Ellen Brown
JULY 16, 2026

Discussions of artificial intelligence typically begin with the question, What happens when the machines take our jobs? For thousands of years, work has been the means by which we fed our families, earned our place in society, and gave structure to our lives. We have come to equate paid employment with identity.

That presumption may soon be obsolete.

When Elon Musk proposed replacing Universal Basic Income with what he calls a Universal High Income—a level of income sufficient for everyone to live comfortably while intelligent machines produce much of the goods and services society requires—critics warned that people would become lazy. They would stop pursuing college degrees, stop starting businesses, stop inventing, stop contributing. Without jobs, it was argued, life itself would lose meaning and purpose.

Interestingly, humanity’s oldest written history begins with the premise that the purpose of humans is to work. The earliest known writing was impressed into clay tablets in ancient Sumer more than five thousand years ago. The Sumerian Atrahasis tablets tell of sky-deities called Annunaki, cast in modern “ancient architect” scenarios as extraterrestrial engineers. The heavy labor required to maintain life on earth was delegated to junior gods called Igigi, who finally grew weary of the arduous work, laid down their tools and rebelled.

The remedy was to create a new being to carry their burden. This was done by genetic manipulation to upgrade the highest life form found here, creating the human species. Whether we read that as history, allegory, or mythology, its underlying message is that humanity was conceived as a labor force – and human civilization begins with a control system to manage the laborers.

The first writing was not poetry or philosophy. It was accounting: grain tallies, labor quotas, rations, obligations. Most of the original cuneiform tablets were administrative records. What began as an exchange system evolved into a money system to control work and the workers performing it. For nearly six thousand years, human worth has been measured by our productivity. We deserve food and shelter because we worked for it.

In many respects, life is still organized around compulsory labor. Writing was devised to organize it. Accounting on clay tablets predated the use of coins, managed by temple priests as intermediaries for the gods. The temple evolved into private banks, with bankers intermediating commerce.

In the 1930s, British economist and philosopher John Maynard Keynes predicted that by the end of the twentieth century, technological advancement would reduce the work-week to just fifteen hours. So why is the forty-hour work week still the norm? It has been argued that our current economic structure uses “busyness” as a form of social containment. By tethering survival to forty hours of corporate or administrative labor, the system ensures that the majority of human creative power is spent serving institutional interests rather than personal or community liberation.

That may be why modern life feels increasingly saturated with what anthropologist David Graeber termed Bullshit Jobs in a book of that name—pointless administrative tasks that serve little social purpose, but that keep people too exhausted to pursue their own interests. He argued that the rise of “fake” work is a political device to keep people from having the free time to organize or rebel. But if artificial intelligence takes over the majority of production, that changes the meaning of work.

From Scarcity to Abundance.

For centuries, scarcity shaped human behavior. Scarcity taught people to guard, to compete, to fear loss. But abundance changes the emotional landscape. What happens if we are simply handed what we need to survive? Skeptics say people will stop working and learning, that society will collapse into idleness, that life will lose meaning without jobs. But pilot studies of Universal Basic Income (UBI) programs involving unconditional cash transfers to recipients show otherwise.

UBI studies from around the world have shown positive results from UBI payments, including higher employment, lower crime, better mental health, higher graduation rates, and little evidence of a retreat from productive activity. Relieved of the constant anxiety of maintaining survival, participants typically pursue education, care for family members, search for better jobs, or start businesses they would not have dared to take on if failure meant destitution. It seems that necessity is not the only mother of invention.

Granted, the payout in most U.S. studies was a marginal $500 or $600 per month, only enough to provide a safety net for basic food and shelter. Plenty of motivation was left to add income for the finer things in life. Studies of the effects of a Universal High Income of $50,000 or more per year have not been done. But many people who are no longer working for pay, either because they are retired or because they have an inheritance or investments to live on, volunteer their time for socially beneficial causes.

