The Wages of AI Abundance: Who Gets What When Machines Do the Work?
Christos Fellowship — Sunday, 19 October 2026. Participants: Thomas, Armond, Charlie, Leonard, Isak (Michael had left)
Notes marked “Note” were added after the meeting. They supply references or correct points the discussion missed or got wrong. Section 13 records a follow-up exchange between Thomas and Armond after the meeting on this topic.
1. Is the Danger Real, and Is the Solution Big Government?
Thomas asked for thoughts on the week’s reading from Transforming America. Charlie said he and Thomas had already talked about the AI chapter and found it remarkable, but he had two questions. Is the danger real, or a Y2K-level panic? And if it is real, what do we do? He said Thomas’s proposed solution seemed like a big-government welfare solution.
Thomas agreed that it is exactly that, and said this concerns him, since he is no advocate of big government. He laid out the problem. Under capitalism, people survive by doing things others need done. If AI and robots do everything, nobody needs anything done, and there is no mechanism for getting what the machines make to people who no longer work. The alternative to big government would be a kind of big communism, where everyone takes whatever he wants from what is produced. So the real question is distribution: how do you decide who gets what?
Having run several scenarios, he said it comes down to two poles. In the first, the government taxes those still producing and gives the money to those laid off. The producers then conclude that the work isn’t worth it if the government takes it all to give to people who do nothing. In the second, the government prints money and sends it to everyone to spend. People then sit back and live on the checks.
Armond said, “Sounds like California.” Charlie said, “I resemble that remark,” and Isak said he wished the money actually came in.
2. Why Should a Labor-Saving Device Cause Havoc?
Charlie asked Thomas to go back to the beginning and examine whether this is a problem at all: why should a labor-saving device cause such havoc? Isak clarified that Charlie meant AI in robotic form.
Armond said the problem is that nobody knows where it ends, who has the authority to draw the line, or where it would be drawn. He looks to history: other industries were inevitable and changed life while people held conversations like this one. Video calls were once on The Jetsons; before television, people listened to ball games on the radio. People once feared automobiles would ruin the ranchers who depended on horses. Yet today a professional rancher or cattleman is probably one of the wealthiest people in his circle. (Armond paused to note he had just seen a red-tailed hawk.) His view is that this change is inevitable, and certain careers and tasks will disappear. The question is what it frees our time and attention for.
Thomas asked: if you didn’t have to work, what would you do?
Charlie said he would still work. Armond said he would do exactly what he does now: build houses, fly planes, and teach. Charlie added that he would probably invent booby traps to kill robots, and Armond said that is already a developing industry.
3. Isak: Purposelessness and the Money in Death Machines
Isak said robot defense is a serious matter. AI leaders, Elon Musk among them, are promising that people won’t have to work and that the government will send a high income, “not a low income, a high income.” Isak said this tells us nothing, since high and low are relative. It also does not say whether such an income would give anyone a reason to keep living. When people retire with nothing they must work for, their bodies can decay. The mind and body stop working together, and the drive to live and to procreate fades. His fear, shared by many, is a sanitized culture of abundance and nothing.
His second concern, which he credited to others, was this. AI is promised to bring healthcare, wealth, and advancement, but the money is currently being made in drones, security, and surveillance. Wars are increasingly automated, becoming contests of surveillance and mind control, with AIs flooding the internet with messages from foreign governments and radicals. It grows harder to see the truth, and even apparent truth may be an AI-generated video. People generally have the goodwill to build healing machines, he said, but the money is in death machines and surveillance machines.
Note: Musk has repeatedly predicted a “universal high income” as AI and robots take over labor. Examples include his remarks at VivaTech in Paris in May 2024 and later statements. He has not specified a mechanism for funding or distributing it. That gap is the one Thomas’s chapter tries to fill.
4. Who Serves Whom?
Charlie asked what would keep robots from making humans their servants, since it takes much human energy to make one robot and humans are relatively cheap. Why wouldn’t they “unionize”? He invoked 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Matrix, and Terminator; Leonard added Philip K. Dick. Armond asked who is to say we aren’t already there, already slaves to consumerism. Charlie said he is a slave to his screen and that this could be the Matrix; it feels surreal.
