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There is a strange silence at the heart of today’s AI debate. Everyone talks about disruption. Everyone talks about productivity. Everyone talks about how workers must “reskill” and “adapt.” But almost no one talks about the only question that truly determines whether an economy survives the age of artificial intelligence.
If AI Can Do Everything, Most People Won’t Have Jobs — And If People Don’t Earn, Who Will Companies Sell To?
We hear endless forecasts about job losses. Some predict mild turbulence, others speak of mass displacement. But underneath both optimistic and pessimistic scenarios lies a shared assumption: the basic structure of capitalism will remain intact. Human beings will earn money, and then spend that money on goods and services, and this cycle will continue.
But what if that assumption collapses?
AI is not just automation. It is the first technology that competes head-on with white-collar cognitive labour: writing, analysing, advising, coding, designing, even managing. It threatens not one sector but the entire wage-based model that has powered modern capitalism for 150 years. Behind closed doors, economists, policymakers, and tech leaders know this. Yet in public, most avoid stating the obvious conclusion.
When labour income falls, mass consumption falls. When consumption falls, demand collapses. And when demand collapses, the engine of capitalism seizes. So the real crisis of the AI era is not unemployment. It is the collapse of purchasing power.
Which brings us back to the question no one wants to ask:
If people can’t earn, where will demand come from?
Slowly, a new answer is beginning to emerge — not one mechanism but a hybrid architecture held together by multiple sources of liquidity. Think of it as a new operating system for capitalism:
“Capitalism with multiple liquidity injections from state, platforms, donors, and investors.”
This is the only credible path that keeps society stable without depending on traditional wages. And although no government will admit it openly, the building blocks are already visible.
The first pillar is state-backed purchasing power, a blend of income support and welfarism that will quietly replace wages as the foundation of household stability. Whether governments call it Universal Basic Income or something less provocative, they will eventually have to guarantee a minimum level of liquidity as work becomes scarce. Though purists see this as market distortion, in a democracy like India it has steadily maturing into an all-party consensus.
India is already closer to this reality than most countries realise. Aadhaar, UPI, and DBT give it the world’s strongest rails for direct income support, and a wide welfare net already lowers the cost of living. MNREGA provides a rural fallback, subsidised food and electricity keep essentials affordable, PM-JAY cushions health shocks, and new women-focused schemes strengthen household finances. None of this is ideological. It reflects a simple truth: as earning power declines, the state must shoulder more of life’s basic costs. In this sense, India is not behind the West — it is ahead of it.
The second pillar is the freemium economy, an underappreciated form of private-sector welfare. AI companies will increasingly give away powerful tools for free — personal tutors, design assistants, writing aides, analytics engines. People who cannot pay will still access world-class capability, cross-subsidised by enterprise users or premium tiers. Freemium is not a business model anymore; it is becoming a social stabiliser.
We are already living inside this shift. Most Indians use Google search, Maps, Photos, WhatsApp and YouTube without paying anything, while AI-driven tools like Canva, Grammarly, Khan Academy’s tutors and basic Copilot features deliver capabilities once reserved for trained professionals. Across the digital world almost every major platform now offers a free tier, from ad-supported streaming to news sites and online learning portals. As AI pushes the cost of digital delivery toward zero, these free tiers will only expand, turning what began as a marketing funnel into a parallel welfare system run by private platforms.
Over time this may even evolve into a formal ‘data dividend,’ where users are compensated for the training value their consumption provides — a shift that could take the logic of freemium beyond free access to models that effectively pay people to participate. Ultimately, as AI makes digital services abundant while human attention remains scarce, freemium may even move beyond “free” into negative pricing, with users effectively being paid to consume because their behaviour and data become the real economic inputs.
The third pillar is philanthropy, but of a new kind. Extreme concentration of wealth in AI-driven economies will make large-scale redistribution unavoidable. Foundations, global health missions, and climate funds will evolve from charity to macroeconomic infrastructure. However, this will not be purely altruistic; it will be a mix of systemic preservation and colossal ‘vanity projects.’ Whether motivated by the desire to colonize Mars, extend human lifespans, or build monuments to their own legacy, this spending effectively recycles private wealth back into the public domain. Philanthropy becomes not just a moral act, but a structural necessity to maintain the stability that protects that very wealth.
We can already see this shift taking shape, emerging as a complex blend of systemic necessity and colossal ‘vanity projects.’ On the utilitarian side, the Gates Foundation funds vaccination and agricultural resilience , while in India, Tata Trusts and the Azim Premji Foundation run major education programmes that fill gaps the state cannot reach. Yet, this liquidity also flows through high-status moonshots—from climate initiatives like the Bezos Earth Fund to tech leaders backing open-source AI and digital public goods. Whether motivated by moral duty, the race for innovation, or the desire to build a personal legacy, the economic effect is identical. These initiatives are no longer just charity; they are becoming essential stabilisers in an economy where private wealth is growing faster than public revenue.
Finally, the fourth pillar is venture funding, which becomes the last engine of upward mobility in a world where traditional jobs shrink. Entrepreneurship turns into the primary route for income generation, and AI lowers the cost of experimentation to almost zero. A single person with a laptop can attempt what once required an entire company. Most attempts will fail, some will succeed, and that constant churn keeps innovation and aspiration alive. But venture capital also plays a deeper macroeconomic role. With global wealth rising faster than viable investment opportunities, there is an enormous surplus of capital searching for ideas. This excess liquidity will increasingly flow into individuals rather than institutions, backing millions of small, AI-enabled experiments simply because the money has nowhere else to go. In that sense, venture funding is not just supporting entrepreneurs — it is absorbing surplus capital that the old wage-driven economy can no longer productively deploy.
It is important to stress that the role of venture capital here is not mere optimism; it follows directly from the logic of the global savings glut. With a worldwide surplus of capital — vast “dry powder” raised but not yet deployed — and too few high-growth opportunities in the physical economy, investors are structurally pushed toward funding digital experiments. They back these ideas not because success is assured, but because the alternative is allowing capital to sit idle in an increasingly stagnant world.
Put these four pillars together and a picture emerges. The wage-based economy will slowly give way to a liquidity-based economy, where income flows not from labour but from a mosaic of state transfers, platform subsidies, philanthropic injections, and entrepreneurial bets. People will still consume. Companies will still have customers. Capitalism will continue — but only because we rebuilt the plumbing beneath it.
The real danger is not that this conversation is controversial. The danger is that it is being ignored. If we refuse to plan for a world where wages no longer drive demand, we will stumble into it unprepared. And by the time the cracks appear — falling consumption, rising inequality, social unrest — it will be too late to design the new architecture.
Someone has to ask the forbidden question: If people don’t earn, who will companies sell to?
And someone has to state the uncomfortable answer.
Beneath this new architecture lies a sobering truth. When earned wages are replaced by a mosaic of transfers, subsidies, grants, and data-linked payments, we risk drifting toward a kind of high-tech neo-feudalism. In such a world, the majority survives not through independent economic agency but through the patronage of the state and the benevolence of algorithmic platforms. Welfare, philanthropy, and data dividends may keep the engine of capitalism turning, yet they quietly rewrite the social contract, exchanging personal autonomy for systemic stability. We may avert an economic breakdown—but we must take care not to build a society of permanent dependents governed by those who control the code.
The only capitalism that survives the age of AI is capitalism sustained by multiple streams of external liquidity. Everything else is wishful thinking.
These pieces are being published as they have been received – they have not been edited/fact-checked by ThePrint.