According to McKinsey, automation could wipe out up to 800 million jobs by 2030. At the same time, universal basic income trials from Kenya to Germany are showing that when people receive money with no strings attached, they don’t stop working. The world is inching toward a future where earning a paycheck is no longer a given. And the real question isn’t whether that future will arrive – it’s whether it will set us free or trap us in a new kind of dependence.
Half the world no longer produces material goods
According to the International Labour Organization, in 2024, approximately 26% of the global workforce was employed in agriculture, and about 24% in industrial production. The remaining 50% works in services. Logistics, trade, finance and management are all mechanisms for distributing and servicing what the first half produces.
There is nothing new here. The share of employment in agriculture has been declining for nearly a century: in the United States, at the start of the 20th century, 40% of the population were farmers; by 2025, that figure had fallen to 1.6%. Productivity has increased so much that fewer and fewer hands are needed to provide everyone with food, clothing, and shelter.
The problem lies elsewhere. That 50% which does not directly create material goods is forced to compete for the right to access them. In my view, a significant portion of employment in services is not a response to real demand, but rather a necessity to keep people occupied so that they have legal access to distribution. As long as the system is tied to labor income, a person without a job is deprived not only of money – they are entirely excluded from the mechanism of receiving material benefits.
What happens when people are paid for nothing
In 2025, the Republic of the Marshall Islands introduced a permanent unconditional basic income – not a pilot and not an experiment. Every citizen receives $200 per quarter with no means-testing or work requirements. Stanford University’s Basic Income Lab tracks more than 100 pilot programs in the United States alone, and similar experiments are underway in dozens of countries.
The German experiment is among the most methodologically rigorous. For three years, 122 people received €1,200 per month, while a control group of 1,580 people received no payments. The result, from the German Institute for Economic Research: labor activity did not decline. Instead, well-being improved, decision-making autonomy increased, and stress levels decreased.
The Kenyan GiveDirectly experiment is the longest-running: 12 years of monthly payments in villages living below the extreme poverty line. Those who knew the program would last 12 years did not squander the money on consumption – they invested it, started businesses, and increased their incomes. The myth of the “lazy recipient” has not been confirmed in any major study.
That said, a National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) study conducted in two American cities did record a moderate reduction in working hours – and this reduction was not offset by a shift toward more productive activities. People worked slightly less but did not stop working altogether. The picture is more like this: basic income gives people choice, and choice leads to a different model of behavior.
Liberation from work as an emerging reality
Universal basic income is often discussed as a political concept. Automation, by contrast, is a technological process that is advancing regardless of political decisions.
According to McKinsey, existing technologies are already capable of automating up to 57% of working hours in the United States. Analysts estimate that by 2026-2027, more than 42% of business tasks could be performed by machines. This does not mean that 42% of workers will lose their jobs. Rather, it means that the structure of employment is changing at a pace that education systems and social institutions are struggling to match.
Robotics and artificial intelligence are increasingly taking on tasks that until recently were considered uniquely human: data analysis, software development, legal research, and even medical diagnostics. Automation no longer liberates people from physical labor; it liberates them from labor itself.
In this sense, universal basic income and automation are converging trends. One creates the technical possibility of liberating people from work; the other creates the economic necessity to do so.
The American Dream has reached its limits
The American Dream is one of the few social ideals that fused work and purpose into a single promise: work hard, and you will succeed. In its original 18th-century form, it was rooted in the ideas of equal opportunity and political freedom. After World War II, it gradually evolved into a simpler equation: hard work leads to material prosperity.
That formula remained compelling as long as prosperity was beyond the reach of most people. Once basic material needs became attainable – at least across much of the developed world – the dream began to lose its motivational force. Surveys by the Pew Research Center show that a growing number of Americans no longer believe that hard work alone guarantees success, while social mobility in the United States now lags behind that of many other developed countries.
The American Dream did not fail; it simply reached its endpoint. It culminated in a vision of stability and security: earn a living, buy a home, provide education for your children. Beyond that, it offers little guidance. Yet it is precisely beyond that point that individuals find themselves once their basic needs have been met.
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs describes this transition. After satisfying physiological needs, achieving security, and establishing a sense of belonging, people naturally begin to seek self-actualization. Yet neither modern economic systems nor social institutions are designed for that stage. Schools teach people how to earn a living. Corporations reward those who generate value. Governments support those who cannot. Few institutions prepare individuals for a world in which earning a living is no longer the central organizing principle of life.
Whoever controls the money makes the rules
In a world shaped by integrated payment systems, digital identities, and credit ratings, universal basic income can become a mechanism of dependency embedded within every transaction.
If basic income serves as the primary source of income for a significant share of the population, those who control its distribution gain substantial leverage. Anyone who opposes official policies can be excluded. Anyone who publicly criticizes the system can be downgraded. Although an individual receives the same amount, access to opportunities and services become restricted in practice: landlords may refuse to rent to those with low social ratings, while stores may offer them less favorable terms.
China’s social credit system demonstrates that these concerns are not merely theoretical. Citizens with low social ratings have been denied the ability to purchase airline tickets and high-speed rail tickets, with 23 million such restrictions imposed in 2018 alone. Access to certain schools, government positions, and even dating platforms is also limited.
This is why the architecture of a financial system is not simply a technical matter but an existential one. When a payment system is controlled by a single centralized authority, basic income can evolve into a tool of control. When the system is anchored to gold – an asset that cannot be printed at will and is more difficult to confiscate than digital records held within banking networks – basic income remains what it was originally intended to be: a form of financial insurance that preserves individual freedom.
The infrastructure of freedom
Whether society is psychologically prepared for it or not, we are moving toward a future in which the majority of people will no longer need to earn a living through traditional work. Automation is increasingly freeing human labor. Experiments have shown that people do not inevitably become idle or socially dysfunctional when freed from compulsory work. The determining factor is financial architecture: it will decide whether this newfound freedom becomes genuine independence or a new form of dependency.
Financial institutions and banks that are already developing gold-based payment infrastructure are laying the foundation for a future in which liberation from labor does not mean surrendering control over one’s own life. This is not a charitable undertaking; it is an engineering challenge that must be solved before decisions about the distribution of wealth are made for us.
Working simply to survive is a temporary stage in human history, one that is gradually coming to an end. In the era that follows, the most valuable skills will no longer be the ability to earn money, but the ability to create: to think, to explore, and to produce what machines cannot.
By Anton Nikitin, founder and CEO of Fingold