Parents devote extraordinary energy to raising children without receiving a paycheck. Volunteers spend countless hours building community organizations. Amateur musicians practice difficult instruments for years with little expectation of financial reward. Scientists have pursued questions that fascinated them long before the result was likely to be commercially valuable. Thousands of programmers worked without pay to develop Linux open source software, and editors work for free to produce Wikipedia, just for reputation, community and the satisfaction of solving hard problems. These activities are not work for wages, but they are work that is quite meaningful to the people engaged in them.

The Enlightenment: Largely the Legacy of the Leisure Class.

The intellectual triumphs of the European Enlightenment—the era that birthed modern science, political liberty, and the social contract—were primarily the domain of a wealthy leisure class, or of talent that was financially backed by institutional support (church, courts, universities) or personal patronage.

Sociologist Thorstein Veblen laid out this thesis in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). He argued that scholarly pursuit functioned as a form of “conspicuous leisure”—a way to demonstrate financial strength by engaging in activities that were “unproductive” in the immediate economic sense. To spend decades debating the nature of sovereignty or the movement of the stars required a measure of “unearned increment” or rent extraction. Examples included:

Francis Bacon (1561–1626): As Lord Chancellor and a member of the high nobility, Bacon’s scientific methodology was fueled by the resources of the state and inherited status.

Robert Boyle (1627–1691): The father of modern chemistry was the son of the “Great Earl of Cork,” then the wealthiest man in the British Isles. His work was conducted as a “gentleman scientist” with no need for professional employment.

Antoine Lavoisier (1743–1794): Lavoisier funded the world’s most advanced chemical laboratory through his role as a “Tax Farmer” for the French crown—a position of pure financial extraction.

For those not born into the elite, intellectual survival usually required “aristocratic patronage.” John Locke’s influential work was made possible by his residency and support from the Earl of Shaftesbury, while Thomas Hobbes was a lifelong dependent of the Cavendish family. This system ensured that even “revolutionary” ideas were filtered through the lens of those who benefited most from the existing social hierarchy.

The irony is that the very thinkers who theorized about “universal human rights” and “liberty” did so from a position of security provided by the systems of land-rent and debt-extraction they were analyzing. To create truly universal “liberty” requires a secure income for all.

Non-compulsory Education.

For over a century, schools have functioned as labor factories, designed to produce compliant workers for industrial economies. If labor is no longer the center of life, education must change as well. AI already performs memorization and standardized tasks better than humans, relieving us of the need to perfect those skills ourselves. But that does not mean there is nothing left to learn. Studies of “Self-Directed Education” or “Unschooling” suggest that children are biologically wired to learn, and that removing the coercion of traditional schooling leads not to ignorance but to highly motivated, specialized learners. Self-directed education produces young adults who retain their curiosity and creativity, develop emotional intelligence, and pursue mastery for its own sake.

A 2013/2014 survey of 75 unschooled adults conducted by educational psychologists Peter Gray and Gina Riley found that 83% went on to some form of higher education. Despite not having a high school diploma, they reported little trouble getting into college, often using portfolios, interviews, or community college credits to bridge the gap. A high percentage of unschoolers pursued careers in the creative arts or became entrepreneurs. The researchers reported that unschooling helped them develop the self-reliance and out-of-the-box thinking required for these fields.

A South African study found that while “unschooled” students may have followed non-traditional paths, they often achieved high levels of professional success, particularly in creative and entrepreneurial fields. Intrinsic curiosity replaced extrinsic rewards (grades or job requirements) as the primary driver for learning.

Research on children who learn to read through unschooling shows wide variance in when they start (anywhere from age 4 to 14), but once they decide they want to read, they often reach grade-level proficiency in a matter of months rather than years because they are personally invested. Proponents argue that traditional schooling actually stifles learning by making it a chore.

The Sudbury Valley School model (founded in 1968) is a radical form of democratic education based on the belief that children are naturally curious and capable of managing their own learning. In a Sudbury school, there are no grades or required classes. Instead, students of all ages (5–18) mix freely and decide for themselves how to spend their time. Long-term studies of graduates show that they overwhelmingly transition successfully into higher education and careers, often citing the school’s emphasis on responsibility, self-direction, and democratic participation as the primary drivers of their adult success.

