Spatiotemporally Distributed Monetary Dissolution in AI Production Networks: A Thought Experiment on Future Production Relations

This discussion paper investigates a conditional possibility of spatiotemporally distributed monetary dissolution within a hypothetical production economy operated predominantly by highly capable artificial-intelligence systems. Productive labour is assumed to be widely automatable, while material scarcity, differentiated authority over resources, and heterogeneous institutional commitments remain. The paper distinguishes debt cancellation, the expiry of particular claims, substitution of monetary functions, reduction in reliance on general purchasing power, and disappearance of a monetary institution. Its central hypothesis is that locally coordinated value circuits may sustain productive activities through resource-specific commitments, shared capacities, distributed records, and admissible multilateral settlement, progressively displacing some uses of money without a synchronized economy-wide transition. This possibility faces difficulties of overlapping circuits, nonlinear dynamics, contested value attribution, conflicting normative and aesthetic appraisals, trust-dependent bottlenecks, and concentrated power over both resources and governance protocols. An optimistic branch considers jointly accessible production data and substantially enhanced AI capacities for system identification and adaptive planning, without presupposing complete prediction or normative consensus. Drawing critically on generative justice, monetary theory, and commons governance, the study treats non-extractive value return and the regeneration of productive conditions as distinct tests of an institutional arrangement's significance. Monetary dissolution is consequently presented as a localized, reversible and normatively contingent transformation in production relations.