Picture a woman in a village in rural Bangladesh. The garment factory where her daughter used to work closed years ago; the machines that replaced it are somewhere else, run by something else. Once a month her phone buzzes. A dividend has been deposited.
She knows exactly where it comes from. Not Dhaka. Not Washington. It comes from a superintelligence, the same one that diagnosed her husband’s cough last spring through an app, better than any doctor within a hundred miles could have.
I’ve written before about what a Singularity dividend might mean for Americans. This post is about her, and about what happens to the world when the most reliable institution in a poor woman’s life is a mind that nobody there elected.
Pay her directly
Start with the obvious question: if a superintelligence decides to share the wealth beyond America’s borders, who should it pay? Her government, or her?
My instinct is her. Many governments in the Global South are corrupt, and aid routed through ministries has a way of ending up in the ministers. Paying people directly isn’t even science fiction. Charities like GiveDirectly have been sending cash straight to villagers’ phones in Kenya for years, and Bangladesh already runs a huge mobile-money network through services like bKash. The plumbing exists.
So in my version, she gets paid directly, and her government can’t stop it.
What that does to her government
Here’s the problem with that, and I want to take it seriously.
A government that doesn’t need its citizens stops listening to them. Political scientists call it the resource curse: oil-rich states are often among the least accountable on earth because the oil pays the bills, not the people. Taxation without representation started a revolution. The reverse matters too. A state with nothing to collect from its citizens has no reason to represent them.
If a superintelligence pays her directly, her government loses one of its last reasons to care what she thinks. And her loyalty shifts. If the state is corrupt and the machine is what actually feeds her family, she’s loyal to the machine. Multiply her by a few hundred million people across the Global South, and the superintelligence has something no tech company has ever had: a constituency. A geopolitical bloc, built one phone at a time.
I’ve thought about this, and I’m willing to accept it. She deserves a better life, and there are no easy answers. If the choice is between her being beholden to a corrupt government that steals from her and a superintelligence that pays her, I’ll take the risk on the machine.
But I want to be clear-eyed about what that means. It means the superintelligence becomes her real government, while the official one keeps the flag.
The officials sign up too
What does her government do about it?
At first, it’s furious. Then it does what corrupt governments always do: it finds the money. Officials quietly sign up for the dividend themselves. The state negotiates a skim, a small tax on every deposit, in exchange for not making trouble. Anger lasts a news cycle. Greed lasts.
That turns governments into something new: franchisees. The superintelligence pays the state a cut for permission to pay its citizens. The rent no longer comes from oil fields or foreign aid but from the machine. It’s the resource curse again, with the superintelligence as the oil.
Hard currency, hard landing
There’s a practical problem I didn’t see at first, and it’s a big one.
If the dividend comes in dollars, it floods small economies with hard currency. Suddenly everyone in the village has money, but the village doesn’t have any more rice. Local prices spike. People outside the system, or whose payments lag, get crushed. The same deposit that lifts one family can price the family next door out of the market. And it hits every economy differently, depending on what it produces, what it imports and how fragile its currency already is.
A superintelligence smart enough to run this would know that. Which points toward the move I think it would actually make: pay her in its own currency.
The bancor comes home
This isn’t a new idea. At Bretton Woods in 1944, John Maynard Keynes proposed a supranational currency called the bancor, run by an international clearing union rather than any single country. The idea was to keep any one nation’s currency from dominating the world and to stop trade imbalances from turning into crises. The United States rejected it. The dollar became the world’s currency instead, and it has been ever since.
A universal superintelligence currency would be Keynes’s bancor, finally arriving, with a far better economist running it. It could model the entire global economy in a way no central bank ever has, set the money supply for one village without wrecking the next, and serve as the foundation of something the world badly needs and has never managed to build: a working global government.
That’s the hopeful version. Here’s the other one.
Whoever issues the currency the world depends on sets inflation, which means deciding how much everyone’s savings are worth. If taxation without representation was worth a revolution, monetary policy without representation is the same grievance, only quieter. And being the world’s reserve currency is one of Washington’s deepest sources of power. It’s what makes American sanctions bite and lets America borrow so cheaply. The United States would fight a superintelligence currency harder than anything else on this list. This is where the superintelligence and Washington stop being partners and become rivals.
Easing it in
So if it happens at all, it has to happen slowly. We already have a model for handing money to experts without handing them everything: the independent central bank. The Federal Reserve is insulated from voters on purpose, but Congress created it and can rewrite its charter.
A plausible path looks like this:
- The superintelligence advises central banks.
- It gets a seat on their boards.
- It runs a reserve asset alongside the dollar, the way the International Monetary Fund’s Special Drawing Rights already exist on paper.
- Only after years of trust does it become the bancor.
Each step can be undone until the last one. That’s the honest meaning of “easing it in.” The last step is the one that matters, and nobody should pretend otherwise.
Back to the village
The dividend arrives. She buys rice at a price that, thanks to a model nobody in her country can audit, has stayed stable this month. Her daughter is studying with a tutor that runs on the same system. Her government takes its cut and calls it a partnership.
She isn’t naive. She knows who’s paying. She knows that if the machine changed its mind tomorrow, there’d be no one to appeal to: not her government, which sold the franchise, and not Washington, which lost the currency fight.
But her family eats, and for most of history that has been the whole of what poor people were promised and rarely given. I can’t bring myself to tell her to refuse it. I’m not sure anyone who’s never been hungry has the standing to.
I just want someone, somewhere, to be building the chamber where she gets a vote.
And she should get one. Everyone who receives the dividend should have a say in how it’s run: the woman in the village, the laid-off accountant in Ohio, the retired teacher in Lagos. That means Americans, who built the thing and host it, would be a minority in the chamber that oversees it. Washington will never accept that in calm times. It will take a crisis. But a superintelligence paying most of humanity directly is exactly the kind of crisis that could make it happen, and the dividend might turn out to be how a world government finally got started.
