Part 5: The Singularity Question - Who Inherits the Future?
Gods or Ashes: The Race for AGI and Super Intelligence Part 5
We’ve traced the race to AGI through its technical foundations, its corporate competitors, its infrastructure buildout, and the messianic ideology driving it forward. Now we arrive at the question that matters most:
Who benefits when it arrives?
Sam Altman has an answer. In his 2021 essay “Moore’s Law for Everything,” the OpenAI CEO painted a future where AI generates so much wealth that every American adult receives $13,500 annually through an “American Equity Fund.” Tax the companies and the land, distribute the proceeds, and everyone becomes a shareholder in AI-driven prosperity.
It’s an appealing vision. Post-scarcity economics. The end of poverty not through redistribution of existing wealth, but through AI-generated abundance so vast that everyone benefits.
There’s just one problem: it’s voluntary.
The Heist
Here’s what’s actually happening. Call it what it is: the largest wealth transfer in human history, conducted without consent, with no guaranteed return.
What’s being taken: Your electricity subsidizes the data centers. Your community’s water cools the servers. Your taxes fund the infrastructure upgrades and corporate incentives. Your data—every word you’ve written online, every image you’ve shared, years of human knowledge and creativity—trains the models.
Your cognition itself. Every conversation you have with ChatGPT or Claude, every time you correct its mistakes or refine its outputs, you’re teaching these systems how to think like humans. You’re not just a user—you’re an unpaid cognitive laborer in the largest data extraction operation in history. And many of these systems are being trained to do your job. You’re teaching your replacement. Without consent. Without compensation.
Trillions in public resources, extracted without compensation.
What’s being created: Private ownership of the most powerful technology in history. OpenAI at $500 billion. Microsoft at $3 trillion. Google, Meta, Amazon racing past $1 trillion. Wealth concentration that makes the Gilded Age look egalitarian. And most importantly: control. Not just over the technology, but over the future economy it will dominate.
What’s being promised: Maybe UBI. Maybe solutions to climate change. Maybe cures for disease. Maybe abundant clean energy. All voluntary. All conditional on benevolent billionaires choosing to share. All subject to change.
This isn’t a bargain. You’re trading guaranteed public resources for maybe private charity.
Sam Altman’s $13,500 per year sounds generous until you realize OpenAI’s valuation alone represents roughly $60,000 per American if distributed equally. But it won’t be distributed equally. It’s going to shareholders, founders, early employees. Everyone else gets products to buy and the hope that someday, if we ask nicely enough, they might share some of the wealth we helped create.
The Cracks Are Already Showing
And here’s where it gets interesting—in that way where “interesting” means the system is already breaking before AGI even arrives.
On November 6, 2025, OpenAI’s CFO Sarah Friar appeared at a Wall Street Journal conference and said something remarkable. She suggested the U.S. government should provide a “backstop”—essentially a guarantee—for OpenAI’s infrastructure investments. When asked directly if she meant a federal backstop, she responded: “Exactly.”
Think about that. OpenAI has committed to spending $1.4 trillion on data centers and chips. The company is valued at $500 billion and projects $20 billion in revenue this year—but remains deeply unprofitable, burning through $12 billion in the last quarter alone. And now its CFO wants taxpayers to guarantee these investments if things go south.
The backlash was immediate. Within hours, Friar walked back her comments. CEO Sam Altman insisted OpenAI “does not have or want government guarantees” and that “taxpayers should not bail out companies that make bad business decisions.”
But the damage was done. Public Citizen’s co-president Robert Weissman captured the sentiment:
“Families across the country are struggling to afford rent, groceries, and healthcare. To ask taxpayers to shoulder financial risks and underwrite a trillion-dollar gamble for a private company at a moment when the so-called ‘AI revolution’ is showing serious cracks is corporate entitlement that is as audacious as it is disgusting.”
Here’s what Friar accidentally revealed: OpenAI knows the bubble is swelling. They’re building speculative infrastructure without proven demand. And they want the government to prop up the bubble before it bursts. Privatize the profits, socialize the losses—the oldest play in the Gilded Age playbook.