Self-directed learning doesn’t require an independent income, but the point is that the drive to learn and to apply that education to useful pursuits is an inherent human trait, in both children and adults. It’s something we want to do and will do, whether or not an employer requires it.

Self-actualization and Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

American psychologist Abraham Maslow conceptualized the needs or goals that motivate human behavior in a clinical review in 1943. He argued that once physiological and safety needs are met, humans naturally move toward “Self-actualization” – the realization of personal potential and pursuit of creative activities. In his later years, Maslow added a level above self-actualization called “Self-transcendence”, where people focus on goals outside themselves (altruism, community and caregiving).

That natural evolution can be applied not just to individuals but to civilizations. As AI and robotics free us from the self-centered needs of survival, we can awaken to our larger purposes of collective actualization and harmonious progress.

Escaping the Welfare Trap.

That’s the promise of AI – that it can free up our time so that we can escape the meaningless “busyness” of paid labor and pursue goals more meaningful to ourselves. But the same digital tools have a darker side. Catherine Austin Fitts and other critics warn that AI could become the ultimate “digital panopticon”—a weapon of entrapment by which programmable money and algorithmic surveillance create a modern “golden cage” in which the right to receive “welfare” is tied to political compliance. The UBI thus becomes a tool of coercion.

The same technology, however, offers tools to avoid that trap. Decentralized, neutral identity systems and zero-knowledge proofs allow people to establish that they are unique humans without revealing personal data. Zero-knowledge proofs are a cryptographic method by which one party can prove to another that a statement is true without revealing any additional information. A neutral protocol is one in which the rules are transparent, fixed, and cannot discriminate against specific users. By using “Smart Contracts” on a blockchain, the distribution of UHI becomes automated. The code only checks if the user has a valid, unique identity proof. It cannot check the user’s political party, criminal record or social behavior (unless explicitly part of the code). A government-issued digital currency could also be generated using the privacy-protected, peer-to-peer models of Project Hamilton and the ECASH bill, as detailed in Part 3 of this series.

Those are political decisions, dependent on a democratic system governed by and for the people. Mandating that these tools be incorporated into any government payments system can ensure that UHI remains a right of existence rather than a reward for obedience.

If AI can handle production, it removes the original justification for compulsory labor. The choice is whether we use AI to automate our enslavement or to finally automate our exit from the Sumerian story, transforming ourselves from a managed labor force into a self-directed, creative civilization.

Rewriting the Human Story.

For six thousand years, humanity has lived inside the Sumerian story: we were created to work for external masters. But AI has brought us to the point where labor no longer must be our master. AI abundance is not the end of work but the beginning of choice, and choice is the beginning of meaning.

Our first choice must be to insist on a democratic government run in the public interest, and a financial system that supports independent endeavor. Freeing humanity from compulsory labor can then provide the freedom for us to develop more fully as human beings.

Some people will create art. Some will teach. Some will explore science, history, biology, or engineering. Some will build communities. Families may simply become more present with each other. For the first time in history, large numbers of people may have the time and stability to ask the deeper questions about the meaning of life and the unique purpose of their own lives.

In the new story that emerges, we can see ourselves not as laborers but as musicians. We can make beautiful music together, but we need the other instruments. An orchestra is beautiful because each instrument contributes its unique voice to a larger harmony. The promise of AI is to free us from compulsory labor so that we can explore our own unique gifts and discover the music only we can play.

Be sure to check Ellen Brown’s earlier posts here on the AI Abundance Paradigm.

Originally published on Scheerpost.com.

Shared via Creative Commons.

Project Hamilton, ECASH, and the Quest for a Privacy-Protected Digital Dollar

 Ellen Brown
JUNE 12, 2026

The first two articles in this series explored the proposition that artificial intelligence and robotics will soon be ushering in an economy of unprecedented abundance, and examined the resource and energy constraints that could limit that voluminous growth. If machines eventually replace most of the workforce, society may need some form of Universal High Income (UHI), as Elon Musk and others have suggested, simply to keep purchasing power aligned with productive capacity. In a world where goods and services can be produced in abundance, the challenge may no longer be creating supply. It may be creating enough consumer demand (money) to purchase that potential supply.

