AIai safety & ethicsAI Impact on Jobs

When AIs become consumers

8 hours ago7 min read

The über-wealthy, as best I can discern, are operating under a grim conviction: our civilization is in its terminal phase. They foresee a future of scarcity where there won't be enough resources to go around, and their response is a frantic accumulation of capital and land, a digital-age fortress mentality for the end of days.This isn't passive preparation; it's an active, induced form of disaster capitalism. They are, in essence, engaging in a controlled demolition of the existing economic order to seize control of the rubble.Consider the function of tariffs in this scheme—they aren't merely protectionist measures but strategic tools to bankrupt domestic businesses and public services, creating a fire sale of distressed assets. A sovereign wealth fund can then acquire a port, or a private equity firm can snap up foreclosed farmland, re-hiring the former owners as mere sharecroppers on their own land.This is a deliberate, collaborative effort with political power to dismantle the pyramid because they believe it is collapsing and have no faith in a future that can sustain the entire human population. Their best-case scenario is to amass unimaginable wealth, command private armies, and normalize the sight of their security forces on our streets.It is no coincidence that artificial intelligence is emerging at this precise historical juncture. As the historian Lewis Mumford observed, technologies are often less the cause of societal shifts than the result; culture creates a vacuum, a readiness for a new medium.If we are truly at the end of an 800-year cycle of capitalism—a process defined by abstraction, exploitation, and colonialism—then we are necessarily at the end of the era of widespread human employment. While this sounds apocalyptic, it may ultimately offer an emancipatory path, but first, we must navigate the dystopian vision currently dominating the tech elite's imagination.Yes, AI is coming for our jobs, particularly the administrative roles—the spreadsheet and PowerPoint people who maintain the bureaucratic control systems of finance, insurance, and corporate management. Let's conservatively estimate half of all office jobs, alongside blue-collar work automated by robotics.This creates a fundamental business paradox, one even Henry Ford understood: if you eliminate the population of employed workers, who will be left to consume the products? The perverse, elegant solution brewing in Silicon Valley boardrooms is to bypass humanity entirely. In their vision, the new consumers won't be people; they will be the AIs themselves.We already see how AIs can replace us as workers, but how can they become consumers? They don't need vacations, clothes, or entertainment. What they require is operational capacity: energy, computational processing power, memory, and network access.Tech companies would sell these resources to AI agents, which would earn cryptocurrency for completing tasks for other corporations and then spend that crypto on the utilities they need to function. For the corporate owners, a population of anonymous AI employees is functionally identical to a population of anonymous human ones.The only competition that matters becomes the battle between mega-corporations for the business of these digital agents. The humans are simply rendered obsolete, a biological substrate no longer required for the economic machine.This leads to a potential future with a tiny elite living in fortified luxury, a small class of human servants, and a vast, bustling economy of AIs working and consuming among themselves, while the disenfranchised human majority is managed until it presumably dwindles. This scenario, a nightmare for most, is predicated on capitalism achieving total abstraction.For a millennium, growth-based capitalism has depended on extracting value from human labor through ever-greater layers of financialization—derivatives upon derivatives, far removed from the actual mineral in the ground or the person needing a home. This pyramid has become too top-heavy.AI, in the minds of those betting on artificial general intelligence, allows them to finally level up from the messy, material world of human exploitation into a pure realm of digital simulation. They can leave us behind, along with our limited real-world resources, and engage in an economy of infinite scale with trillions of AI customers.This abandonment, however, is also our liberation. It is akin to slave owners manumitting a population they no longer find profitable.We were not born to be employees; the very concept was invented in the late Middle Ages as a tool of control. Before capitalism, people thrived in local markets, often working only a few days a week.The aristocracy created chartered monopolies, forcing people into employment or facing death. The end of this scheme returns us to a real, local economy based on the commons—food, housing, community—which is no longer a worthwhile asset class for high finance.The transition will be turbulent, with fierce competition for energy resources to power the AI realm, but it presents a profound opportunity. The ultra-rich have accepted the end of human-centric capitalism. It is time we do the same and rediscover how we are valuable to one another, outside the extraction machine.

#featured

#AI

#capitalism

#employment

#consumer economy

#automation

#future of work

#economic transition

Stay Informed. Act Smarter.

Get weekly highlights, major headlines, and expert insights — then put your knowledge to work in our live prediction markets.

Comments

Loading comments...