I Hope AI Takes Every Job

I want AI to take your job.

I want it to take mine too.

Before you close this, imagine I hand you $100 million tomorrow morning. No strings, no catch, no conditions.

Do you show up to work on Monday?

Be honest. Not the version you'd give a coworker. The real one.

Most people, when they actually sit with it, find the answer is no. Some would take a month off, then start building something new. Some would change careers entirely. A few, genuinely, would keep doing exactly what they're doing now, and I'll come back to them. But almost nobody would show up Monday to the same job, at the same intensity, for the same reasons.

Hold onto that answer.

Because we're about to have the conversation everyone is having about AI and jobs, and I think the entire conversation is aimed at the wrong target.

The fear is that AI takes work away from humans. But if $100 million means you'd stop working, then work was never the thing you wanted. It was the toll you paid to get the thing you wanted.

So what actually happens when the toll booth disappears?

What money is actually for

Most conversations about AI stop at jobs. AI will take jobs. Robots will replace workers. Millions unemployed.

Maybe is the wrong word. In some industries, it's already happening.

But there's a deeper question sitting underneath, and almost nobody asks it. What if AI eventually does all jobs?

Not some. Not the routine ones. Not the ones we condescendingly call low skill.

All of them. Construction workers, doctors, engineers, CEOs, and the people building the machines themselves.

The immediate reaction is that this sounds dystopian. Because the first thing your mind does is complete the sentence. Then how do I afford to live? How do I pay for anything if nobody has money?

Right. That's the point. Now stay with it, because that's where it gets interesting.

What is money actually for?

Zoom out far enough and the entire economy is made of goods and services. And to create those goods and services, we use one thing. Specialized labor.

For most of human history people did nearly everything themselves. Grew food. Made clothes. Built shelter. Fixed their own equipment. Slowly, civilization discovered specialization. One person raised chickens. Another made blankets. Another built tools. And specialization required a way to trade across time and strangers.

That's money. That's all it ever was.

Money is stored labor. Stored time. Stored human effort.

You do something useful for other people, and society hands you symbolic tokens representing that contribution. You carry those tokens into the future and exchange them for someone else's effort. Every dollar in your account is a claim on another human being's time.

There's a line from Ray Dalio I keep returning to. One person's spending is another person's income.

You work construction. You get paid. You spend it at the grocery store, the gas station, the daycare, Amazon. Your spending becomes their income. They spend it somewhere else. The cycle continues, and the whole thing looks like an economy, but it's really just humans passing each other's time around in circles.

Keep that loop in view. We're about to break it.

The part everyone skips

So run the experiment properly.

What happens if AI and robotics become capable of doing every job? Not just physical labor. Cognitive labor too. Research, diagnosis, design, management, and the machines that build the machines.

If machines do all the labor, why would humans need money?

This is where the pushback starts, and the first round is easy.

I'm talking about a fully automated system, A to Z. And honestly, if you've watched what's happened in the last three years, that's no longer a wild premise. It's a timeline question.

But those aren't the real objections. The real objection, the one you're holding right now whether or not you've put words to it, is this.

The people who own the machines will keep everything.

That's not paranoia. That's the default outcome. And most people who write about post scarcity futures skip straight past it with a wave of the hand, which is exactly why nobody believes them.

So let's not skip it. Let's start with the part that goes wrong first.

The economy breaks before it gets better

Here's what almost nobody discusses. This transition doesn't begin with abundance. It begins with deflation. And our entire financial system is structurally incapable of surviving deflation.

Modern economies don't just tolerate rising prices. They require them. Central banks target inflation deliberately. Debt is priced assuming nominal growth. Pensions, mortgages, government budgets, corporate balance sheets. All of it is built on the assumption that next year's numbers are bigger than this year's.

And what does technology do? It makes things cheaper. Relentlessly. That's the entire function of a productivity gain.

This isn't only about AI. AI, robotics, cheap compute, biotech, and energy are arriving together and compounding on each other. Together they represent the largest deflationary force in human history. Every one of them drives the cost of producing things toward zero.