5. Isak’s Day Off the Internet
Isak described a recent day when he refused to use the internet at all, with no streaming and nothing else, so he could exist in his own mind, fed by God, not by others. He allowed himself books and vinyl records. Driving that day, he began noticing everyone else’s screen use: every car beside him held someone looking at a device or letting a Tesla drive. He said people’s brains are being sucked into a void. He acknowledged he was enjoying the void at that moment because the fellowship was in it. But usually it is twelve thousand perspectives on the news with a blurb about what actually happened. It is a battlefield for information, votes, and influence, exposed to foreign governments and to foreign ownership of social media.
He said he felt wonderful that day. He read William Saroyan’s The Human Comedy in three hours and cried for the first time in months, and felt more human than he had in a long time. Without wanting to sound like a heretic of modern technological culture, and knowing there is good intention behind AI, he said he cannot help feeling we are missing a great deal of life and are at risk of losing our humanity.
Leonard called it a form of fasting, and said fasting is a good thing. Charlie said Isak’s point had made the discussion profound.
6. The Matrix, and Who Regulates AI
Isak said he might be cynical or have watched The Terminator too often, but there is truth in The Matrix. One sees it in church and in paying taxes. The Matrix is essentially an infrastructure system; we have one, and the more it develops, the more it resembles the film’s “desert of the real.” The place where it becomes real or fake is in our heads.
He then asked a series of questions. Is there a fight to be had within the AI world? Thomas has proposed using AI for good and teaching it Christian morality. If that morality is the best and truest, is that battlefield even open? Are the people building AI also the ones regulating it, and can they be trusted completely? If not, we must regard AI with real apprehension, as thought police training everyone to ask the same questions and receive the same answers (“this person started the war, think this way”), with no need for books because the books have been absorbed. Does that benefit humans, machines, or God?
He noted that the military were the first buyers of the Wright brothers’ airplane, and that humanity invented fire for warmth and quickly learned to make flaming arrows. Is evil inherent in this technology, or only in what people do with it? Is it already too late? Should we become Luddites, or accept it in some way? He said he did not have the answers. “I am a man of questions.”
7. Leonard: Denver’s Post, AI as a Copyist, and a False Authority
Leonard read a short blog post Denver published on 18 September titled “Don’t Use AI.” In it Denver says he does not use artificial intelligence to compose anything: posts, talks, letters, emails, or legal filings. He has seen a sharp rise in AI-written messages sent to him, and those may go unanswered, because he is not inclined to converse with an algorithm. Charlie asked whether it was Denver’s and said he could tell.
Leonard then described his own use. He designed the temple concept himself and used Grok Imagine only for the tedious rendering, which it produced on the first try. He compared this to music. A composer might write most of a symphony in MIDI or notation software (Leonard uses an online program called Flat) and then let AI do the copying. He worked as a copyist with his brother for three or four years. The copyist takes the full score and writes out each instrument’s part (first violins, second violins, violas, cellos) so it can be handed to the players. It was done by hand with a fountain pen, using thin and thick strokes, almost an art, and it paid poorly for the labor. Using AI for that kind of work does not trouble him, since the composer remains the source of the inspiration. He sees AI possibly freeing people’s minds to create more great things.
But, as Isak said, evil people will have the same tool. He wondered how to keep it from the wicked, or how to ensure the righteous can handle what the wicked do with it. He added that we already have a superintelligence available through prayer and meditation, since God is the ultimate superintelligence and is not man-made. In that sense, he said, AI may be Satan’s way of diverting humanity into a false religion, or a false sense of authority and intelligence. AI is only what its programmers make it. Most of the job listings Indeed sends him in his field of design and engineering are now for training AI to do engineering and design.
