Nexus — Part 3 "Before Basic Income: The Question the AI Era Needs to Ask First"
"If AI takes our jobs, the government will give us basic income. Let's just think positive." — But that sentence is missing one question. Who does the wealth created by AI actually belong to? A perspective shaped by reading Nexus.
Nexus — Part 3
"Before Basic Income: The Question the AI Era Needs to Ask First"
What I found most interesting about Nexus wasn't AI itself.
It was the part that came long before AI — how human society has operated, and what has always driven it.
Harari keeps coming back to the same point: power has always moved with information.
Those who had writing. Those who had records. Those who had the printing press.
They always had more influence.
And now, we are standing at the beginning of a new information revolution called AI.
· · ·
There's one topic that never fails to come up in conversations about the age of AI.
Universal Basic Income.
The logic is simple. AI increases productivity. Jobs disappear. The government provides basic income.
I used to think this was a natural progression too.
But at some point, a strange thought occurred to me.
Look at the people who talk most enthusiastically about basic income — and a pattern emerges.
Sam Altman of OpenAI. Elon Musk of Tesla. Along with many other American tech entrepreneurs.
They're all American. And they all run companies that build AI or supply its infrastructure.
There's a structural reason why they can talk about basic income.
The enormous wealth generated by AI accumulates in their domestic companies. And the taxing rights over that wealth largely remain with their own government.
AI revenue accumulates inside the US. The US government collects the taxes. And that money gets redistributed to American citizens.
Basic income is only possible when there is wealth to redistribute.
Which leads naturally to this question.
Where does the wealth created by AI actually accumulate?
· · ·
That question took me back to an older idea: imperialism.
The structure of imperialism was surprisingly simple.
Extract cheap labor and raw materials from other countries.
Use them to create high-value products.
Sell those products back to the same countries.
Wealth flows back to the imperial center.
Colonial nations worked hard. They supplied labor. They supplied raw materials. But the final value — the profit — belonged mostly to the empire.
Looking at the AI era, I get a strange sense of déjà vu. The form is different, but the structure looks familiar.
The data people leave behind across the world. The information generated by billions of users. The low-wage labor of workers in developing countries who train AI models.
All of it feeds into the growth of massive AI systems.
If the old imperialism grew on the raw materials and labor of its colonies, AI empires grow on the data and information left behind by users around the world.
And the AI built on all of that is then sold back to the world.
· · ·
People worry about AI dictatorship. It's a legitimate concern.
Surveillance is visible. Censorship is visible. Oppression is visible.
Threats you can see are threats you can resist.
But AI imperialism is different.
You use ChatGPT without a second thought. You watch YouTube. You stream Netflix.
No discomfort. No sense of oppression.
But through all of it, data accumulates. Usage fees flow overseas. The value created ends up in platform companies. And securing adequate taxing rights over that wealth is far from straightforward.
This isn't an abstract concern.
📌 THIS IS ALREADY HAPPENING
In May 2026, Google Korea won both the first and second trials in a lawsuit contesting a ₩154 billion corporate tax assessment.
Netflix had ₩68.7 billion out of a ₩76.2 billion tax assessment overturned.
Meta also won its case against a ₩230 billion+ corporate tax bill.
The reasoning was straightforward: Google's servers and data centers are in Singapore. There is no "permanent establishment" in Korea. Under the current international tax framework, imposing tax is not easy.
While Korean companies like Naver pay hundreds of billions in corporate taxes, global big tech companies use this structure to sidestep taxation entirely.
In the age of AI, this problem only gets larger.
AI imperialism doesn't come with guns and swords. It comes with convenience.
That's what makes it harder to notice. That's what makes it seep in more slowly.
· · ·
Where does Korea stand in all of this?
Korea has world-class semiconductor capabilities. Samsung and SK Hynix exist. HBM is a critical piece of AI infrastructure. This is not a minor position.
And yet, an important question remains.
Where does the final value accumulate?
With the companies that own the AI models and platforms? Or with the companies that supply the components?
Who takes the largest share of value in the AI supply chain hasn't been fully decided yet.
But looking at the history of platform industries so far, final value has tended to concentrate with those who own the platform.
And whether those platforms can be taxed adequately — the court rulings we just looked at are already giving us an answer.
· · ·
I don't think the basic income argument is wrong. If anything, it's a conversation we'll need to have.
But before we get there, there's a question that needs to come first.
The old imperialism came with guns and swords — which is why people could recognize it. AI imperialism comes with convenience. Which is why we might mistake it for innovation.
But if we're going to talk about the age of AI, there's a question that has to come before basic income.
Who does the wealth created by AI belong to? And who holds the taxing rights over that wealth?
Perhaps what determines the future of the AI era isn't basic income — but the answer to that question.
