Original title: Redistributive Policies for the Times of Transformative AI
Jakub Growiec, Klaus Prettner, Maciej Szkróbka · September 2026
Transformative artificial intelligence could cause broad-based automation. This is expected to lower the share of income that goes to workers and raise inequality. While economic growth may speed up, a small group of people and companies could capture most of the rewards. Without policy fixes, inequality could climb to levels never seen in the industrial era. To address this, the researchers used a single theoretical framework to examine various redistributive policies. These include universal basic income, universal basic capital, permits for robots and compute, and taxes on assets like capital, robots, energy, and wealth. The authors find that sharing the returns from capital broadly, such as funding basic income with capital taxes, is the most likely way to create lasting reductions in inequality.
Imagine a small bakery where one baker gets a machine that bakes bread ten times faster than anyone else. The bakery's output skyrockets, but the other bakers lose their jobs and the baker with the machine earns all the extra profit. In this paper, transformative AI is that machine—it boosts economic growth, but without redistribution, inequality worsens. The paper examines policies like universal basic income or taxing the machine's profits to share the gains.
Without redistributive policies, the vast wealth from transformative AI could concentrate among a tiny elite, leaving most people behind. This could destabilize societies and create unprecedented economic divides. The paper surveys which policies—like universal basic income or capital taxes—might actually work to spread the gains.
The paper is a theoretical survey, not a detailed empirical study. It does not model specific economic impacts or account for political feasibility, enforcement, or unintended consequences of the proposed policies. The conclusions are normative, based on a unifying framework, and may not capture all complexities of real-world implementation.
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Redistributive Policies for the Times of Transformative AI — Jakub Growiec, Klaus Prettner, Maciej Szkróbka
Abstract licence: CC0
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper. This is a preprint, so it hasn't necessarily been peer reviewed.