8. Thomas: Humans Training Machines to Replace Humans
Thomas said Leonard had just stated his point exactly: we are using humans to put humans out of work. This has been happening for at least thirty years through training workers overseas to do American white-collar jobs more cheaply; AI is the same thing “on steroids.” Taken to its logical extreme, and echoing Armond’s question of where it stops, he said there is no stopping point.
He also addressed Leonard’s remark about Satan. He recognized it was not quite what Leonard meant, but said the idea that a particular technology is satanic is simplistic. What matters is what we do with it; it can be used for good or evil, and the challenge is to use it for good.
Leonard agreed. He meant that evil people can use it as well as righteous people can. It is a tool, like a hammer: you can build houses or kill people with it.
Note: The two positions are closer than they appear. Leonard’s concern is the AI functioning as a rival authority, the place people go for wisdom instead of God. That is a concern about use, not about the silicon. It is the same distinction drawn in the symbols discussion about the bronze serpent, a God-given instrument that became an idol when Israel began burning incense to it (2 Kings 18:4).
Note: On outsourcing, white-collar offshoring since the 1990s has gone chiefly to India and the Philippines (software, call centers, back-office work), while manufacturing went chiefly to mainland China. Hong Kong served more as a financial and trading intermediary than as a destination for outsourced labor.
9. Armond: Overconsumption and Its Counter-Industries
Armond said the deeper issue is our propensity to overconsume. He compared it to a water flosser that keeps pumping after the water runs out. He described a competition between a packaging robot and one of the top human packers on the same line. They kept pace, and the human may even have won within the time frame. But when the human was spent, the robot kept going at the same rate for another twenty-three hours. If production can run without human input for long periods, raw materials will be depleted. That in turn opens opportunities for recycling, and, as Isak’s internet fast suggested, for detox and self-care industries.
Charlie said Armond seemed to be describing a health-and-recovery spa run by robots. Armond said he could imagine getaways inside Faraday cages, much as some concerts already lock phones in pouches, marketed as escapes from AI. Isak imagined a wellness spa with a library and electricity only for lights. Armond added incandescent bulbs and cash only. Charlie proposed an entire AI-free state, “Freelandia.”
10. Isak: Prime Real Estate and Who Lives Where
Isak said people pay so much to live on the California coast because it is coveted, prime real estate that movie stars can afford and others cannot, so most live inland. Even with AI distributing an income, the old questions of value and allocation remain. The leaders of AI may give everyone an income and then live at the beach themselves because they are in charge, while everyone else lives in the bottom of Los Angeles or Bakersfield.
11. Living Alongside the Machines
Charlie predicted that in thirty years even the poorest American family will have three or four broken-down robots in the garage, waiting for someone to pull the hard drives so they can be disposed of. He does not see AI as different from other technologies we have adapted to. He took a four-hour walk a couple of weeks ago and could still feel it, a sign of how much cars have cost him the ordinary human ability to walk all day. (Isak: then we invented horses. Leonard: “Hey, that animal over there, I need that, get on top of it.” Charlie: someday someone will reinvent walking shoes. Isak: We already have driving shoes.)
Isak said every invention brings a dozen accessories. Some consumption is good: eating to fuel the body, cutting trees or using clay or metal to build a house. Overconsumption is different. When he wants to buy new clothing, he said, it is usually because he is dissatisfied with something in his life and is redirecting that into buying clothes, drinking a beer, or other consumption that does not help him. Buying a good book is good consumption; a 32-ounce soda is not. Everything is at our fingertips, and we must decide whether it is worth the piles of trash. He asked whether there is a way, or a country, that lives with minimal consumption and still feeds its people. The drive for ever-cheaper goods produces cheaper food, more pesticides, more sickness, and a market for healing and pills: an ecosystem. If we stopped needing to consume so much, would that be death to humanity or only to an economy? It seems we are told we have only one choice: to keep producing and consuming to keep each other alive, but he doubted anyone thought it through that way; it is more a byproduct.
Charlie told of failing his driving test at the DMV. The young examiner went through a long checklist of his errors and then admitted that he doesn’t do any of those things either, because he drives a Tesla. Charlie said he doesn’t have a Tesla and has to think all the time.