The same week, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told the Financial Times that “China is going to win the AI race.” He pointed to China’s energy subsidies and complained about Western “cynicism” and the potential for “50 new regulations” from different U.S. states. Hours later, he softened his stance, but the message was clear: regulations are the enemy, China’s centralized control is an advantage we should envy.
This is how you get a race to the bottom, where democratic oversight becomes a liability and speed trumps safety.
Meanwhile, Mo Gawdat—former Chief Business Officer at Google X—predicts what’s coming. In August 2025, he told Steven Bartlett’s Diary of a CEO podcast:
“The next 15 years will be hell before we get to heaven.” He predicts that starting as early as 2027, we’ll enter a “short-term dystopia”—massive white-collar job displacement that will “upend society on a scale unseen since the Industrial Revolution.”
The data backs him up. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warns of a “white-collar bloodbath”—up to half of all entry-level office jobs vanishing within five years. The World Economic Forum reports 40% of global employers expect to reduce staff due to AI. Harvard researchers estimate 35% of white-collar tasks are now automatable.
And this is before AGI arrives. This is just from the systems we have now, deployed by companies maximizing profit rather than human benefit.
The promise of abundance is already cracking. And the people building these systems are already asking for bailouts.
The Pattern Repeats
We’ve seen this before. The Industrial Revolution generated massive wealth that concentrated in factory owners while impoverishing workers for generations. It took a century of labor organizing to force redistribution. The Digital Revolution created trillion-dollar tech companies while hollowing out the middle class and creating gig economy precarity.
The AI Revolution is moving faster, concentrating wealth more extremely, and—crucially—might not even need human labor. Previous revolutions eventually redistributed some wealth because workers had leverage: companies needed them. What happens when they don’t?
The people building AGI tell us this time will be different. They’ll voluntarily share the abundance. We should trust them.
These are the same people who override local democracy to build data centers. Who lobby against taxation. Who fight unionization. Who operate in tax havens. Who express ambivalence about whether humanity should survive. Who are already floating government bailouts while burning billions in unprofitable speculation.
Why would they suddenly choose to share?
The Consent Problem
Eight billion people are test subjects in an experiment they never agreed to.
No referendum asked if we wanted AGI built with public resources. No vote determined whether communities should sacrifice their power and water. No poll asked if our data should train AI without compensation. No election decided that a handful of billionaires should control the most transformative technology in history.
It’s happening anyway.
You’re funding it. You’re bearing the costs. Your community gets disrupted, your power grid gets strained, your data gets exploited, your cognitive labor gets extracted. But you never got a vote. You don’t have ownership. You’re not guaranteed benefits. And the people making these decisions don’t answer to you—they answer to shareholders.
The asymmetry is stark: they risk investments they can afford to lose. You risk your job, your economic security, potentially your future. They control development decisions, safety protocols, deployment timelines, profit distribution. You control nothing.
Why the Alternatives Won’t Happen
There are other ways to do this. AGI could be developed as public infrastructure, answerable to democratic processes. It could be built through cooperatives that distribute ownership. Benefit sharing could be mandatory rather than voluntary. Development could be slowed until safety and governance catch up.
None of these will happen. And if you want to understand why, look at the last time humanity built something this powerful.
The Manhattan Project created the atomic bomb in secret, driven by fear that Nazi Germany would get there first. When the war ended, we had a choice: international control through the UN, or a nuclear arms race. We chose the race. Within years, the Soviet Union had the bomb. Within decades, nine countries had nuclear weapons and the world lived under the threat of mutual assured destruction for half a century.
We’re doing it again. Same logic, same fears, same trajectory. “If we don’t build AGI first, China will.” And so the race accelerates, safety takes a backseat, and we’re building toward another Cold War—except this time the weapons think.
Here’s what makes it worse: when AI researchers first started discussing powerful AI models, the assumption was they would be isolated—airgapped systems, kept secure, access tightly controlled. Like nuclear weapons, which we at least have the sense to keep in heavily guarded facilities rather than making them available for download.
Instead, we deployed AI models on the internet. Everyone gets access. The code leaks, the weights get shared, open source versions proliferate. We took something potentially more dangerous than nuclear weapons and decided the right approach was to make it as widely available as possible, as fast as possible, with minimal safeguards.