A UHI or UBI (Universal Basic Income) would have to be issued digitally by the government. This third article addresses the fear that such a currency would come with strings attached – that it could be programmed to restrict purchases, limit movement, or enforce political conformity, imposing a “digital prison.”

The question posed here is, could a government-issued digital currency be created in a way that is privacy-protected, not programmable, and tradable like cash?

The answer is that it could. In fact, between 2020 and 2022, such a public digital-dollar system was in development. Project Hamilton, a collaborative effort of the Boston Fed and MIT, created a digital dollar that stored no personal data or transaction history, was not programmable to control how the money was spent, could be used without an intermediary, and was also the fastest payment system ever built. It was a digital money design that made a financial control grid impossible.

In late 2022, however, the program was quietly shelved – not because of a failure of design, but because it was thought to threaten the business models of banks and private payment networks. That was the belief, but a public money system built with Hamilton-style digital dollars could actually strengthen local banks, as will be shown here.

Why does all this matter? Congress is currently debating legislation that could make privately issued stablecoins a major component of the future dollar system. Supporters, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, see Treasury-backed stablecoins as a way to strengthen the dollar and create new demand for U.S. government debt. Banks worry that if stablecoins are allowed to pay competitive yields, depositors could move their money out of traditional bank accounts and into digital wallets. But both sides share a common assumption: that future digital dollars must be backed by government debt. There is another possibility—a privacy-protected, non-programmable digital dollar issued directly by the Treasury and designed to function like cash.

The irony is that the privately-issued stablecoins now being implemented by Congress actually are programmable and do threaten the business model of private banks. That subject in order will be explored in a follow-up article. This article will look at the non-programmable alternative that was demonstrated and then abandoned, and at how it could be the only mathematically viable alternative for funding a UHI, if or when that option becomes necessary to maintain economic stability.

The Digital Control Grid We Already Have.

For years, the loudest warnings about a central bank digital currency (CBDC) have centered on the fear that a government-issued digital dollar would create an unprecedented surveillance system. However, a surveillance system is already built into the digital money we use today. Hamilton-style digital dollars could have bypassed that invasion of privacy.

More than 95 percent of the money supply is now digital, and the payment rails it runs on — Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, Stripe, Zelle, the major banks — already track what you buy and where you buy it. Every purchase is tagged with a merchant category code (MCC), which forms a detailed behavioral map of your life. Behind the scenes, companies like Plaid and Yodlee sit between your bank and the apps you use. When you connect a budgeting or payment app, these intermediaries often copy years of your transaction history — every pharmacy purchase, every restaurant bill, every utility payment. They store it, analyze it, and build profiles of your spending habits that can be shared or sold.

Payment processors use automated systems to flag and sometimes freeze accounts based on activities designated as suspicious by algorithms. PayPal’s Acceptable Use Policy, for example, allows it to seize funds for a wide range of activities defined by the company. These decisions are made under corporate policies buried in complicated fine print that few people actually read, policies executed by the company without due process or a clear right of appeal.

Project Hamilton, the Privacy-protected Alternative that Was Shut Down.

In contrast, under Project Hamilton a public digital-dollar system was built, tested and proved that could have blocked surveillance, protected privacy, and given Americans a cash-like digital option. Developed by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and MIT’s Digital Currency Initiative, Project Hamilton was a working prototype. Phase 1 delivered something no private payment network has ever offered: 1.7 million transactions per second, with settlement in under a second, no personal data stored on the ledger, no transaction history, no account numbers, and no surveillance architecture.

Instead of numbered accounts, it used opaque 32-byte hashes — a fixed-length string of 32 bytes that is cryptographically generated, random-looking, and impossible to link to a person or decode into meaningful information. It might look something like this: 0xA3F9C1E4B7D2F8C9E1A4F3B2C7D9E0F.

The system validated payments without knowing who was making them, and identity checks happened outside the transaction layer, meaning the core ledger never touched personal information. MIT released the entire codebase publicly, so that anyone could inspect it and verify that it was designed to protect users, not monitor them.

