What C. H. Douglas Knew, and Why the Age of Artificial Intelligence Could be an Age of Human Freedom — If We Get the Financial System Right, By Brian Simpson

For six months, "Thy" has been hosting the radio — bright, quick, insightful. This week we found out she's not real. She's AI. And not everyone is surprised.

We're getting used to this. AI writes essays and news articles, diagnoses illnesses, handles legal briefs, books your holidays, translates your documents, and sometimes even pretends to be your friend. The realisation is dawning: this isn't a novelty. It's a shift. White-collar jobs — once thought immune — are going the way of the assembly line.

So, what's real? Who's behind the mic, the diagnosis, the policy advice, the voice on the phone? These are big questions — but there's a bigger one underneath:
What happens to people when machines can do nearly everything?

The standard answer is grim. Technological unemployment. Widening inequality. Social decay. A kind of existential redundancy — what do you do when there's nothing left to do?

But there's a different path — and it's not new. It was laid out over a century ago by a brilliant British engineer and economist named Clifford Hugh Douglas, who saw that industrial society was heading for exactly this problem. His theory of Social Credit started from one key insight:
Production and income were becoming decoupled.

Factories could produce far more than people could buy, because wages didn't keep pace with the output. The problem wasn't scarcity — it was that people weren't given the means to purchase what machines made. His solution was startlingly simple:
Issue a National Dividend. Not as welfare, but as a right — a regular, guaranteed payment to every citizen, drawn from the collective productive power of society. That's a simplification, but it will suffice for this article; Alor.org is Australia's leading social credit site so readers will find a rich harvest here.

Now fast-forward a hundred years. AI isn't just replacing factory hands — it's replacing analysts, creatives, thinkers, planners. We're not facing a downturn in employment. We're staring down the possibility of the end of employment as the organising principle of life.

That could be a disaster — if we cling to the idea that income must come from labour. But if we follow Douglas' logic, it doesn't have to be. In fact, this could be the start of a new kind of civilisation — one where artificial intelligence handles production, and humans are freed from the economic treadmill.

Because what Douglas grasped — and what's never been more urgent — is that if machines can make the goods, people don't need to work to deserve them. They just need to be given a share. A social dividend, paid not as charity, but as ownership — a recognition that all wealth is socially produced, even if the agents are now artificial. This has utterly nothing to do with communism, and in fact the very opposite, being a recognition that societies are based upon association and cooperation, basic anthropology 101.

If we do this — if we reform the financial system to reflect the new reality — the coming of AI doesn't have to be the collapse of human purpose. It can be the fulfilment of it.

We can finally move beyond a civilisation where value is measured by hours on the clock, and into one where creativity, leisure, care, learning and rest are legitimate ends in themselves — not luxuries for the few.

Even the singularity — that science-fiction moment when AI surpasses human intelligence — need not be a horror story. Not if the wealth it creates is distributed justly. Not if we break the link between work and worth.

Douglas called for it in the age of petrol. We need it even more in the age of silicon.