In July 2026, two manifestos were published within 24 hours; though they came from different worlds, they addressed the same problem. On July 13, more than 200 economists, including 16 Nobel laureates such as Stiglitz and Bernanke, published the statement “We Must Act Now.” One day later, “The AI Pledge for Humanity” went online, signed by more than 800 people, including Andrew Yang, Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, and Nobel laureate Vernon Smith. One manifesto reflects the academic consensus; the other is an activist campaign. Both emphasize that the benefits of AI are becoming increasingly concentrated, and the window of opportunity for change is closing. [1]
“We Must Act Now” is deliberately brief—just three sentences. AI could become radically more powerful in ten years and transform the economy faster than the Industrial Revolution did. That is why economic, political, and tech leaders must create incentives, guidelines, and institutions now to steer AI in a way that benefits humanity. The strength of the statement lies in the large number of signatures, not in specific demands. It calls for understanding first and acting second, but does not specify any measures or institutions designed to foster that understanding. Fortune describes the sentiment among experts as an admission: “We are driving in the fog.”
The Pledge is more specific. It cites figures, imposes obligations, and names names, while the Consensus Statement focuses solely on the urgency of the matter. Its principle of “Common Inheritance” reframes the question of ownership: AI is based on collective knowledge, public research, language, and labor, and does not belong solely to those who exploit it. The solution is a voluntary “AI dividend”—an unconditional basic income funded by the signatories’ AI profits. Two limitations remain: Voluntary participation depends on the goodwill of those who have the most to lose. And crucially, the Pledge distributes cash.
This provides a framework for the debate. At the top are the institutions; at the bottom are the dividends, whether funded by the government or the private sector. In both cases, the point of contention is who distributes the money and from what source. None of the manifestos asks what the money is actually intended to enable. A basic income secures one’s livelihood and makes experimentation possible. However, it is not the same as the ability to succeed in those experiments.
This is where an old FROLLEINFLOW proposal comes in, one that takes a different approach to distribution. The “Unconditional Learning Credit,” formulated in 2016, ties public funds not to need, but to a willingness to learn: Trust in exchange for freedom—a budget that allows individuals to take the reins rather than handing them over. The difference from the Pledge is fundamental. A transfer without expectations buys time but does not build judgment. And judgment—the ability to decide what to hand over to the machine and what to take responsibility for oneself—wither away when income is secure and the machine is convenient. This security can even delay the development of that ability by removing the pressure to acquire it.
This is not a rejection of the basic income. A safety net that prevents anyone from falling into the abyss is a prerequisite for everything else, and the Pledge is right to demand it. But a manifesto that promises freedom and provides money confuses two things that are not the same. Brynjolfsson’s phrase in the consensus statement—“complement humans rather than imitate them”—points precisely to this: tools should build capacity for action, not replace it. A check does neither.
The distribution that no manifesto organizes is the one that every person carries out daily at their own desk: what they feed into the system and what they decide for themselves. This distribution requires no signature from Nobel laureates and no philanthropist pledging two percent of their wealth. It is available today, to everyone, free of charge, and it is the only one that no one has to wait for while others negotiate. Whether a basic income is implemented is decided by politicians and billionaires. What someone does with their judgment, as long as it is still there, is up to him or her to decide.
Sources
- “We Must Act Now — A Statement on AI’s Transformation of the Economy,” July 13, 2026 (Full text + signatories): https://www.wemustactnow.ai/ · Announcement from the Stanford Digital Economy Lab: https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/news/wemustactnow/
- “The AI Pledge for Humanity” (Scott Santens / Income To Support All Foundation), accessed July 14, 2026: https://aipledgeforhumanity.org/
- #BELGUT – The Unconditional Learning Credit, February 8, 2016: https://frolleinflow.com/belgut-das-bedingungslose-lernguthaben/
- Most of those quoted here are men—but that is not the case among the signatories. The four organizers of “We Must Act Now” and all 16 Nobel laureates mentioned are men (the latter also reflects who has received the Nobel Prize in Economics to date). However, the full list of signatories includes significantly more women, including Diane Coyle, Gita Gopinath, Rebecca Henderson, Betsey Stevenson, Stefanie Stantcheva, Marianne Bertrand, and Beatrice Weder di Mauro. For the AI Pledge for Humanity, 5 of the 21 highlighted “Founding Signatories” are women (Katie Moussouris, Jaya Baloo, Sophia Swire, Jane Golley, Gigi Danziger); the full list of over 800 signatories is not available. In both cases, the quotes come almost exclusively from the male end of the list. But that’s nothing new. ↩︎
