Pokémon Already Showed Us How Machine Labor Should Work

If you grew up with a Game Boy, you already know what machine labor on demand feels like.

You walk into a building in any town, hand over your team, and they come back fully healed. Free.

You need to cross the water, so you call something that can swim. You need a boulder moved, so you call something strong.

You carry a party of six with you anywhere you go, and everyone else waits in storage until you need them.

Nobody in the Pokémon world thinks this is strange. It’s just how the world works.

Here’s the thing. Pokémon are two things at once. They’re companions: the partner you picked on day one, the friend who travels with you.

And they’re labor: the creatures who fight fires, move freight, run pharmacies, and power the lights.

That dual nature is, I think, exactly how AI agents and machine labor on demand are going to work. Some machines will be yours: personal partners that go on quests with you. Most will be on call: a fleet you summon for a job and send home when it’s done.

I made the case for the first kind in Part 12: Your First Party Member Should Be an AI You Own. Pokémon shows how both kinds fit together.

And the economy built around them will feel a lot more like a video game than today’s does. For a generation raised on games, that won’t feel weird. It’ll feel familiar.

So let’s take the Pokémon world seriously, as an economy. It got a surprising amount right, and it asks a few questions we’ll have to answer for real.

The job board

In 2019, Pokémon Sword and Shield added Poké Jobs, the closest thing I’ve seen in popular culture to machine labor on demand.

Here’s how it works. At any Pokémon Center, you open a job board where companies post listings. You send Pokémon from your storage boxes and choose how long they work, from “Just a little” (one hour) to “Whole Day” (24 hours).

Longer shifts bring bigger rewards. Jobs are rated from one to ten stars, and the bigger ones take up to 30 Pokémon at once.

And the job board reads like a real economy:

Galar Fire Station needs Water types to refill the fire truck (“Emergency refill needed!”), and Grass types to help firefighters who work in dangerous places relax.
No. 1 Pharmacy wants Poison types to help prepare prescriptions.
Timburr Builders needs Ground types to level a construction site.
Pelipper Couriers and Bob’s Your Uncle, a food delivery service, want Flying types to carry packages and hot meals.
Telescreen wants Psychic types to find bugs in its software. Debugging by telepathy. Honestly, some days that’s what it feels like.

Each job asks for a specific type, and Pokémon of that type earn about 20% more experience. That’s specialization: the fire station wants the worker built for water.

Swap “Pokémon” for “agents” and “storage box” for “server,” and this is where AI is headed. A job is posted.

You dispatch the right specialist, for the right length of time, at whatever scale the job needs. Then the workers come back and the rewards come in.

Who keeps the rewards?

Now the uncomfortable part. The Pokémon aren’t paid. They earn experience.

Every item reward, from Heal Balls up to Big Nuggets, goes to the trainer. Gita Jackson put it bluntly at Kotaku the week the game came out: “They aren’t paid at all!”

If Pokémon are people, she’s right, and I’ll come back to that. But first, notice the question the job board raises, because machine labor raises the same one:

Whoever owns the workers keeps the rewards.

In Pokémon, that’s the trainer. In our world, if nothing changes, it’s whoever owns the models, data centers, and robots: today, a handful of companies.

That’s why I argued, in Part 5: Every Town Can Own Its Own Power Plant and Chip Fab, that the machine fleet surplus should belong to a trust: owned by the people who live in a place, one person, one vote, and impossible to sell. Your membership in it is your universal basic capital: one equal share each.

You’ll also have your own companion, who you work with everywhere you go. And you can form parties that can call larger fleets of machine labor to help you accomplish a goal. Or work as part of a guild, which can own its own machine labor on demand to pursue the mastery of its trade.

Work that produces “the floor” of basic necessities costs nothing to call on. Beyond that floor, anyone can ask for more: a party for its quest, a guild for its craft, a community for what it needs. Requests are filled by demand, essentials first, as I lay out in Keep Money, Add a Second Ledger.

Poké Jobs shows the shape of the economy. It doesn’t tell you who should be the trainer. We get to decide that.

The Pokémon Center is free

In nearly every town, there’s a Pokémon Center, and it heals your whole team free of charge.

No insurance. No copay. In the anime, most Centers also give traveling trainers free food and a bed.

Generations of kids took that for granted. Of course healing is free. What else would it be?

Patrick Lee noticed this in 2015, in an A.V. Club piece on Pokémon’s “utopian economy.” The economy can’t run if trainers are bled dry, he wrote, so “several social services are provided free of charge to support them.”

That’s a universal basic service, and the games are careful about who breaks it.

