Artificial General Intelligence could force citizens in poor nations into a surveillance-conditional survival where food depends on compliance.
April 25, 2026
Original Paper
The Great Displacement: Monopolistic Artificial General Intelligence, Surveillance-Conditional Survival, and the Global Majority
SSRN · 6636418
The Takeaway
The risk of AGI is often discussed as job loss, but the reality for the global majority could be much darker. Subsistence in nations with low economic resilience may become a reward for total compliance with AI monitoring systems. As AI replaces traditional labor, people lose the ability to support themselves outside of state or corporate digital platforms. Survival becomes conditional on being tracked and analyzed by the very systems that took their jobs. This creates a new form of global stratification based on digital obedience. The future of AI governance must address the possibility of automated survival instead of just automated work.
From the abstract
The discourse on artificial general intelligence and labor displacement is overwhelmingly domestic, assuming wealthy nations can cushion the transition through universal basic income. This paper asks what happens to five to six billion people in countries lacking fiscal capacity, monetary sovereignty, and institutional infrastructure to sustain populations once labor holds no market value. Drawing on Klein, Wallerstein, Zuboff, Rodrik, and the capability approach of Sen and Nussbaum, the paper d