In short, the United States successfully built a digital dollar that was fast, private, and not traceable to the user.

In a 2023 report in the MIT Technology Review titled “Is the Digital Dollar Dead?”, Mike Orcutt wrote, “Hamilton’s first phase demonstrated a feasible technical approach, and the researchers promised a ‘Phase 2’ that would explore sophisticated approaches to privacy. But late last year, shortly after the project came under scrutiny from anti-CBDC legislators, the Boston Fed ended Hamilton.”

The Independent Community Bankers of America warned that a CBDC “could destabilize the existing banking system that serves as the backbone of the U.S. economy.” Members of Congress sent letters to the Boston Fed expressing concern that Hamilton’s architecture could bypass commercial banks entirely. Orcutt wrote that CBDC research suddenly became “political red meat.” Bills were introduced to ensure that a digital dollar “never sees the light of day.” And in 2022, the Boston Fed quietly ended the project.

Opponents of developing a U.S. CBDC questioned the need for it. They argued that dollars are already digital. You can pay with a debit card or credit card.

In response, Orcutt quoted Willamette University law professor Rohan Grey, who observed that  5.9 million U.S. households are “unbanked” and limited to using cash, and cash won’t work on Amazon and other online shopping outlets. He added that the non-traceability of cash is a “social good” that needs to be preserved as we transition to a digital world.

The ECASH Act: A Treasury-issued Digital Dollar.

In 2022, Grey helped author a U.S. House bill called the Electronic Currency and Secure Hardware Act (ECASH). Introduced by Rep. Stephen Lynch of Massachusetts, the legislation directs the Treasury to create and issue a digital dollar that functions like physical cash. According to the ECASH Act Fact Sheet:

“The bill mandates several e-cash features, e.g.:

• Legal Tender: E-cash must be legal tender, created and issued into circulation by Treasury, and payable to bearer.

•Financial Inclusion: E-cash must be distributed and used directly by the American public via widely available hardware devices. It must also be capable of peer-to-peer, offline transactions and interoperable with all existing financial institution and payment provider systems. Moreover, in developing e-cash, the Security must prioritize technologies that promote universal access and usability – particularly as relating to  individuals with disabilities, low-income individuals, and communities with limited access to internet or telecommunications networks.

• Privacy: E-cash must incorporate key security and functionality safeguards that are generally associated with the use of physical currency – including anonymity, privacy, and minimal generation of data from transactions. E-cash must also be distributed through secure hardware devices that are secured locally via cryptographic encryption or other similar technologies and cannot contain personal identifiable information or be subject to surveillance, transactional data collection, or censorship-enabling features.  “

Grey envisioned cards that could be tapped together or to smart phones to transfer value anonymously, online or off-line. That such an “ecash” system would work was demonstrated in the 1980s and became available through Credit Suisse in Switzerland in 1998, then through Deutsche Bank in Germany and other banks in Europe, where cash is more often used than in the United States.

The U.S. ECASH Act has not yet been passed, but it is still alive. It is a minority-party bill in a Republican-controlled House that has never passed committee, but it has been reintroduced in subsequent sessions of Congress, including the current 119^th Congress.

The Public Option – Still on the Table?

Another bill that has not yet passed – H.R. 1122, the CBDC Anti-Surveillance State Act – would prohibit the Federal Reserve from issuing a retail CBDC, ever. But even if that bill passes, there is a public option that is still available. A modern Greenback could be issued through the Treasury, the fiscal arm of the government, rather than through the central bank. This is what is mandated in the ECASH Act – Treasury-issued digital currency.

Far from a new idea, government-issued currency is actually the oldest American monetary tradition we have, dating back to the American colonists and Abraham Lincoln. During the Civil War, the United States had no Federal Reserve, no central bank and no lender of last resort. But it did have a Treasury, and the government was facing an existential crisis. To finance the war without crushing the economy with debt, the Lincoln administration issued Greenbacks: Treasury-created dollars that required no borrowing and paid no interest. They were sovereign, debt-free, interest-free, and issued directly into circulation.