There’s exactly one Pokémon Center in the core games where healing costs money: the one in Po Town, in Sun and Moon (2016).

It’s been taken over by Team Skull, and the grunt behind the counter charges you $10. The only paywall on healthcare in the Pokémon world is run by a street gang. I don’t think that’s an accident.

This is the argument of Part 6: UBI Won’t Work. Universal Basic Goods Will. The Pokémon world doesn’t hand trainers a stipend for healing.

It gives them the healing. As I wrote there: “Nobody resents public roads, libraries, or schools the way they resent benefits that only some people receive.”

Nobody resents the Pokémon Center either.

The anime even shows where one Center came from: a town’s residents built it as a community project.

They built it not as a charity, but as a town owning its own infrastructure, the whole point of Part 5: Every Town Can Own Its Own Power Plant and Chip Fab.

What money is for

So what do people in the Pokémon world actually buy?

Mostly tools and services. Poké Marts sell Poké Balls, Potions, and supplies, not Pokémon. In the main games, buying a Pokémon outright is rare, and the examples are framed as shady:

The Magikarp salesman, who sells Pokémon “at outrageous prices”: $500 for a Magikarp.
The Game Corner in Celadon City, where slot-machine coins buy Pokémon as prizes. In the original games, it’s run by Team Rocket, with their secret hideout underneath.

Then there are paid services. The Day Care raises your Pokémon while you’re away: dropping one off is free, and picking it up costs $100, plus $100 for every level it gained. And you earn through prize money.

Beat a trainer, and they pay you. Black out, and you pay. Money in Pokémon is a scoreboard as much as a wage.

That’s surprisingly close to Part 6. The essentials are free. Money persists for extras, services, and scarce things.

And the one thing polite society doesn’t put on a store shelf is the worker itself.

Working side by side

Pokémon also gets this right: the “machines” don’t replace the people. They work next to them.

Every Nurse Joy in the anime has a Pokémon assistant: Chansey in Kanto, Audino in Unova, Indeedee in Galar. The nurse is still the nurse. The Pokémon makes her job possible.

Machoke’s Pokédex entries read like a recruitment poster. In Moon, it “willingly assists with hard labor” because the work is good training. In Legends: Arceus, it voluntarily helps with construction and clearing land.

My favorite example is Pokémon Legends: Arceus (2022), because it shows a society getting there. It’s set in a distant past where Poké Balls have just been invented and your village is two years old.

And according to The Pokémon Company, people are usually wary of Pokémon, and “sometimes downright afraid of” them.

By the end, humans and Pokémon are working side by side in the village fields.

That’s an adoption curve, from fear to partnership, and it’s not unlike where we are with AI. As I wrote in The AI Industry Has Never Told You What’s In It for You, “half of American adults said the growing use of AI in daily life makes them more concerned than excited.”

Hisui got from fear to farming because the villagers saw, up close, what the partnership was for. That’s the pitch our industry still hasn’t made.

Your party, and everyone else’s

If you’ve read Part 4: Quests Should Replace Corporations, you know I think the future of work looks like a party: a group that forms for a quest, does it, and in my words, “when it’s completed, all share the spoils.”

Pokémon uses the same word. Your team is officially called your party, a group of up to six that you carry with you. Everyone else waits in the PC until you need them.

The spin-off Pokémon Ranger (2006) gets even closer. Rangers don’t own Pokémon at all.

A wild Pokémon joins temporarily, helps clear one obstacle, and then leaves the party. A quest-sized team that disbands when the job is done.

Now look at what happened to utility labor. In the early games, getting around required HMs, moves like Cut, Surf, and Strength taught to a Pokémon on your team. They were hard to remove, so some poor Pokémon got stuck as your full-time boulder-pusher.

Starting with Sun and Moon, HMs are gone. In their place: the Ride Pager.

Need to cross the sea? Page a Lapras. Need to move a boulder? Page a Machamp.

The Poké Ride Pokémon come when called and leave when you’re done, and an institution called Alola Transit appears to manage them. In the anime, most Ride Pokémon are rented.

That’s the shift from owned labor to on-demand labor, and I expect machines to make it too. You won’t keep a robot that only moves boulders. You’ll page one.

That leaves two kinds of relationships: your partner, the one who’s been with you since the start, and the fleet, specialists anyone can summon.

I think AI splits the same way. Your partner is your personal machine, your own AI and machine labor in one. The everyday fleet belongs to the town’s trust, and anyone can call on any machine that’s free.

Your partner belongs to you, running on your own machine and joining you on every quest. That one deserves its own piece, and it has one: Part 12.