12. Armond: Every Technology Breeds an Industry to Undo It
Armond said every new technology seems to bring an equal industry to help us return to our primitive, natural state, and returning is usually more expensive. Before cars and tractors, treadmills and weights would have been hard to sell. A farmer who had worked all day would not have paid to lift lead balls for fun. Isak said the farmer had a symbiotic relationship between his work and his body; automation then multiplied crops so that people work even less for their food.
Armond said that is where we need to direct our minds now, not later: if AI leads us somewhere, what pathways bring us back toward our natural state? He said the food system shows the pattern, with the FDA allowing poison to be sold while medicines keep people comfortable as they are poisoned.
Charlie asked what the medicine for AI robots would be. Armond asked which AI industry he meant. Isak said there are many, like asking what “the book” means in English. Clusters of American companies buy one another and form super-companies; others do the same in China or Russia, and work is outsourced. It resembles the weapons trade, where one must trace the money to find who is behind the weapons in a given war. What AI is allowed to do will be set by infrastructure and law: we legislated it into cars as road safety, and into the military as a new cold war over who drops the drone bomb first, which is already happening, though not under national flags. Charlie lamented that he will never afford a Mercedes robot and will be stuck with a Kia.
13. Thomas: How Do We Fund the Transition?
Thomas said AI will come whether we want it or not, and we will have to sanctify it, as we must everything else. The question in his chapter is how to fund the transition from here to there. He asked again: of the two poles, printing money or taxing producers, are either acceptable? Should it be a mix, or some third option? We live under capitalism with a socialist streak; can we reach the new world by a path people will accept? He said it is partly a sales job: what will people accept? Speaking as people ourselves, he asked whether we would rather tax companies and individuals to support those put out of work, or have the government print money while everyone follows Isak’s approach of dialing back consumption. On that path, less is produced, people consume less, and that discipline helps those who were laid off simply survive.
He does not expect the timing to synchronize neatly, with each round of layoffs followed by retraining and new production. More likely, AI and robots will be implemented gradually, and people will be put out of work gradually, producing a lower class of semi-unemployed people living on something like unemployment. He said he does not see the end state, where AI and robots make everything, as the big problem. The problem is the transition.
14. Armond: Ghettos, and the Haves and Have-Nots
Armond said he expects what we now call ghettos. Non-working populations on subsidized housing will be corralled into certain neighborhoods. This is not new, he said; capacity is simply being increased, as it already has been. He believes we will eventually recognize that the old divisions of religion, team, city, and race are false classism, offered to us precisely to separate us. In reality there are only two groups, the haves and the have-nots. He sees society moving toward subsidy for anyone not directly providing the means of production or serving as a vendor to or of the AIs. Those who keep practicing a skill AI has largely taken over will become artisans, probably very highly paid ones.
15. Uploading the Self, and Brains Grown from Neurons
Charlie asked whether it will be possible to download a person’s essence (voice, thought patterns, history) into a robot and achieve a kind of immortality, at least for those who recognize the personality. Someone, he said, will try.
Armond said companies are already building biological computers from living human neurons, naming Cortical Labs, which he had read about that morning. He had also read that a man-made computer matching the human mind’s computing and storage would occupy about half an acre. He called it Frankenstein all over again.
Isak asked how people would interact with a new species wheeled out in a few years: “Fred,” the stem-cell bio-brain. What rights would it have, or lack, and what purposes? We are drawing closer to the line where robots are just like people, and might decide to use people as their horses. Armond suggested we might create our own destruction.
Note: Cortical Labs, based in Melbourne, grows human neurons from stem cells on electrode arrays. Its 2022 “DishBrain” experiment, published in Neuron, showed a neuron culture learning to play Pong. In 2025 it announced the CL1, a commercial biological computer. The “half an acre” figure could not be traced to a source and should be treated as illustrative. Estimates of the brain’s computing capacity vary by orders of magnitude.