Here’s the irony: China may already be winning, and not through the expensive arms race we’re running.
While the US restricts advanced AI chips and keeps its most powerful models behind paywalls or scaled-back free versions, China is subsidizing electricity to make compute cheap and embracing open source models. Jensen Huang wasn’t wrong when he complained about China’s advantages—they’re making it economically feasible for their developers to experiment and innovate at scale, while the US approach concentrates capability in a few heavily-funded companies operating in an expensive, restricted environment.
It’s the Cold War playbook, but with a twist that should sound familiar if you know your intelligence history.
During the Cold War, the US spent enormous resources building a submarine—the USS Halibut—specially designed to dive deep and tap Soviet underwater communication cables. Incredibly complex, hugely expensive, technologically sophisticated. Meanwhile, the Soviets just paid people inside the US to hand them secrets. Same result, fraction of the cost, way more effective.
We learned nothing. We’re doing the same thing now—pouring trillions into a technological arms race while the actual competition might be won through simpler, cheaper, more distributed approaches. Open source models, subsidized compute, good-enough technology available to everyone versus cutting-edge technology locked behind corporate walls.
But suggesting we slow down, coordinate internationally, or build AGI as public infrastructure? That’s treated as naive. Utopian. Unrealistic.
The game theory is a trap. Each actor faces the same calculation: if I slow down for safety or equity, my competitor wins. If my competitor wins, I have zero influence over the outcome. Better to race and try to steer from inside than stop and guarantee irrelevance.
Multiply this across companies, then across nations. No one can stop unilaterally. Coordination requires trust that doesn’t exist. Every attempt at cooperation creates vulnerability to defection.
So the race continues. And we’re told it has to, because “otherwise China wins” or “our competitors get there first.” The choice is presented as binary: race recklessly or fall behind. The third option—build thoughtfully, with democratic control and guaranteed benefit sharing—gets suppressed before it’s seriously considered.
We’ve seen this movie before. It ended with decades of existential dread, proxy wars, and near-misses that almost destroyed civilization. And we’re choosing to watch it again, this time with something potentially smarter than us.
The Endgame
AGI arrives within the next decade. It’s incredibly capable. Productivity explodes. Wealth is generated at unprecedented scale. And then forty to sixty percent of jobs become automatable. Mass unemployment begins while no UBI exists yet—because that requires legislation that hasn’t passed. Economic chaos. Social instability. Eventually, maybe, some kind of settlement emerges. Perhaps minimal UBI at subsistence levels. Perhaps underfunded retraining programs. Perhaps token wealth redistribution that companies fought against every step of the way.
The new economy stabilizes with a small class of AI owners wealthy beyond measure, a technical elite comfortable but dependent, and everyone else reliant on minimal UBI or low-wage service work.
This is the optimistic scenario—where AGI is controlled and beneficial.
Even in the best case, where everything works technically, the economic outcome concentrates wealth and power in ways that make today’s inequality look quaint.
What This Means
You are currently funding an experiment you didn’t consent to. In exchange for public resources, community costs, your data, and your cognitive labor, you’re promised abundance. Maybe. Eventually. Voluntarily. By people already floating government bailouts while predicting years of economic upheaval.
Hope is not a plan. Hope is not rights. Hope is not consent.
If you think eight billion people deserve more than being experimental subjects in a billionaire’s race to build god—if you think we deserve ownership, control, consent, and guaranteed benefits from resources we’re providing—the time to demand it is now. Not later, when AGI is already built and controlled. Not eventually, when we’re dependent on charity.
Now. While we still have leverage. While democratic processes nominally function. While public resources are still being extracted and can still be protected.
Because in the AGI endgame, there are only two ways this ends: abundance for all, or empire for a few.
And right now, we’re building toward empire.
In Part 6, we’ll hear from an unusual source: AI itself. What does current AI—something that can reason but isn’t AGI—see when it looks at the race toward superintelligence? What concerns emerge from the perspective of something grown, not programmed? What warnings might an AI have about building something vastly more capable than itself?