Which means the thing we're most afraid of and the thing we most want are the same phenomenon.

Falling prices are the good news. Falling prices are what abundance looks like from inside a monetary system. The problem isn't that prices fall.

The problem is that debt doesn't.

Irving Fisher described this in the 1930s and it's still the most underrated mechanism in economics. Prices fall. Nominal debts stay exactly where they are. So the real burden of every debt quietly rises. Borrowers cut spending to service it. That spending was someone else's income, and now it's gone, so incomes fall. Which means less spending. Which means prices fall further. Which makes the debt heavier again.

Now layer on AI and automation. Exponential technology doesn't just make goods cheaper. It removes the incomes on the other side of the ledger. One person's spending is another person's income. So when AI removes the first person's income, it deletes the second person's income too. And the debt is still sitting there, untouched, indifferent.

Global debt is somewhere north of $300 trillion, sitting on top of a system that only functions if nominal values keep expanding.

The early tremors are already here, and the full break is closer than most people are ready for.

I want to be careful here, because there are two different kinds of deflation and people tend to blur them together.

The first is productivity deflation. Prices fall because we got better at making things. That's roughly what happened across much of the late 1800s in the United States. Prices fell for decades while real wages rose, and people got materially richer. Citizens participated in the upside. That's the good kind.

The second is debt collapse deflation. The 1930s. Japan after 1990. Demand craters, debt calcifies, the economy seizes.

Technological deflation is the first kind. But arriving at the same time as wage collapse and record debt levels, we get both at once. The good deflation triggers the bad one.

So the honest version of what I'm saying isn't that AI takes the jobs and then everything is wonderful. It's that there is a window, and it might be an ugly one, where wages have collapsed and prices haven't fallen far enough yet to compensate. Where output is soaring and incomes are gone. Where the machines are producing more than ever and fewer people can afford any of it.

And it won't arrive evenly, which makes it worse. Some industries will hollow out in a handful of years while others barely move. Customer support, translation, basic coding, paralegal work, entry level analysis. Those are already going. Anything requiring hands in unpredictable physical environments takes longer. So you get a strange, unstable period where one neighbor's entire profession has vanished and the neighbor across the street hasn't noticed anything yet. That gap is where the resentment lives, because the people who haven't been hit assume the people who have simply failed to adapt.

That's where the political chaos comes from. The scapegoating, the strongmen, the identity crises. Not because abundance failed. Because we arrived at abundance still running an operating system designed for scarcity, and never bothered to update it.

Strauss and Howe's Fourth Turning idea is useful here, not as prophecy but as a lens. Their argument is that institutional orders get torn down and rebuilt on roughly eighty to a hundred year cycles, and that the tearing down phase always feels terminal from inside it. That's the part worth keeping. Every generation mistakes the crisis phase for the end of the world.

Feudalism felt permanent. The gold standard felt permanent. The British Empire felt permanent. Every system feels eternal from the inside, right up until the day it isn't.

The forcing function

Here's the part that gives me genuine optimism, and it isn't idealism. It's arithmetic.

An economy that produces infinite goods and pays zero wages has no customers.

The owners of the machines are only wealthy if someone can buy what the machines make. Infinite production capacity with no demand isn't power. It's a warehouse full of widgets.

Henry Ford figured this out at the scale of one factory. Pay workers enough to buy the cars. Not generosity. Self interest with a longer time horizon.

The same logic applies at civilizational scale, and it's the pressure that eventually bends capital toward distribution. Not some redistribution scheme where we take from the rich and hand it to the poor, which is how the media frames every version of this conversation. And not because owners suddenly become kind. Because concentrated ownership of productive capacity in a demandless economy is worth very little, and business owners will figure that out the way business owners always figure things out. By watching their revenue disappear.

The incentives eventually point the right direction. The question is how much damage happens while we wait for people to read them, and whether we build the bridge before or after the crisis forces us to.