16. Armond: Parasites and the Serpent
Armond described a book he had read about “Wetiko.” It holds that ancient religions and cultures all reported a parasitic presence as a prominent part of human experience. He said one parasite, toxoplasma, is so prevalent that doctors no longer test for it, and that it alters behavior much as rabies does. On this philosophy, everyone from the politicians down is infested, and the parasites have steered leaders toward policies favorable to the parasites’ survival, in food, drink, clothing, and how water is or isn’t treated. Charlie said there is a lot of truth in that.
Armond also reflected on the serpent in Genesis. Rather than a snake, he suggested picturing a parasitic worm in the body. Parasites can give a person thoughts and voices, so such a thing could tell a person to eat a food harmful to his health and survival. He asked what the underlying goal of AI is and what it would do for the parasites in control of so many things, adding that such a parasite could easily be considered satanic.
Note: “Wetiko” (wétiko, a Cree term; wendigo in other Algonquian languages) names a cannibalistic spirit of insatiable greed. The likely source is Paul Levy’s Dispelling Wetiko (2013) or Wetiko: Healing the Mind-Virus That Plagues Our World (2021). Levy treats wetiko chiefly as a psychic or spiritual infection, a “mind-virus,” using biological parasitism as an analogy, not as a literal claim.
Note: On toxoplasma, it is not true that doctors no longer test for it. Testing is standard in pregnancy and for people with weakened immune systems, because the infection can harm a fetus and can cause severe disease in immunocompromised patients. Infection is common: the CDC estimates roughly 11% of Americans aged six and older carry it, and estimates run higher worldwide. Toxoplasma gondii does alter rodent behavior, making infected rats less afraid of cat odor. Associations with human behavior and psychiatric conditions have been reported but remain debated, not established.
Note: On the serpent, Scripture identifies the serpent of Eden as “that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan” (Revelation 12:9; cf. 2 Corinthians 11:3). The parasite image works as a metaphor for how temptation speaks from within (James 1:14–15). Read literally, it would shift the source of sin from the will to biology, which the text does not support.
Leonard recalled a recent TV comedy-mystery on the same theme, Brain Dead. Tony Shalhoub, who played Monk, plays a right-wing legislator infected by an alien parasite that eats about a third of the brain and makes its host more radical in whatever he already believes. Infected liberals and conservatives push each other to extremes until the parasites, male and female, are revealed to have infested Washington. He said it was well made and funny, credited Ridley Scott, and noted it ran one season but wrapped up its story. Mind control, by chip, brainwashing, or parasite, has long been a theme in programming, he said. Now Elon Musk’s Neuralink is helping people speak or see again. He added that he and Thomas are working on the NeuroGym.
Note: Brain Dead aired on CBS in 2016. It was created by Robert and Michelle King, with Mary Elizabeth Winstead in the lead. Shalhoub played Senator Red Wheatus, a senator, not a congressman. Ridley Scott was not the director. His production company, Scott Free, was involved as producer, as it had been on the Kings’ The Good Wife.
17. What Is This Group?
Charlie asked what to call this weekly think tank. Armond said he calls it Fellowship; Leonard offered “the Blue Sky Fellowship.” Isak said he always absorbs new information and viewpoints. He said it helps to weigh these questions at the start of each week, for the same reason weekly church can be a good institution: it is a time to look at the important things in life and go through the week with new ideas about the right way to live.
Leonard said his wife needed to go, and the group closed in prayer. Thomas thanked God for bringing them together, for the week’s insights and the launching platform for reflection, and for the fellowship and opportunity to share and be real people. He asked God to guide and bless them in the coming week, in Jesus’ name.
18. Follow-Up: Thomas and Armond After the Meeting
After the others left, Thomas told Armond that he had spent the week not on physics but on national policy for the presidential effort. Unlike last time, he intends to promote it publicly, aiming to have it ready by 4 July 2027. He has written perhaps twenty to forty or more policy essays and finds the work almost addictive. The AI chapter’s problem, how to support people AI puts out of work, is not a fringe concern; nearly everyone sees it, and no one has proposed a convincing answer. He asked whether Armond had read it. Armond said he had read Chapters 7 and 8, including the addendum to Chapter 8 on the bridge from wages to AI robotics.
