The impossibility of reciprocity in an artificial economy

Money assumes reciprocity. Marx wrote extensively about the extraction of surplus value. Veblen identified the leisure class. The fundamental division between those who own and those who work persists, now obscured by narratives of hustle culture and meritocracy.

With language models, we return to these old questions with new urgency. The technology’s owners promise transformation while building systems that may render traditional labor obsolete. The question isn’t whether automation will eliminate jobs, but what happens when it does.

I’m reminded of a quote by Buckminster Fuller:

We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living.

It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest.

The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living.

We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors.

The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.

Fuller understood that employment isn’t fundamental to human nature—it’s a construct of our particular economic system, one we’ve mistaken for natural law.

Dawkins’ definition assumes both parties need something from the exchange. But artificial intelligence needs nothing in return. It doesn’t hunger, doesn’t tire, doesn’t aspire. It computes.

This breaks the fundamental exchange. When labor becomes worthless because machines do it better and cheaper, the token of exchange loses meaning for those who have only labor to offer. The shark’s tooth has value only if someone needs what you provide.

We’re constructing an economy where reciprocity becomes impossible for most. The owners of capital and compute accumulate wealth while others face not just unemployment but economic irrelevance.

The platform companies don’t seek reciprocity—they extract rent. Users pay for access while simultaneously providing the data that improves the models. Value flows in one direction. The companies have positioned themselves as gatekeepers to approximation itself.

We’ve progressively abstracted value from human need. First barter into currency. Then currency into credit. Then labor into automation. Now expertise into probability distributions. Each layer of abstraction takes us further from anything tangible.

Perhaps the impossibility of reciprocity isn’t a bug but a feature—forcing us to confront what Fuller identified decades ago: the absurdity of “earning a living.”

We face choices: create artificial scarcity to maintain the current system, decouple human worth from economic output, or imagine entirely new forms of value exchange.

The machines need nothing from us. This could be liberating—if we have the courage to imagine an economy based on something other than reciprocal exchange.

The shark’s tooth only has value in a world where sharks’ teeth are needed. Perhaps it’s time to imagine a different kind of ocean.