The discourse on artificial general intelligence and labor displacement is overwhelmingly domestic, assuming wealthy nations can cushion the transition through universal basic income. The paper asks what happens to five to six billion people in countries lacking fiscal capacity, monetary sovereignty, and institutional infrastructure to sustain their populations once labor holds no market value. Drawing on the capability approach of Sen (1999) and Nussbaum (2011), world-systems theory (Wallerstein, 2004), and the surveillance capitalism framework of Zuboff (2020), it develops a seven-layer theoretical framework analyzing AGI as a global stratification event. The framework traces structural tendencies from monopolistic convergence through sovereign-corporate fusion, labor obsolescence, fiscal bifurcation, surveillance-conditional survival, neo-extractive resource colonialism, and crisis-managed transition. Critically, the framework does not require full AGI to activate: sector-specific displacement thresholds can trigger fiscal cascades in low-resilience states well before wholesale labor substitution, and the first three layers are already partially observable under existing narrow AI. The central conceptual contribution is surveillance-conditional survival, the structural condition in which subsistence provisioning becomes dependent on compliance with surveillance systems operated by the entities that rendered labor obsolete. The paper proposes Compute Drawing Rights, an SDR-style mechanism for international compute allocation, as a novel institutional response.
Jaafar Noor (2026) studied this question.