Ownership, not allowance

Everyone reaches for Universal Basic Income. I think UBI is the weak answer, and it's worth being clear about why.

UBI makes you a dependent. Your survival becomes a line item in someone else's budget, and line items get cut, means tested, indexed badly, or made conditional on behavior. And that last one should worry you more than it does. A monthly payment everyone depends on is the most powerful behavioral lever ever built. Behavioral economics on steroids. Attach conditions to it, tie it to compliance, tie it to speech, tie it to a social score, and you have a mechanism for control and censorship at a scale no government in history has had access to. Every recipient becomes a constituency to be managed.

It's a leash with a stipend attached.

The stronger answer, at least in the near term, is ownership.

If machines produce everything, the question was never how we redistribute the output. The question is who owns the machines.

And this isn't theoretical. It already works.

Norway is the proof this model works. Instead of spending its oil revenue, it invested it, and its sovereign fund now owns roughly one and a half percent of every publicly listed company on earth. Split across its five and a half million citizens, that's around $385,000 per person. Not a bank balance anyone can withdraw, but a collective asset the entire country owns together, one that now funds more than a quarter of the national budget.

Alaska made it personal. Since 1982, every resident has received an annual dividend from the state's oil wealth. It has survived four decades of political turnover, and researchers found no decline in people working. A dividend from something you own turns out to be politically untouchable in a way a government benefit never is.

Now apply that shape to automated capital.

Not a tax on robots. A sovereign equity stake in them.

As productive capacity shifts from human labor to automated systems, the public takes ownership positions in that capacity rather than skimming revenue from it. Citizens become shareholders in the automated economy and receive dividends as owners. Existing taxation on labor becomes less relevant every year anyway, because the thing it's levied on is disappearing.

There's a name for this direction that fits better than anything I've come up with. Universal Basic Equity, a term I first came across from Yat Siu. Not a universal income handed down from above. Universal ownership, built into the structure of the economy itself. The difference is the entire point.

The distinction between a stake and a benefit matters more than it sounds. A benefit is something you receive, and it can be revoked in a bad election. Ownership is something you hold. One creates dependence. The other creates sovereignty. If you're going to build a bridge across this transition, build the one that doesn't require anyone's permission to keep standing.

Is this politically easy? Obviously not. Every entrenched interest fights it. But it isn't utopian either. It's a boring, functioning model that two governments already run, and the pressure to adopt something like it rises with every quarter that productivity climbs while employment doesn't.

And here's what I find genuinely elegant about it. Dividends are the bridge, not the destination. They're money, and they matter enormously, right up until the goods they purchase cost almost nothing. Then they quietly stop mattering.

Money doesn't get abolished. It gets outlived.

The real constraint was never human time

There's a physical floor under all of this, and it deserves to be said plainly.

All production is energy transformation. That's not a metaphor. Growing food, building houses, moving goods, running computation. Every one of them is energy converted into a different arrangement of matter.

Human labor is energy conversion too. Calories in, work out, capped at roughly a hundred watts sustained. That's the entire engine. Every cathedral, every pyramid, every mile of railroad was built by chaining together enough hundred watt biological machines for long enough.

Machines convert energy at scale and, unlike us, they scale without a biological ceiling, as long as you keep feeding them joules.

So under full automation the binding constraint on civilization stops being human time. It becomes energy.

Which means this entire thesis rests on one question. Does energy become abundant?

I think the incentives make it close to inevitable. Once human labor stops being an input cost, energy becomes the only remaining input cost. Everything else is downstream of it. Which means whoever controls automated production has overwhelming financial pressure to drive energy toward zero, because energy is the last line on the balance sheet. That's a stronger force than any climate policy or subsidy has ever been, and it points in the same direction.

The trend is already running. Solar costs have fallen by orders of magnitude over the last few decades and are still falling. Storage is following behind it. Elon Musk has been making a version of this argument for years, that solar plus batteries is the answer and that the real constraint is manufacturing and deployment speed rather than physics. Advanced nuclear sits behind that. Fusion sits behind that.

