This week Dario Amodei asked to slow down artificial intelligence. Altman and Musk agreed with him.
The debate is all about safety. But the risk that will hit us first does not take the shape of an attack. It takes the shape of a public budget.
About half of Italy’s tax revenue rests on labour. If work shrinks, it is not the salary that collapses: it is what that salary pays for. Healthcare, pensions, schools.
I thought about it for a long time, starting from an idea that seemed solid to me.
A machine cannot take on responsibility: it has no assets that can be seized and no freedom to lose. It cannot sign. So let us tie income not to the work performed, but to the responsibility taken for the machine that performs it. The humanoid produces five times as much, and that surplus pays everyone: worker, company, State.
Then I put it to the test and had to go back on two points.
First: one person will not supervise one humanoid. They will supervise twenty, then two hundred. That is the very point of automation.
Second, and harder: the surplus does not stay in the company. If my competitor automates too, competition passes the productivity gain on to the final price, not to the margin. It happened with farm mechanisation, with textiles, with logistics. The surplus exists for whoever gets there first, and only for a few years.
Hence the correction, which I believe is the real point: each of the two phases needs a different mechanism.
Phase 1 — the window
The surplus is still there. It is not distributed: it is capitalised. The Norwegian logic: oil did not fund current spending, it fed the fund. The instrument that withstands relocation is a contribution of shares instead of a levy, the Meidner plan, Sweden 1976: the company issues shares to the fund instead of paying a tax. It does not touch cash flow, so it pushes no one to leave.
Phase 2 — the regime
Margins are zeroed, the flow is no longer taxable. But the stock of capital is owned. Only the real return is paid out, never the capital.
One last thing, rarely mentioned
Imagine it works: guaranteed income, free time, a calmer world. The literature on well-being says otherwise. People who lose their job but keep their income remain much unhappier all the same. And freed-up time, on average, does not go to sport or reading: it goes to screens.
So a fund that merely pays out is not enough. It must fund structures for participation, care, training and local presence that give people back a social position and a rhythm to their days.
And that is where responsibility becomes central again. Not as a device to justify a salary, but as an answer to the need to be needed. That, the humanoid does not produce.
The window to capitalise opens now and closes by itself.
Those who decide later decide with an empty till.
How do you see it?
Celebron Research Unit · celebron.it