves, physically speaking, are machines. All of our musical instruments are machines. The physical universe is a machine—in fact, universe is the minimum and only perpetual motion machine. What people are usually apprehensive about is the unfamiliar... I don't think that it is the machine per se that bothers man; it is just not understanding—anything—whatever it may be—that disturbs him."

"I think AI has the potential to build infinitely stable dictatorships."

"REFORMERS look forward to a time when efficient social organization and perfected machinery will do away with the necessity for severe and prolonged labour, making possible for all men and women an amount of leisure such as is enjoyed at the present day only by a privileged few. Nobody, in that golden age, will need to work more than four or five hours a day. The rest of every man's time will be his own, to do with whatsoever he likes. It is difficult for any sensitive person not to sympathize with these aspirations."

"The problem of computer control will have to be solved... before computers are put in charge of systems essential to society’s survival. If a computer directing the nation’s economy or its nuclear defenses ever rated its own efficiency above its ethical obligation, it could destroy man’s social order—or destroy man. 'Once the computers got control,' says Minsky, 'we might never get it back. We would survive at their sufferance. If we’re lucky, they might decide to keep us as pets.'"