Silicon Valley has begun imagining a fantastical future: AI giants eliminate human jobs and then distribute $12,000 per month to everyone, enabling universal early retirement. Recently, a prediction about “Universal High Income” has been circulating. According to this vision, the wealth generated by companies like NVIDIA and OpenAI could one day support over $12,000 per month for every individual. Work becomes optional, allowing people to devote their time to art, community, and pursuits they truly love. Of course, this remains purely speculative—no company has committed to such a payout plan. Sam Altman did, however, genuinely fund an experiment that provided 1,000 low-income individuals with $1,000 per month for three years. The results showed that recipients primarily used the money for rent, food, and transportation; work hours decreased slightly, but there was no mass exodus from employment into creative endeavors as some had imagined. What’s most intriguing about this discussion is that Silicon Valley is now seriously grappling with a fundamental question: If humans no longer need to labor to produce value, how should wealth be distributed? But this raises a profound contradiction. Why should the wealth created by AI automatically flow to ordinary people? The ownership of NVIDIA’s GPUs, OpenAI’s models, and tech giants’ data centers is highly concentrated. As AI replaces more and more labor, people may gradually lose even the ability to participate in wealth distribution through the sale of their labor. In such a scenario, who decides how much each person should receive? Corporations? Governments? Or shareholders who own the AI assets? I certainly hope for a future where no one needs to work just to survive. But what matters more than the monthly amount one might receive is how much of the wealth created by AI ordinary people actually own—and whether they hold the power to determine how that wealth is distributed. After all, Silicon Valley’s billionaires can now debate letting everyone retire early—while simultaneously fighting to control ownership of the future economic system.