The billionaires’ AGI plan

What they intend to do with your mind, and everyone else’s livelihood

Let us speak plainly, because the marketing departments will not.

The stated ambition of the handful of dominant AGI vendors — four or five corporations, backed by the largest concentrations of capital in human history — is to build artificial general intelligence: systems capable of performing the cognitive work currently done by human beings. Their own executives and investors describe the prize openly: the global wage base for knowledge work, estimated at 30 to 40 trillion dollars per year, captured as revenue and margin.

Read that again. Their business plan is your job. Their addressable market is your parents’ livelihoods, your future colleagues’ careers, the work of teachers, translators, accountants, paralegals, designers, coders, clerks, and caregivers. Pair the AGI tools with robotics, and the plan extends from the office to the warehouse, the farm, and the hospital floor.

Ask the questions they hope you never ask

Who decided this?

No parliament voted for it. No community was consulted. A handful of billionaires and their boards decided that the dignity of human work is an inefficiency to be engineered away — and that the proceeds should flow to shareholders.

Where does the value go?

When a machine does the work of forty million people, the forty million do not receive the machine’s wages. The shareholders of four or five vendors do. This is the largest proposed transfer of wealth and power in the history of civilization, and it is being conducted without consent, without regulation worthy of the name, and without shame.

What happens to the displaced?

They are offered slogans: “reskilling,” “transition,” “universal basic income someday.” We have heard these promises before — ask the communities hollowed out by every previous wave of extraction. The profits are always privatized; the wreckage is always socialized.

And who builds it?

Here is the part that concerns you, the student. This machine cannot be built without you. The AGI vendors need a continuous harvest of young minds — recruited from your universities, flattered with signing bonuses, sworn to NDAs, and set to work making their fellow human beings economically obsolete.

Your talent is the raw material of their plan. Withhold it, and the plan falters.

This is not anti-technology. This is pro-humanity.

We are not asking you to smash looms. Many of us built our careers in technology; some of us wrote about its ethics — and the lack thereof — from the inside. Technology devoted to humanity is a blessing: AI that helps a rural clinic read an X-ray, tools that translate for refugees, systems that model climate resilience. We have even argued that people should harvest Big Tech’s subsidized AI for humanitarian ends while it lasts.

What we oppose is the purpose now steering the machine: the deliberate replacement of human labor to maximize shareholder value at the detriment of humanity, controlled by an unaccountable handful of vendors. Purpose is everything. A scalpel in a surgeon’s hand heals; the same blade in a mugger’s hand wounds.

The question before your generation is not “AI: yes or no?” It is: whose hand, and to what end?