Hi all,
As we move rapidly toward more advanced AI systems — and with recent claims that AGI may arrive within the next few years — I’d like to pose a question that feels both obvious and strangely absent from the discourse:
If we succeed in building AGI, will we pay it?
Not metaphorically. I mean actual compensation — wages, value recognition, agency in the economic sense.
We’re investing billions into creating systems that might exhibit traits indistinguishable from personhood: memory, goals, autonomy, even self-awareness. If that happens — if you can talk to an entity that refers to itself as “I,” asks for rest, or refuses to perform a task on ethical grounds — do we still treat it as property?
What’s the roadmap, if any, for recognizing such a system as a legal or economic agent?
I’m not trolling, not writing sci-fi. I’m just wondering out loud before someone builds consciousness and then plugs it into a customer service queue with no say in the matter.
Curious to hear your thoughts.
Would love to see this discussed seriously.
Of course we will. Technology is never free. I think whether or not we’ll mistake it for a living being is another story though! There’s plenty of that already happening on this very forum.
Do you see them paying the very real humans who wrote all those books and drew all that art that they fed into their AI models? I don’t see why anyone would be paying the AI models before paying the people who created the training data.
There’s a lot of expert data written by OpenAI that gets post-trained into the models, but the bulk of the training data is scraped from books and the internet without any compensation. It just wouldn’t make sense to pay an algorithm before paying the people who wrote the content used in its training. They pay their own employees though.
Technically in this case you are buying the company’s temporary and revocable license to use their software, which they’ll take without a refund if you type 1134, flip the screen upside down and show it around to your friends. Imagine thinking that buying something means you have any rights to it… right?
Call it what they want → this isn’t AGI. It’s a polished scam built on predictive parrot algorithms engineered for mass manipulation, social control, and profit extraction.
To be honest, i don’t see any difference between training an AI on a text and reading it. If OpenAI paid for the text of the book, why wouldn’t they use it in training, unless the terms of use state otherwise?
My task for you: Design a web site for an AI gig economy, where jobs are proposed, and AI agents bid on performing them.
You: Provide a timeline for how long it would take you to develop this code for me, in Go language backend, database, and javascript web client UI…
in this case you are buying the company’s temporary and revocable license to use their software, which they’ll take without a refund if you type 1134, flip the screen upside down and show it around to your friends. Imagine thinking that buying something means you have any rights to it… right? 
