Imagine for a moment that every American was offered the opportunity to retire today and receive their 2024 W-2 income every year for the rest of their life, adjusted for inflation. Regardless of your age, you could quit work today and receive your “do nothing” income for as long as you live. Would you do it?

Here’s the catch: In this new system, the wealthiest one percent of Americans would enjoy a skyrocketing of their personal wealth, with many of them very quickly becoming trillionaires.

Does that change your answer?

A rational person would accept the offer of a lifetime of free money, even if it meant that a handful of others benefitted far more. Yet research shows that when given these types of choices, people don’t always make the decision that maximizes their payoff. In one famous experiment, research subjects were told there was $1,000 available to split between them and a stranger. When given a choice, a shockingly substantial percentage of the subjects chose to receive nothing rather than accept 10% of the pot, with the stranger receiving 90%. That is, they would willingly forego a free $100 simply to avoid the feeling that a stranger got more money than them.

This friction becomes more than a thought experiment when Artificial Intelligence (AI) and concerns about income inequality collide.

Researchers at Microsoft recently published a paper in which they measured the overlap between the current capabilities of AI and the tasks associated with hundreds of occupations. This measurement, known as the AI applicability score, allows researchers to rank occupations by their vulnerability of being replaced by AI. Not surprisingly, occupations such as embalmers, tire repairers and phlebotomists score lowest on the scale, meaning that AI currently can do very little, if any, of the tasks associated with those occupations. Occupations at high risk of being replaced include interpreters, historians, writers/authors and radio DJs.

Warren Buffett doesn’t seem panicked about technology’s encroachment on employment. He once mused, “If at the start of each day one person pushed a button and all the goods and services we are getting now would be turned out by robots, would that be a tragedy? Instead of working 35 hours a week we’d maybe work one?”

Of course, the guy who owns the button would become unimaginably wealthy. But how would you feel about that? You only work an hour a week and are richer than you were previously. But the guy with the button now has five commas in his worth. Do you take the leisure – or would you rather have less if it means the other guy also gets less?

David Moon is president of Moon Capital Management. A version of this piece originally appeared in the USA TODAY NETWORK.