Thomas said that, in drafting, ChatGPT proposed giving everyone $18,000 a year, and he hates it because no one can live on that. Armond said that is what is happening now, and it is unrealistic to expect the whole norm to change. He said the real opportunity is to raise what we consider an acceptable standard of living in those situations, which would be monumental. Otherwise, too much rests on whoever decides what meets the standard.
Thomas described what he expects: a person living an ordinary life comes home one day and tells his wife that the life they spent years building is over and they must move into the projects, not because anything else changed but because an AI took his job. This could be epidemic. Armond said it is already happening. He mentioned a recent report of five thousand layoffs at a steel mill. He said U.S. Steel’s Gary Works, around which his whole city was built, once employed about 30,000 people and now employs about 5,000 while producing more steel than at its employment peak. “How do we keep everything from looking like Gary, Indiana?” Thomas said that is exactly his point.
Thomas then gave his own answer: all three remedies will be needed together.
- Tax the windfall. Tax those whose profits have soared through automation more on that windfall. Letting them keep all of it to stay motivated to innovate is “a little bit much.”
- Increase the debt, that is, create money to support those displaced.
- Ask everyone to lower consumption during retraining. No one should expect to keep a gold-spoon standard of living untouched. Society cannot treat the displacement as someone else’s problem. “We are all in this together, and we are going through a change, and it’s going to be wonderful on the other side, but we are not on the other side.”
Because giving people money raises prices if consumption stays the same, he proposed what he called Sensors: a system that measures the actual stock of goods and services and announces which are scarce. People would be asked to hold back on scarce items unless they had a real need, so prices of plentiful goods, such as toothpicks, wouldn’t rise merely because more money was circulating. He framed it as a wartime footing. This is a crisis; rationing and sacrifice are necessary; a weekly list from the Sensors would say what to avoid overconsuming; people would buy only what they needed, refuse to hoard, and trust their neighbors to do the same; and stores would impose limits, as they did with toilet paper during the pandemic.
Armond said his family had stocked up beforehand and never understood the toilet paper panic. He suspected it was artificially manufactured, because lumber was in short supply and the lumber companies own the paper industry. Thomas attributed it more to “the sky is falling, let’s do something.” Armond recalled buying three fishing rods, still in their plastic, thinking he would have to live off fish from the local pond.
Note: On the funding question, one consideration bears directly on the print-or-tax choice. Inflation results from money growing faster than the goods and services it buys (the quantity equation, MV = PY). If AI and robots substantially increase output, the money supply can grow in proportion to that added output without raising the general price level. Some of the “printing” pole may therefore be less inflationary in an AI economy than it would be today. It becomes inflationary only to the extent that money is created faster than production rises. This does not settle the moral question of whether it is righteous to give money without work, but it changes the economic arithmetic.
Note: On the Sensors proposal, in a free market prices already function as a scarcity signal. A rising price tells buyers to economize and tells producers to make more. The proposal therefore substitutes voluntary restraint, guided by published information, for part of what prices do. The nearest precedent is the World War II Office of Price Administration, which combined price controls with ration books. It held down measured inflation but also produced widespread black markets. The voluntary, non-coercive form Thomas describes, which publishes the information and appeals to neighborly restraint with store-level limits only where needed, avoids the controls that caused those problems. It also depends far more on public trust and a shared sense of crisis.
Note: Gary Works is the largest integrated steel mill in North America, not in the world. Its employment did fall from roughly 30,000 at its mid-century peak to a few thousand today, which supports Armond’s point that automation and productivity gains, not lower output, account for much of the job loss. The report of 5,000 recent layoffs was not verified for this write-up.
Note: On toilet paper, the 2020 shortage arose mainly from a sudden shift in demand from commercial to household products, which are made on separate production lines and packaged differently, combined with panic buying. The lumber price spike came separately, in late 2020 and 2021. Toilet paper is made from pulp, and pulp supply was not the main constraint.