A Human-Centered Mixed Economy Model: The Institutional Sustainability of Middle-Class Welfare in the Age of Robotic Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

The age of robotic artificial intelligence, by raising for the first time the prospect of large-scale substitution of both physical and cognitive labor, structurally challenges the historical centrality of human labor upon which the modern economic order is built. This study aims to develop a holistic theoretical response to the question of how economic productivity, human dignity, middle-class sustainability, the social state, democratic legitimacy, and nation-state capacity can be preserved together in an era in which the economic centrality of labor is weakening. The study adopts a normative political-economy approach that combines historical-comparative analysis, transdisciplinary theoretical synthesis, comparative institutional model analysis, and scenario-based strategic foresight. Within this framework, it diagnoses the tendency of the robotic age to generate digital capitalism, technological feudalism, and a new class structure encompassing data elites and the cognitively precarious; it then analyzes the structural limits of classical liberal capitalism, the neoliberal paradigm, the traditional welfare state, and the unconditional universal basic income approach, and conceptually constructs a human-centered mixed economy model in response. The proposed model rests on complementary institutional pillars: a national robotic welfare fund, a fair tax architecture adapted to robotic productivity, participatory and cooperative ownership structures that broaden access to the means of production, the socialization of algorithmic rent through data cooperatives and a data dividend, a lifelong reskilling infrastructure, and a new framework of economic citizenship that makes the citizen a constitutive partner in the system. The model's robustness is further tested against major counter-theses and through a multi-scalar (national, regional, and global) governance dimension. The central claim is that, when equipped with appropriate institutional instruments, the robotic transformation can cease to render unemployment a structural fate in any nation-state, so that high productivity and broad-based welfare are no longer alternatives. The study's original contribution lies in offering a universally adaptable, human-dignity-centered institutional architecture that integrates scattered policy proposals around a single constitutive logic.