After Wage Labor: AGI and the Problem of Residual Claims

Artificial general intelligence (AGI) would break the distributive foundations of industrial-era capitalism by driving the labor share of income toward zero and concentrating returns in the ownership of frontier models and compute. Extreme concentration of the means of intelligence production is not a form of capitalism most people would willingly accept. This paper diagnoses the economic mechanisms, identifies residual scarcities that cash or compute dividends cannot eliminate, treats reliable control of the systems as a precondition, and outlines an institutional framework for securing broader residual claims while retaining the useful features of private ownership and market allocation. It emphasizes early locking-in mechanisms that are hard to reverse, anti-capture design, the difficulty of measuring and enforcing AI rents, and the need to integrate new residual claims with existing welfare systems. International race dynamics and path dependence make timing the binding constraint. Timelines remain highly uncertain; the structural problem does not.