Greenbacks (U.S. Notes) kept the Union solvent, stabilized prices, and funded the war effort as well as a great deal of national infrastructure. They showed that the Treasury can issue money directly when the public interest requires it.

A modern version of that option, a Treasury-issued digital dollar, is not only possible under the Constitution and pending ECASH Act; but if we are heading into an AI-driven economy where Universal High Income becomes necessary to maintain consumer demand, Treasury issuance may be the only model that makes mathematical sense. Treasury-backed stablecoins and the Fed’s Quantitative Easing are both debt-based. With stablecoins, the interest on the Treasuries flows to private issuers. With the bank reserves the Fed issues to buy Treasury debt from banks, the interest flows to the banks. With Treasury-issued dollars, government interest flows to no one, because the government owes it to no one. This is the cleanest, most democratic form of money creation, and it falls squarely within the American monetary tradition.

The age-old objection to that solution is that it would devalue the currency and inflate prices from too much money chasing too few goods. But in an age of unprecedented AI-generated abundance, that maxim would be turned on its head. When too little money is chasing too many goods, the system actually needs an infusion of new money in order to maintain economic balance.

A Public Payment System that Preserves Private Local Banking and Serves the People.

How would Treasury dollars reach consumers, and how would they connect to community banks?

One possibility is through postal banks. The United States once had a very popular postal savings system, and Japan still has one. Japan Post Bank, one of the largest deposit-taking institutions in the world, provides universal access, simple accounts, basic payments, and a public option for savings. Yet it coexists with private banks, which continue to make loans and serve as the credit engines of the economy.

A U.S. postal banking system could do the same. The Postal Banking Act is a legislative bill reintroduced in 2022, aimed at re-establishing basic financial services at the United States Postal Service (USPS). Championed by lawmakers including Senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Bernie Sanders, the act seeks to provide safe, low-cost alternatives to predatory services like payday loans and check-cashing companies. According to Sen. Gillibrand, it could also generate nearly $19 billion per year for the USPS.

For a UHI, the Treasury could issue the digital dollars, and postal banks could distribute them. Balances above a modest threshold (say $500) could be automatically swept into the customer’s chosen community bank each night. Community banks would remain the lenders, keep lending local while ensuring universal access to public money. Local banks could have access to a public liquidity window through a state-owned public bank, similar to the Bank of North Dakota model.

To prevent fraud, the banks would also continue their function of monitoring large money flows, following the “two-tier” model in which banks handle the Know Your Customer (KYC) and AML monitoring envisioned in Project Hamilton’s documentation.

Conclusion: Stablecoins or Digital Greenbacks?

A stablecoin is a privatized claim on public debt, on which the U.S. government pays interest to the issuer. A Treasury-generated Greenback would be a public claim on public productivity, backed by “the full faith and credit of the United States” – the agreement of U.S. citizens to accept those Treasury-dollars in payment.

Treasury-issued digital dollars built on Project Hamilton architecture could support a UHI or UBI in an AI-driven economy without raising taxes or increasing the federal debt, and without the exponentially growing interest that leads to boom and bust cycles in a debt-based money system. If administered through a public banking model, a digital Greenback system could preserve community banks, provide universal access to the unbanked and under-banked, protect privacy, and keep monetary sovereignty in public hands.

Project Hamilton’s design was the opposite of the surveillance-heavy systems we use today. It used opaque 32-byte tokens that carried no personal information, a ledger that stored no transaction history, and a core that never saw names or account numbers. In other words, Hamilton would have been less programmable and more privacy-preserving than either the bank-created digital dollars Americans already use or the stablecoins being legislatively negotiated now.

Part 4 of this series will look more closely at the stablecoin legislation now pending, and at how that option can serve to strengthen the dollar’s reserve currency status abroad and ease the federal debt crisis without impairing the domestic lending business of local U.S. banks.

Be sure to check Ellen Brown’s earlier posts here on the AI Abundance Paradigm.

First Published on ScheerPost.com.

Shared via Creative Commons.