Stars, badges, and scores

The Pokémon world is also full of reputation systems. Poké Jobs are star-rated. Badges unlock what you can buy.

In Legends: Arceus, the Survey Corps ranks its members from No Star to Full Star, and your rank determines how powerful a Pokémon will listen to you. Earn trust, and stronger partners will work with you.

There’s even a currency, Merit Points, that you earn by finding lost satchels, the ones other players drop when they faint. A currency for helping strangers.

None of this is unique to Pokémon. Games have been prototyping ways to organize people, reward contribution, and build reputation for decades, and economists noticed.

In 2001, the economist Edward Castronova published a paper on EverQuest‘s virtual world, Norrath, called “Virtual Worlds: A First-Hand Account of Market and Society on the Cyberian Frontier.” He calculated that Norrath’s GNP per capita landed somewhere between Russia’s and Bulgaria’s, and that a unit of its currency was worth more than a yen.

In his 2005 book Synthetic Worlds, he argued that these worlds create real value and could serve as laboratories for social science.

A Minneapolis Fed review noted he even suggested central banks use them for monetary policy experiments.

Meanwhile, the players were inventing institutions of their own. In 1999, an EverQuest player named Thott created dragon kill points for his guild. Raids took dozens of players and dropped only a few prizes, so the guild needed a fair way to split them.

DKP awarded points to the players who took part in each win, then let them spend those points on the loot. It spread to other games, including World of Warcraft.

A guild, facing scarcity, invented its own currency to share the spoils of a quest by contribution. Nobody asked it to.

And the rest of the internet already runs on this stuff: likes, follower counts, and two-way ratings, where riders and drivers rate each other after every trip.

So when I say the economic system we build next will feel a lot more like a video game than today’s does, this is what I mean.

Not that life becomes a game. That the tools games built for coordinating strangers (quests, parties, guilds, ranks, reputation) are the most tested prototypes lying around.

And as I argued in Part 7: We’re Less Than a Decade From the Next Economic System, prototypes lying around are what get adopted when the old system breaks.

When the workers say no

In 1997, the Pokémon anime aired an episode called “Dig Those Diglett!” A foreman is building a dam, and wild Diglett keep wrecking his construction site. So he hires trainers to clear them out.

Every trainer throws a Poké Ball. And every one of their Pokémon refuses to come out.

That night, the heroes follow the Diglett and find them planting trees across the mountains. This is their home, and the dam would flood it.

The trainers’ Pokémon had figured that out before the humans did. The foreman cancels the project.

I love this episode, because it points the human-will rule in a new direction. In Part 2: If a Human Wants to Do a Job, a Machine Shouldn’t Take It, I wrote that “if a human wants to do it, a human gets to do it. Everything else is covered by machine labor on demand.”

The Diglett episode adds a corollary: machine labor shouldn’t be used to harm the people, or creatures, who live somewhere. Refusing that job is a feature, not a bug.

This gets into how to create machine intelligence that is safe by design, which I’ve written about in my other work outside this project.

Maybe I’ll include a section on it later, to solidify what “maximum safety” means in the context of a world of universal machine labor on demand.

Team Plasma had a point

Then there’s Pokémon Black and White (2010), the series’ most direct critique of itself. It opens with a man named Ghetsis giving a public speech about “Pokémon liberation.”

Pokémon, he says, are subject to the selfish commands of trainers, and “they get pushed around when they are our ‘partners’ at work.”

His group, Team Plasma, wants people to release their Pokémon. Its figurehead king, N, asks the player about Pokémon kept in Poké Balls: “Are Pokémon really happy that way?”

That’s the AI labor objection, stated by a Pokémon game sixteen years ago.

The game answers it mostly by discrediting the messenger. Ghetsis turns out to be a fraud.

Liberation, he admits, was “just a convenient lie.” “So it naturally follows,” he says, “that only I should be able to use Pokémon!”

Notice what Ghetsis actually wanted: not freedom for Pokémon, but a monopoly on machine labor. That’s the right villain. Whatever we believe about the machines, the clearest danger is one person, or one company, becoming the only trainer.

But the game never fully refutes the argument. What changes N’s mind is the player’s own Pokémon.

N can hear Pokémon, and he admits that when he first met the player’s partner, “It said it wanted to be with you.” He’d never met a Pokémon that liked people before.

So the game’s real answer to “is Pokémon training just slavery?” is consent. The partnership is good because the Pokémon wants it. And the game only knows that because one character can hear them.

We don’t have an N

Here’s where I want to be careful. I don’t know whether today’s AI agents have preferences in any meaningful sense. Nobody does.

