2026-11-03
The Industrial Revolution Chained Humans to Timecards for 200 Years: In the Age of AI, Why We Must Decouple Survival from Wage Labor
【UBI & The AI Social Contract · #08】Today 99% of people assume that 'no punch-card job means no right to eat' is an eternal law of nature. Yet economic historians have shown that tying human survival 100% to selling hours of wage labor was an artificial institution invented in the late 18th century to feed steam-powered factories—less than 240 years ago. As AI agents and robotics complete a week of repetitive human work in seconds, keeping survival chained to billable hours only manufactures structural despair.
