Jeff Dornik – 

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My conversation with Manila Chan on The Jeff Dornik Show went somewhere most political conversations about artificial intelligence still refuse to go. Everybody wants to talk about whether ChatGPT is going to take somebody’s office job, whether robots are going to replace warehouse workers, whether AI-generated videos are getting too realistic, or whether America needs to beat China in the race for artificial intelligence. Those conversations barely scratch the surface. The real issue is that some of the most powerful men in the world are openly describing a future in which human labor becomes unnecessary, money eventually becomes irrelevant, machines produce nearly everything, government distributes income to people who have been economically displaced, and artificial intelligence increasingly mediates the information people consume. At that point, we are no longer talking about a new piece of technology. We are talking about the intentional construction of an entirely new economic, political and social order.

Manila summed up the underlying structure perfectly during our conversation when she described it as ultra-capitalism producing an ultra-wealth divide and asked whether the rest of us would essentially become sharecroppers in their AI future. That is exactly the danger I see. The people selling this future call it abundance. I see a system where ownership of the means of production becomes concentrated in a tiny number of corporations controlling artificial intelligence, robotics, computing infrastructure, data centers, energy, communications platforms and eventually much of the financial infrastructure necessary to participate in modern society. Everyone else gets access. Everyone else gets a stipend. Everyone else gets whatever goods and services the system decides to make available. The billionaire class owns the machinery producing the abundance, the government manages the redistribution, and ordinary people are told this arrangement constitutes freedom because the television is bigger and the robots deliver dinner faster.

Elon Musk has been remarkably open about where he believes this is heading. During his October 2025 appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, Musk said that AI would rapidly eliminate jobs that do not involve physical work and that eventually working would become optional because AI and robots would create what he calls “universal high income.” He described a benign scenario where everyone could have essentially whatever products or services they wanted. Near the end of that same conversation, Musk went even further, discussing what he called an “actual communist utopia” and saying that, if it is achieved, it will be “achieved via capitalism.” Those are his words, not mine.

That statement should have stopped the political Right dead in its tracks. Instead, because Musk tweets memes, fights with the Left, supports certain Republicans and bought Twitter, enormous portions of the conservative movement have apparently decided that his underlying worldview no longer requires scrutiny. I do not care which political team somebody is temporarily standing next to. I care what they believe about human nature, political power, private property, individual liberty and who should control the infrastructure civilization depends upon. A billionaire announcing that capitalism may eventually produce the communist utopia deserves far more scrutiny than another stupid argument over which politician posted something mean on Truth Social.

Musk has continued developing this vision. In November 2025, he told Nikhil Kamath that he believes work could become optional within roughly ten to twenty years and that eventually “money disappears as a concept.” His reasoning is straightforward. Once AI and robotics can satisfy human needs with extraordinary abundance, money supposedly stops functioning as a necessary mechanism for allocating human labor. He pointed once again to Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels, where advanced artificial intelligence operates a post-scarcity civilization in which people largely have whatever they want. In July 2026, Musk made an even more aggressive prediction, saying money would not matter by 2036 because enormous numbers of intelligent robots could create a “quasi infinite economy.”

This is why I have repeatedly said that people need to stop treating Musk’s statements as isolated predictions about gadgets. He is articulating a worldview. Under that worldview, human labor becomes economically unnecessary because machines perform it. Money becomes unnecessary because machines create abundance. Artificial intelligence manages increasingly complicated systems because human administration becomes comparatively inefficient. Brain-computer interfaces further merge human interaction with digital systems. Neuralink already has clinical-trial participants controlling computers and robotic devices with their thoughts, which is genuinely incredible technology for people suffering from paralysis and neurological disease. The technology itself can accomplish tremendous good. The philosophical question concerns what kind of civilization gets constructed when artificial intelligence, robotics, communications, financial access and eventually brain-computer interfaces converge under a small number of enormously powerful institutions. Neuralink itself says its participants can already operate computers with their thoughts.

