CONCEPT
The Social Contract for the AI Economy
Reich's five-point framework for the tacit agreement between workers, employers, and government that must govern the AI transition: compensation for training data, broad distribution of gains, antitrust enforcement, public AI investment, and educational reform.
Every economic era has a social contract—the implicit agreement about the terms on which the major actors cooperate. The knowledge economy's contract promised that workers who invested in education and developed symbolic-analytical skills would receive secure employment and rising wages. AI broke that contract by eliminating the scarcity that sustained it. The new contract must address five structural realities. First: workers whose output became training data must be compensated for that use. Second: gains from AI productivity must be taxed and redistributed broadly, likely through universal basic income. Third: antitrust enforcement must prevent monopolistic control of AI platforms. Fourth: public investment must create open, democratically governed AI tools. Fifth: education must shift from training symbolic producers to cultivating directorial capacity. These are not policy preferences. They are, in Reich's framework, the structural requirements for an AI economy that serves the common good rather than concentrating wealth and power in the hands of platform owners.
