In October 2025, internal Amazon documents leaked, revealing plans to automate roughly 75 percent of warehouse operations by 2033, potentially avoiding 600,000 future hires and saving about $0.30 per shipped item.
Amazon denied that the documents represented its full strategy, but the direction of this is toward automation becoming the profit engine of large-scale logistics.
Across newsrooms and boardrooms, the same question surfaces: What happens when automation is no longer marginal but dominant?
From Efficiency to Abundance
Until now, automation has been measured in efficiency gains, fewer injuries, faster throughput, lower unit costs.
But the Amazon leak revealed something deeper: the beginning of abundance economics, where cost per unit keeps falling.
If logistics, manufacturing, and service industries all follow similar curves, the outcome is not just efficiency, it’s massive productivity without proportional employment.
Economists call this the decoupling of output from labour.
That decoupling underpins a growing hypothesis that automation could eventually make survival needs inexpensive enough that income becomes universal and high, not conditional and scarce.
From Universal Basic to Universal High
The emerging phrase universal high income distinguishes this idea from traditional Universal Basic Income debates.
Where basic implies a safety net, high implies an economic system producing so much value that survival becomes trivial.
If that trajectory continues, income becomes a right of participation in abundance, not compensation for labour.
It is a radical reframing of economic purpose, from securing wages to managing distribution.
Early examples of this shift are beginning to appear.
Some economists are proposing automation dividends, where citizens receive a share of national AI or robotics productivity gains funded by automation-driven profits.
Emerging platform models now reward participation itself, offering credits or payments for data sharing, content curation, or model training rather than traditional employment.
Energy and compute dividends are also being tested, with households earning returns from community-owned renewable grids or cloud infrastructure that generate surplus value. In some regions, community ownership models are giving residents micro-equity in local automated supply chains and logistics networks.
Other experiments, such as universal access tokens, provide credits for services like transport, education, or healthcare sustained by automated production. Even corporations are exploring forms of abundance sharing, distributing automation-driven value to customers and stakeholders to maintain trust and stability as labour demand shifts.
The Fulfilment Question
The hardest part of this transition isn’t economic, it’s psychological, apparently.
As routine work disappears, people will confront a new frontier: meaning without necessity.
Future research agendas now include:
Purpose architecture: How societies sustain motivation when labour is optional.
Civic participation models: How communities assign value when work no longer defines contribution.
Cognitive health: How to maintain identity and structure in post-work environments.
The material conditions of abundance may arrive sooner than the emotional frameworks to live within them.
Trajectory, Not Utopia
The “universal high income” concept should be read not as prophecy, but as trajectory, a system-level trendline visible through observable data.
Even if full abundance is decades away, the slope of change matters more than the timeline.
Automation is scaling faster than labour adaptation.
Policy discussions are shifting toward sharing automation’s gains.
Cultural narratives are evolving from productivity to purpose.
Each step redefines what “work,” “income,” and “contribution” mean.
Why It Matters
For policymakers and institutions, the critical foresight question isn’t if automation will reduce labour dependence, it’s how societies convert efficiency into shared prosperity.
For individuals, it invites a deeper reflection: what gives life meaning when survival is no longer the organising principle?
The “positive AI future” is not guaranteed.
It is a path that must be engineered through governance, ethics, and imagination, where abundance becomes a shared outcome, not a private dividend.
Hello. I found this post so fascinating and vital to where we are heading. Just yesterday I was watching an interview with Brian Eno who was recommending that 50% of the profits of AI companies should be given to society (I am paraphrasing).
I have recently been researching for a future post broadly on the lines of 'Why the right hate UBI and what it means for our futures....' This post gives me pause for much deeper thought, for which I thank you.