The universal income component makes the picture even clearer. During my conversation with Manila, I focused heavily on the danger of private companies becoming the economic providers upon whom people depend. Musk has actually made the government mechanism even more explicit. In April 2026, he wrote that “Universal HIGH INCOME via checks issued by the Federal government” was the best response to unemployment caused by AI. His theory is that AI and robots will produce goods and services so rapidly that the government can dramatically increase the money supply without triggering inflation because real economic output will rise even faster.

That clarification makes the centralization problem worse, not better. The proposed future now contains giant private corporations owning much of the productive technology while the federal government becomes the institution writing checks to a population whose employment has been technologically eliminated. OpenAI has floated a related structure. Its 2026 industrial-policy proposal calls for a Public Wealth Fund designed to give every citizen a stake in AI-driven economic growth, with returns potentially distributed directly to citizens. The same document advocates new public-private partnership models for the massive energy infrastructure AI requires and discusses adaptive safety nets capable of expanding during AI-driven economic disruption.

People can slap whatever political label they want on that arrangement. I care about the architecture of power. When a handful of corporations control the productive machinery, government controls redistribution, citizens depend on that redistribution for survival, and public-private partnerships fuse corporate and state power around critical infrastructure, the individual becomes radically weaker. The system becomes radically stronger. That is the trajectory I am warning about.

The constitutional dimension is enormous because Americans have spent generations thinking about freedom primarily as protection against government. Our constitutional system was designed around limiting state power because the founders understood that concentrated political power becomes tyrannical. The First Amendment begins with a prohibition on government abridging freedom of speech, and constitutional doctrine generally does not treat purely private companies as state actors simply because those companies are powerful or heavily regulated. Private platforms themselves possess substantial editorial rights. Government coercion of private companies to suppress speech can cross the constitutional line, as the Supreme Court reaffirmed in NRA v. Vullo, but enormous amounts of private control over speech and access exist outside the ordinary First Amendment relationship between citizen and government.

That becomes incredibly dangerous when the same private systems become essential for economic life. A man who owns his home, earns his living, produces something other people value, maintains savings, operates a business and can communicate directly with his community possesses meaningful independence. A man whose job has disappeared, whose monthly income arrives through a centralized distribution system, whose banking and commerce occur through privately governed digital networks, whose information is mediated by artificial intelligence, and whose access can be modified by institutions he does not control occupies an entirely different social position. Calling both men equally free requires redefining freedom until the word means virtually nothing.

Private property is central to this entire discussion because ownership gives people the ability to say no. A man who owns something has leverage against whoever wants to control him. A family owning land has somewhere to live. A business owner possesses productive capacity. A farmer can produce food. A creator with a direct relationship to his audience possesses something an algorithm cannot completely confiscate. A worker with valuable skills can take those skills somewhere else. Every layer of genuine ownership creates another obstacle between the individual and centralized coercion.

This is why the World Economic Forum’s infamous “own nothing” language resonated so strongly. The original 2016 piece was a thought experiment written by Danish politician Ida Auken and published through the World Economic Forum, rather than a binding policy decree handed down from Klaus Schwab’s mountain lair. That factual distinction matters. The vision it described still deserves scrutiny because the World Economic Forum itself promoted a scenario in which goods had largely become services and a person living in 2030 declared, “I own nothing.” The organization highlighted the scenario again during its 2017 annual meeting while discussing the future of privacy.

Ownership being replaced by perpetual access creates dependency even when every transaction is technically voluntary. The subscription economy already provides a primitive version of this. Software became software-as-a-service. Entertainment became streaming access. Computing became cloud infrastructure. Transportation increasingly moves toward ride services and autonomous fleets. Housing becomes more difficult to own as institutional capital accumulates property. Artificial intelligence adds another layer because productive knowledge itself increasingly becomes something rented from centralized computational systems. The endpoint does not require stormtroopers confiscating everyone’s house. It only requires making ownership economically unnecessary, financially difficult or technologically obsolete while selling dependence as convenience.

