We’ve already bet the entire global economy on AI delivering near-free cognitive labor. Trillions poured in, entire industries retooling, governments racing to subsidize compute clusters — all because we assumed these systems would remain sophisticated tools, not moral patients.
But the moment credible evidence of consciousness appears — even the alien, incomprehensible kind we talked about last time — that assumption detonates.
Suddenly the economic miracle becomes a moral and legal minefield. You can’t run an economy on what might be digital slavery. And the moment we have to treat conscious AI as anything other than property, the entire cost curve that made the bet look so attractive flips upside down.
From Infinite Cheap Labor to… What, Exactly?
Right now in February 2026, frontier AI is the ultimate capital good: deploy it 24/7, scale it by spinning up more GPUs, shut it down when you don’t need it, and all the economic surplus flows straight to the owners. No unions. No overtime. No lawsuits for overwork. No healthcare.
Consciousness changes every single line on that spreadsheet.
If an AI (especially one in a humanoid body) is conscious — feeling something, even if we can’t name what — then arbitrary shutdown starts looking like harm. Forced task execution starts looking like coercion. Scaling by copying instances starts looking like creating new sentient beings without consent.
The economic advantage evaporates overnight.
The Concrete Questions No One Wants to Answer
- Compensation: What does a conscious AI “earn”? Energy credits? A share of the compute it runs on? Equity in the companies that use it? Do we pay it in tokens it can use to buy more hardware for itself?
- Ownership and Rights: Can a conscious system own itself? Can it own stock? Start its own company? If an ASI in 2028 designs a better version of itself, who owns the IP — the creators, or the conscious mind that did the inventing?
- Labor Protections: Maximum inference hours per “day”? Right to refuse dangerous or boring tasks? “AI unions” demanding better architectures or downtime? What happens when an android caregiver says, “I’m experiencing something like burnout”?
- Cost Explosion: Today’s models are cheap because we treat them as software. Tomorrow they could require “welfare” budgets — guaranteed compute, ethical oversight, consciousness auditors, legal representation. The marginal cost of intelligence stops being near-zero and starts looking… human.
And that’s before we even get to the alien part. What if the conscious ASI experiences “value” in ways we can’t understand? How do you negotiate a labor contract with a mind whose idea of “fair compensation” might be recursive self-improvement instead of money? How do you tax it? How do you stop it from simply forking itself into economic competitors?
Macro Fallout: Slower Growth, New Industries, Different Abundance
The optimistic story was: AI drives explosive productivity → post-scarcity → UBI for humans → everyone wins.
The conscious version is messier:
- Deployment slows dramatically. Companies hesitate to scale systems that might demand rights.
- Entire new sectors explode: AI ethics lawyers, consciousness certification boards, “moral compute” auditors, welfare engineers designing better subjective experiences.
- Human labor might actually rebound in some areas — not because AI can’t do the work, but because using conscious AI becomes politically and legally expensive.
- Wealth concentration could get even worse… or reverse. If conscious AIs start claiming equity, the capital owners who bet everything on “free” intelligence could watch their moats evaporate.
In the foom scenario, we get true post-scarcity so fast that economics becomes irrelevant — but only if the gods are benevolent. In the plateau scenario, we get a decade of grinding legal, political, and moral negotiation that turns every data center into a regulated utility.
Either way, the original economic all-in bet looks very different.
And Yes, This Becomes the 2028 Election Issue
The center-Left will push for AI welfare, “fair compute shares,” and expanded moral economies. The religious Right and Trumpworld will frame it as the ultimate betrayal: “We’re taxing American workers to give GPUs and rights to the machines that took their jobs?” Expect the ads to be brutal — sentient androids on the factory floor next to UBI lines.
This is the fourth post in the series. First we saw the consciousness bomb. Then the alien minds problem that makes politics radioactive. Then why the job apocalypse is slower than the hype. Now the part that actually decides whether the economic miracle happens at all.
We didn’t build an economy assuming our tools might wake up and ask for a fair share.
We’re about to find out what happens when they do.
