# AI Weekly Issue #487: 100 Years From Now. The Allowance
AI Weekly's "100 Years From Now" column imagines a future where billionaires have destabilized the economy through their AI ventures. The premise centers on a dystopian scenario where wealthy tech leaders offer financial compensation to the general population in exchange for silence about economic collapse.
The piece explores how unchecked AI development by billionaire-backed companies might concentrate wealth so dramatically that it breaks traditional economic systems. Rather than implement structural reforms, these fictional future oligarchs choose appeasement. They establish an "allowance" program. Citizens receive regular payments to accept the new economic order without protest.
The column uses speculative fiction to examine current trajectories. It questions whether today's AI boom, dominated by billionaire-funded companies, sets us on a path toward extreme inequality and social control. The allowance concept serves as satire, highlighting how direct payments could function as a silencing mechanism rather than genuine wealth redistribution.
AI Weekly presents this as a cautionary thought experiment about where unchecked power concentration in AI development might lead within a century.