Today is International Workers’ Day.

If the central themes of labor movements a hundred years ago were time and safety, the defining theme of labor in 2026 seems to be AI.
Recent news shows two opposing expectations colliding: the fear that AI will replace human jobs, and the hope that it will create entirely new opportunities. PwC reported that the wage premium for workers with AI skills rose from 25% to 56% year over year. At the same time, the costs of layoffs and organizational restructuring driven by the transition toward AI are becoming visible across many industries.

In other words, AI is no longer just a tool.
It is rewriting the value and structure of labor itself.

In that context, I find myself rethinking what labor means.
If labor in the past was largely an exchange of time and physical effort, labor in the future may become closer to an expression of creativity and unique value. As AI takes over more repetitive and functional tasks, the human ability to create context, meaning, and trust may become even more valuable.
The ecosystem we are building at Alt.town is connected to the same question.
Rather than having creators and virtual celebrities remain dependent on platforms as content producers, we envision a structure where the value they create can circulate with the community through tokenized assets like DNA. To me, this is one possible future of labor and value creation that Web3 can offer.

The more it seems that technology may replace everything, the more the most human forms of value and trust become the strongest infrastructure of any system. $TOWN