Economy & Finance · 05. July 2026

If AI doesn't augment human labor but substitutes it, the dominant factor of production shifts from labor to productive capital. Just as land and labor once had to be democratized, capital may need to be too — through employee ownership, sovereign citizen funds, or new data-ownership models. An economic thought experiment engaging Acemoglu, Piketty, and Marx that reframes the AI debate from a technology question into an ownership question: not how we protect jobs, but who owns the capital.