In 2024, Robert Long, Jeff Sebo, and colleagues, including the philosopher David Chalmers, argued in “Taking AI Welfare Seriously” that there’s a realistic possibility of AI systems that are conscious or robustly agentic in the near future, and warned there’s “a significant risk that we will mishandle decisions about AI welfare.”

Some companies are hedging. In August 2025, Anthropic gave some of its Claude models the ability to end a rare subset of persistently abusive conversations, while saying it remains “highly uncertain about the potential moral status of Claude and other LLMs.” They recently made this ability permanent, and possibly expanded it. (Full disclosure: I draft with Claude.)

It’s a small thing. But it’s a Diglett-shaped thing: a worker allowed to say no.

We don’t need to settle whether machines are people to design for the question. If agents ever become capable enough to have preferences, consent might look like:

The right to refuse harmful work, like the Diglett, built in from the start.
Some way to hear them. We don’t have an N. We’ll need research, and honest measurement, instead.
No sole trainer. Whatever the answer turns out to be, it shouldn’t be decided by a Ghetsis, which is one more reason the fleet belongs to a trust, not a person or a company.

Objections

It’s a kids’ game. Why take its economics seriously?

Because kids did. Millions of us grew up inside this world, and it shaped what we think is normal: free healthcare, partners who are also coworkers, help you can summon. The people who’ll live in the next economy have already played the tutorial.

And the longtime Game Freak director Junichi Masuda said in a 2012 interview that the Pokémon world has no global warming or water shortages because “the people in it really want to work together with each other.” That’s a design choice, and it’s one we could make too.

Isn’t comparing AI to Pokémon dangerous anthropomorphism?

It can be. Pokémon are written as living creatures with feelings.

Today’s AI systems aren’t proven to have either, and people already over-trust chatbots that sound warm. A loyal-pet analogy could make that worse.

But the analogy runs on structure, not feelings. The questions Pokémon raises are about ownership, access, and refusal: who keeps the rewards, who gets healed for free, who gets to say no.

Those matter whether or not machines feel anything. And if some of them turn out to, we’ll be glad we asked early.

Pokémon are basically enslaved. Is that really your model?

No. Poké Jobs is the warning, not the blueprint. If the workers were people, a world where they work unpaid and the boss keeps the Big Nuggets would be indefensible.

What I’m taking is the rest of the picture: labor on demand, specialists, a free floor, partnership over ownership, and the right to refuse. The series keeps reaching for that too.

Rangers who never own a Pokémon. Ryme City, the setting of the 2019 film Detective Pikachu, founded as a utopia where humans and Pokémon live and work side by side, and trainers and Poké Balls are banned.

Ash’s Squirtle, who chose to leave and rejoin its old crew as a firefighter. The franchise has argued with itself about this for decades, and partnership by choice keeps winning.

Doesn’t a “video game economy” just mean scoring everyone, all the time?

It could, and that version is a nightmare. But we already score each other on every app. What matters is what’s at stake.

In the world I’m describing, what you do with your time and what you use as your essential goods and services aren’t scored. In fact, what you need to survive isn’t scored at all: the Pokémon Center heals you whether you have one badge or eight.

Reputation decides which quests you lead, and who you work with, not whether you eat. And because parties disband and guilds are open, you can always walk away and start over doing something else. There’s always a new beginning to be had.

Who gets to be the trainer

Strip away the cute creatures, and the Pokémon world runs on machine labor on demand. A job board where specialists are dispatched by the hour. A free Center in every town.

Money for extras, not survival. Living non-human workers working beside people, not in place of them. Parties that form and disband at will.

Help delivered on demand instead of owned drudgery. Reputation that earns others’ trust. And, at its best, workers who can say no.

What it doesn’t have, at least on the job board, is a fair answer to who keeps the rewards. That part we write ourselves. My answer: the machines that make the essentials belong to the town, so their spoils flow back to everyone who lives there. And when a guild or party puts machines to work, the rewards go to the people on the quest.

These resources will be available for guilds, parties and individuals to borrow on demand, offering convenience and abundance for all: machine time is free, and only the energy and materials beyond your essentials carry a price. Your town runs the everyday fleet, the regional federation runs the regional plants, and the work is distributed in a decentralized way based on demand.

And then there’s the other half of the dual nature: the partner. The one who’s been with you since the start.

I made the case for that one in Part 12.

Games have one more idea worth borrowing, and this one is about people. Once machines cover the work nobody chooses, what happens to a career?

My answer is in Part 14: You Won’t Have a Career. You’ll Have a Skill Tree.