In a World of AI Unemployment, States Must Redefine Value

As AI rapidly transforms our economy, automating everything from truck driving to legal drafting and even coffee-making, we’re entering a future where employment itself can no longer be the sole vehicle for meaning, stability, or economic participation. According to a 2023 Goldman Sachs report, up to 300 million jobs globally could be affected by generative AI, with 20–40% job displacement expected in some sectors such as transportation, content creation, and customer service.¹

But the federal government isn’t built to respond swiftly to this shift. The United States—vast, gridlocked, and increasingly disconnected from the day-to-day lives of its people—is simply too large to reflect real democratic input. In contrast, smaller democracies like Estonia, Finland, and New Zealand have shown that responsiveness, innovation, and citizen engagement thrive at smaller scales.²

That’s why it falls to the states to lead in this new era—not just to manage automation’s impact, but to reimagine how citizens contribute, how value is created, and how AI can be trained to serve human well-being rather than replace it.

The truth is this: AI is faltering in healthcare. Training on electronic medical records (EMRs) is problematic—they are often inaccurate, include misdiagnoses, reflect care plans that are poorly followed, and most importantly, contain little more than billing and disease management data. EMRs lack true health data. That’s not enough. For AI to be accurate and transformative, it needs real-time, personally relevant signals from daily human life: movement, rest, nutrition, stress, recovery, and social rhythm. In short, AI needs access to the digitized expression of health—not just records of its breakdown.

This is where Web3 and blockchain offer something revolutionary: a way for individuals to self-custody their health data, tokenize their lived experiences, and contribute meaningfully to AI training models—while preserving their privacy and earning economic value.³

The most devastating health outcomes—like pancreatic cancer, sudden cardiac arrest, or early-onset diabetes—are not caused by genetics alone. In fact, gene disposition is not destiny. These outcomes often stem from gene expression, shaped by lifestyle, environment, and daily exposures over time.⁴ Until now, the healthcare system has lacked the ability to capture or decode the co-occurring events that shape gene expression. Without broad, participatory data inputs, we remain blind to preventable crises.

But if states act now—by creating privacy-first, Web3-enabled ecosystems—they can empower their residents to become active contributors to a new kind of health intelligence. In this model, whether someone is employed or not, each individual becomes a living node in a real-time data network simply by documenting aspects of daily life—sleep patterns, nutrition, social interaction, physical activity, and more. This continuous stream of personally relevant data fuels more accurate, context-aware AI models that, in turn, drive better health outcomes and more adaptive public services.

More importantly, this shift offers a proactive solution to the looming threat of civic unrest driven by mass unemployment in an AI-disrupted economy. Instead of being displaced, citizens are enlisted as co-creators of value, participating in a new economy that rewards their lived experience. It restores meaning, purpose, and agency, not by extracting from people, but by inviting them to shape the products, services, and intelligence systems that will define the future. In doing so, states can build resilient, self-reinforcing communities—where improved health and distributed wealth go hand in hand.

This isn’t just about innovation. It’s about economic justice, dignity, and inclusion in a world where traditional employment may no longer define one’s worth.

The future of health, democracy, and AI can be locally built. States that move now—by building digital infrastructure that respects autonomy and invites participation—won’t just survive the AI era. They’ll lead it.