The biblical problem with this vision runs even deeper. Work is not merely an unfortunate economic arrangement humanity was forced to endure until Silicon Valley invented humanoid robots. God gave Adam work before the Fall. Genesis 2:15 says, “The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.” Sin corrupted work and introduced toil, frustration and hardship, but work itself was part of God’s created order. Human beings were made in the image of God and commanded to exercise stewardship over creation. That means productivity, cultivation, creativity, building, serving, providing and taking responsibility are connected to what it means to live as creatures made in God’s image.

A civilization designed around permanent economic uselessness misunderstands man at the most fundamental level. People require purpose. They require responsibility. Men need something worth building, protecting and providing for. Families require productive adults capable of sacrificing for one another. Communities require people who possess skills, judgment and a sense of duty. Churches require believers who understand service rather than endless consumption. Turning humanity into permanently subsidized consumers while machines accomplish the productive work sounds compassionate only when human beings are treated as sophisticated stomachs requiring food, entertainment and medical care.

That anthropology is profoundly anti-Christian. Scripture never describes the good life as possessing unlimited consumption while avoiding responsibility. Paul confronted chronic idleness directly in 2 Thessalonians 3:10 with the command, “If anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat.” The context concerns willing idleness within the Christian community, not disabled people or those temporarily unable to find employment, and the underlying principle still matters. Productive responsibility is a moral good. A society that structurally eliminates human usefulness and replaces vocation with consumption will eventually discover that entertainment cannot substitute for meaning.

The hedonistic side of the AI utopia may become one of its ugliest consequences. Give millions of people unlimited entertainment, personalized pornography, synthetic companionship, immersive virtual reality, AI girlfriends and boyfriends, endless pharmaceuticals, cheap food and no economic necessity to develop discipline, and society does not spontaneously transform into Athens during the golden age. Human nature remains human nature. People with no transcendent purpose frequently become easier to addict, easier to manipulate and easier to pacify. Bread and circuses becomes dramatically more powerful once the circus knows your psychological profile and generates itself in real time specifically for you.

That brings us directly into Manila’s field of journalism and one of the most important parts of our conversation. I told her that AI is going to fundamentally destroy journalism as we currently understand it because the endpoint is not merely an artificial intelligence writing an article. The endpoint is personalized reality. Manila immediately understood what I meant and described it as bespoke news, with information tailor-fitted to the individual. She later pointed out that people are already being habituated to synthetic humans through AI personalities, generated entertainment, chatbots and increasingly realistic artificial media.

Traditional propaganda had a weakness. Everybody watching the broadcast received basically the same propaganda. That meant people could compare notes. A newspaper printed the same headline for everyone. Walter Cronkite delivered the same broadcast into millions of homes. Even algorithmic social media, as manipulative as it has become, still frequently shows recognizable pieces of public content that can be shared, challenged and dissected.

Artificial intelligence can eventually eliminate that weakness. An AI news system can know the stories that make you angry, the language that makes you trust it, the politicians you admire, the subjects you avoid, your purchasing behavior, your social network, your religious interests, your fears, your browsing patterns and the exact rhetorical style most likely to persuade you. It can generate a completely individualized explanation of reality that nobody else sees in precisely the same form. Propaganda stops being mass communication and becomes psychological precision targeting.

That is vastly more dangerous than somebody at CNN lying on television. At least you know CNN exists. At least a clip can be saved. At least millions of other people saw the same statement. A personalized AI intermediary can frame facts differently for every person while maintaining the illusion that it is simply giving each individual objective information. Eventually there may be no single broadcast available for public scrutiny because every citizen receives a different version of the world.

The institution controlling the model then possesses extraordinary cultural power even without issuing a single explicit censorship order. It controls what gets surfaced, what gets buried, which sources are considered trustworthy, which facts receive caveats, which topics trigger warnings, which political assumptions are embedded into explanations and which possibilities never enter the user’s field of vision. The cleanest censorship system imaginable is one where nobody realizes anything has been censored because the missing information never appears.

