The Politics of Jobless Prosperity (Andy Hall, May 13, 2026, Free Systems)
In the scenario the labs are sketching, the politics of AGI will be the politics of jobless prosperity. And this makes it hard to forecast well. The economy will be growing rapidly even as jobs disappear, more like the Industrial Revolution or the China Shock than a normal recession, with mass disruption alongside the explosive enrichment of a small class of elites at the top. Voters in this world will not be anxious about a shrinking economy but furious about being shut out of a booming one, and they may well stop the boom from arriving at all. Jasmine Sun has documented how this anxiety is already curdling into nascent political anger, observing that “the anti-elite and nihilistic attitudes that have dominated US political culture in the last few years are transmuting into anger at AI billionaires.” Alex Imas, in “What will be scarce?“, has made the most careful economic case for taking the underlying disruption seriously, even while laying out why both the short and long-term doomers may be wrong about mass unemployment.The labs see all of this coming, which is why their policy memos have grown so ambitious. It would be easy to read this as good news, since the parties who would have to pay for redistribution are pre-emptively volunteering to do it.
But it cannot work. First, social contracts tend to get extracted from the powerful by the affected, not handed down from above to a public that has not yet decided what it wants.
An economy exists to create wealth, which becomes ever easier as we remove labor and energy costs. Distribution of that wealth is a political question, which the many will determine.