ABCity: Blueprint for the Electric-AI Civilization: Vol. 1 — Theory (ABCity Trilogy)

AI is replacing your job. The question no one is answering is: what replaces your income?Not welfare. Not robot taxes. Not universal basic income funded by governments that are already running out of money. These are the answers the last century produced. They will not survive the next decade.For thirty years, the basic income debate has circled the same question without answering it: where does the money come from?ABCity: Blueprint for the Electric-AI Civilization proposes a different starting point — not redistribution, but ownership.When AI and robots absorb the labor of production and survival, what remains is the energy that powers them. Citizens who own that energy own the new foundation of wealth. UBEE — Universal Basic Energy Equity — is the institutional design that makes that ownership real: a city of 100,000 residents who collectively own their solar infrastructure, govern through real-time democratic AI, and receive as basic income the revenues that ownership generates. Not a subsidy. A property right.This book surveys sixty years of failed basic income proposals — from Milton Friedman to today's robot tax proposals — and builds the case for the only model that works: citizen ownership of the infrastructure that civilization runs on. It examines the precedents already operating — Alaska's Permanent Fund, Korea's Sinan County Sunshine Pension, Geuyang-ri's 100% resident-owned cooperative — and draws the lesson they share: income derived from ownership is stable in ways that income derived from redistribution never can be.This book is the design manual for a prototype city of 100,000 residents built around three integrated systems:UBEE (Universal Basic Energy Equity) — Citizens hold fractional ownership of the city's renewable energy infrastructure. As AI accelerates energy demand, basic income grows with automation, not against it.CityOS — An AI operating system for democratic cities: transparent, auditable, and constitutionally subject to citizen override. In CityOS, AI infers meaning; blockchain fixes state; ontology defines concepts.RTED (Real-Time Executable Democracy) — A governance architecture in which citizens' decisions are immediately encoded and enforced on physical infrastructure. A digital democracy system that enables communities to make decisions at the speed of light in the AI era. When a vote passes, the code deploys. Decision equals execution.Drawing on the work of Jeremy Rifkin, Tony Seba, Carlota Perez, and Michel Bauwens — and grounded in Korea's near-worst-case conditions of land scarcity and energy import dependency — ABCity demonstrates that the numbers work, the technology exists, and the institutional architecture is buildable now.Volume Two addresses spatial design; Volume Three addresses CityOS architecture and AI safety governance."Our societies are based more and more on contributions to networks, not just on paid labor for corporations. But how do we recognize these new forms of value and create better conditions for life and work for the multitudes that contribute for the common good of their society? In this book, the author advocates a move from redistribution, to predistribution. If we can jointly own our energy and data production, we can, based on this sovereignty of our value production, create a new form of income based on the production of (renewable) energy. But the book is much more than that, it rethinks labor in the context of AI, and it rethinks how we should rethink our cities. I warmly recommend this innovative way to rethink our social and economic arrangements, more in harmony with the technical capacity of today." — Michel Bauwens, Founder, P2P Foundation; author of Peer to Peer: The Commons Manifesto Read more