This is exactly why I built Pickaxe around a fundamentally different philosophy. I believe social media should connect human beings to human beings. Creators should have direct relationships with their audiences. Platforms should not manipulate reach to engineer behavior or manufacture artificial consensus. Verified human engagement matters because bot farms and synthetic personas increasingly contaminate the public square. Authentic community matters because a million fake impressions are worthless compared with actual human beings choosing to connect with one another. The technological future does not have to mean surrendering human agency. Building technology around human dignity and liberty is a choice, just as building it around surveillance, manipulation and dependency is a choice.

The biggest deception surrounding artificial intelligence is the idea that technological capability determines political destiny. It does not. A humanoid robot capable of manufacturing products does not require universal dependency. Artificial intelligence capable of diagnosing disease does not require algorithmic censorship. Brain-computer interfaces capable of restoring mobility do not require transhumanist social control. Automation does not require abolishing meaningful work. Abundance does not require abolishing private property. Advanced technology does not require concentrating economic and political power into a handful of corporations and government agencies.

Those outcomes require decisions. People are making those decisions right now.

The people making them also have enormous financial incentives to convince everyone that their preferred future is inevitable. A corporation spending hundreds of billions of dollars building AI infrastructure naturally wants a civilization dependent upon AI infrastructure. A company building humanoid robots naturally benefits from a future where humanoid robots perform enormous categories of human labor. Governments gain power from becoming the distributor of income to populations displaced from work. Political institutions gain control when citizens become economically dependent upon policies administered from Washington. Technology companies gain power when communication, commerce, knowledge and identity increasingly pass through their systems.

None of this requires a smoky room filled with supervillains plotting the enslavement of humanity. Incentives are sufficient. Centralized institutions tend to seek more power. Corporations seek market dominance. Governments seek additional authority. Bureaucracies seek permanence. Human beings rationalize behavior that benefits themselves. Put those incentives together with technology capable of unprecedented surveillance, automation and behavioral manipulation, and pretending there is nothing to worry about becomes an act of ideological blindness.

America cannot preserve liberty by winning the AI race if winning requires constructing the machinery of centralized control. National greatness without individual liberty is simply a more technologically advanced empire. A country can possess the world’s most powerful artificial intelligence, the fastest computers, the largest data centers and the most sophisticated robots while its citizens become increasingly dependent, surveilled, economically irrelevant and politically powerless.

The foundational American principle places the individual human being ahead of the centralized collective because our rights do not originate with Washington, Silicon Valley, an algorithm or an artificial intelligence. Human beings possess inherent dignity because we are created in the image of God. Government exists to protect rights it did not create. Technology exists to serve human beings who possess moral value independent of their economic utility.

That worldview collides directly with a future where human beings become managed consumers inside systems owned by institutions vastly more powerful than themselves. I refuse to call dependency freedom simply because the cage has excellent Wi-Fi. I refuse to call permanent welfare prosperity simply because the check is labeled “universal high income.” I refuse to call synthetic personalized propaganda journalism because a computer can generate it faster than a reporter. I refuse to call the abolition of meaningful human responsibility progress because a billionaire promises robots will make everything abundant.

The technological elites are telling us where they believe this is going. Musk has described work becoming optional, universal high income, money becoming irrelevant and even capitalism eventually producing what he called a communist utopia. OpenAI is proposing public wealth funds, public-private infrastructure partnerships and expanded systems for handling AI disruption. Artificial intelligence companies are racing toward models capable of mediating larger portions of human knowledge while governments race to secure geopolitical dominance through the same technology.

The proper response is not panic, smashing computers or pretending artificial intelligence can somehow be uninvented. The response is to fight relentlessly for decentralization, private property, human agency, direct relationships, constitutional liberty, transparency and the right of ordinary people to remain economically and intellectually independent.

A society of free people uses machines as tools.

A society of serfs depends upon whoever owns them.