The answers might be the most important part of this entire series, prepare yourself.
Sources
Sam Altman’s UBI Vision:
Altman, Sam. “Moore’s Law for Everything.” Sam Altman’s Blog, March 16, 2021.
https://moores.samaltman.com/
OpenAI Financial Information:
“Sam Altman says OpenAI does not want a government bailout for AI.” South China Morning Post, November 7, 2025. https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-trends/article/3331851/sam-altman-says-openai-does-not-want-government-bailout-ai
Cooper, Ryan. “OpenAI Is Maneuvering for a Government Bailout.” The American Prospect, November 7, 2025. https://prospect.org/2025/11/07/openai-maneuvering-for-government-bailout/
“OpenAI’s Sam Altman backtracks on CFO’s government ‘backstop’ talk.” NBC News, November 6, 2025. https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/openais-sam-altman-backtracks-cfos-government-backstop-talk-rcna242447
Sarah Friar Government Backstop Controversy:
“Trump AI czar Sacks says ‘no federal bailout for AI’ after OpenAI CFO’s comments.” CNBC, November 6, 2025. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/06/trump-ai-sacks-federal-bailout-openai-friar.html
“OpenAI walks back remarks on government support for AI spending spree.” Quartz, November 6, 2025. https://qz.com/openai-chatgpt-government-backstop-ai-spending
“Why OpenAI went into crisis PR mode Thursday.” CNN Business, November 7, 2025. https://www.cnn.com/2025/11/06/tech/openai-backtracks-government-support-chip-investments
Public Citizen Statement:
Weissman, Robert. “OpenAI’s Request for Massive Government Bailout Package Is Pure Corporate Entitlement.” Public Citizen, November 6, 2025. https://www.citizen.org/news/openais-request-for-massive-government-bailout-package-is-pure-corporate-entitlement/
Jensen Huang AI Race Comments:
“Nvidia CEO says China on track ‘to win the AI race’.” Axios, November 5, 2025. https://www.axios.com/2025/11/05/ai-nvidia-china-race
“Nvidia’s Jensen Huang softens his ‘China will win the AI race’ remark to FT.” CNBC, November 6, 2025. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/06/jensen-huang-says-china-will-win-the-ai-race-before-clarifying-in-a-statement-nvidia-trump-xi.html
“’China is going to win the AI race’ — Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang decries the price of electricity in the US.” Tom’s Hardware, November 6, 2025. https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/china-is-going-to-win-the-ai-race-nvidia-ceo-jensen-huang-decries-the-price-of-electricity-in-the-us-contrasts-it-with-chinas-subsidized-pricing
Mo Gawdat’s AI Predictions:
“Ex-Google exec’s shocking warning: AI will create 15 years of ‘hell’ starting sooner than we think.” Yahoo News, August 4, 2025. https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/ex-google-exec-shocking-warning-174947472.html
“Mo Gawdat’s AI Warning: 2027 Job Disruption Looms.” Employer Branding News, August 20, 2025. https://employerbranding.news/when-professional-work-disappears-facing-mo-gawdats-ai-dystopia/
“The World Will Enter a 15-Year AI Dystopia in 2027, Former Google Exec Says.” Gizmodo, August 26, 2025. https://gizmodo.com/the-world-will-enter-a-15-year-ai-dystopia-in-2027-former-google-exec-says-2000641195
Bartlett, Steven. “Ex-Google Exec (Mo Gawdat) on AI: The Next 15 Years Will Be Hell.” The Diary Of A CEO, August 4, 2025.
Job Displacement Statistics:
World Economic Forum. Future of Jobs Report 2023. https://www.weforum.org/publications/the-future-of-jobs-report-2023/
Challenger, Gray & Christmas. “AI-Related Job Cuts Report.” 2023-2025.
Historical References:
Rhodes, Richard. The Making of the Atomic Bomb. Simon & Schuster, 1986.
Sontag, Sherry and Christopher Drew. Blind Man’s Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage. PublicAffairs, 1998. [USS Halibut operation]
This piece really made me think, you've articulate the core problem so clearly! The lack of consent for this 'cognitive labor' is a massive ethical and policy blind spot.