In my last post1 I asked what happens if API tokens (Universal Token Standard, or UTS) become a universal monetary standard — a computational lingua franca that makes AI labor legible, tradeable, and accountable across systems that currently cannot speak to one another. The question that immediately follows is not whether humans can still work, but something more fundamental: How does human contribution remain economically visible in a system whose basic unit of account tracks computational inference? What follows is part playful fantasia, part thinking about a serious problem, without asserting a go plan.

The goal would be equilibrium — a stable state where human beings can thrive rather than merely persist, where the preference is for an improved standard of living rather than bare survival. Human Agency Tokens, or HATs, are the structural answer to this problem — not a supplement to a token economy but the missing piece without which only AI work gets counted. From a long-game global view, the economy needs to be stable, and to be stable, there has to be a floor on human suffering and abundance. Past a threshold, the strain of human suffering is too great, leading to over-wild cycles of disruption and correction.

The architecture holds together only as a whole in this fiction — three parts, each necessary, each insufficient alone. A Universal Token Standard (UTS) would measure and standardize AI computational work — the lingua intelligentiae made operational. A Free Subscription to Life (FSL) provides a baseline allocation, akin to "Universal Basic Income": a floor of computational access, dignity without coercion. You can choose not to work and still live. HATs would reward human contribution above that level — the premium for irreplaceable consciousness work. Remove any piece and the architecture fails: UTS alone makes human contribution invisible; FSL alone guarantees survival while agency slowly atrophies; HATs alone coerce consciousness work into existence because survival depends on performance.

The architecture becomes clearer by using the analogy of the "water cycle" of evaporation, rain and reservoir. FSL is the reservoir — the floor that remains constant, baseline income funded by........

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