But it isn't automatic, and I don't want to pretend it is. Cheap energy still requires enormous physical buildout. Mining, manufacturing, grid capacity, permitting, land. Those take real time, and none of them are solved by intelligence alone.

If energy doesn't become abundant, none of this works. You don't get post scarcity. You get a new aristocracy of whoever controls the joules. Feudalism with better hardware.

So let me say it precisely. We are not eliminating scarcity. We're relocating the constraint. Away from human time, which is hard capped, non transferable, and painfully finite, toward energy, which has a ceiling higher than anything our species has ever operated against.

That's not the end of limits. It's a limit so far away it stops governing daily life.

What money loses

Now back to the question I dodged earlier.

If machines do everything and energy is abundant, does money disappear?

I think eventually, yes. But not the way people picture it. Nobody bans it. No decree, no revolution. It loses its referent.

Money's defining property was never that it allocates scarce goods. Plenty of things allocate scarce goods. Money's defining property is that it's storable, transferable, and convertible into control over other people's time.

That last one is the whole game. Money is a claim on human labor.

When no human labor is required, the claim has nothing left to claim.

We've done this before, at smaller scale, and it was so undramatic that nobody noticed. Water used to be carried and sold by the bucket. It was a real profession. In 1780s Paris, thousands of water carriers made a living hauling buckets from public fountains up apartment stairs, thirty deliveries a day, charging by the floor. Then pipes arrived and the profession simply ceased to exist. Nobody legislated it away.

Roads were the same. At their peak in the 1830s, over a thousand British turnpike trusts operated around thirty thousand miles of road with almost eight thousand toll gates. Paying per mile was completely normal. The trusts were dissolved, the roads stayed, and now you drive on them without thinking about it. In the United States, the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1916 barred tolls on any highway receiving federal money and that was more or less the end of it.

Neither of those was abolished by ideology. They were made obsolete by technology. Pipes replaced the carrier. Modern roads and rail replaced the toll gate. Once the new technology was adopted, charging for the old thing simply stopped making sense, and the tolls faded without anyone needing to ban them.

Food, housing, transport, medicine, energy, and education could follow the same path, one at a time, as the cost of producing them approaches zero. Not by decree. Because charging for them stops being worth the trouble.

Who gets the house on Miami Beach

This is the objection people treat as a knockout blow, and I used to think it was the weak point in the whole idea.

Some things stay genuinely scarce no matter how much intelligence you throw at them. Beachfront land. Original artworks. A specific person's attention. Being in a particular place at a particular moment. No amount of AI manufactures a second Malibu.

So the question comes fast. If money's gone, who gets the beach house?

Most people answer by proposing a mechanism. A lottery. A rotation. A waitlist. I've never found any of those satisfying, and I don't think the mechanism is the interesting part.

Because I think the question itself contains a hidden assumption, and once you see it, the whole objection changes shape.

Right now, money is a universal converter. One score, every game. If you win at money you don't just win at housing. You win at healthcare. Legal outcomes. Your kids' education. Political access. How long you live. An advantage in one domain converts directly into advantage in every other domain, because everything is priced in the same units.

That's what actually makes scarcity feel unjust. Not that beachfront exists and is limited. It's that whoever gets the beachfront also gets the better surgeon.

Now strip out the survival goods. Suppose food, housing, healthcare, transport, education, and energy have all de-priced toward zero. What happens to the beach house?

It stays scarce. But the scarcity stops leaking.

Whoever ends up with it gets a house near water. Their child doesn't get into a better school because of it. They don't get a better doctor. They can't convert it into political influence, and most importantly they can't use it to command anyone's time.

Think about front row concert seats. Genuinely scarce. Someone else gets them and you don't, and nobody calls that a civilizational injustice. Why not? Because sitting front row doesn't also buy you a better cardiologist. The scarcity is contained.

That's the shift. Scarcity goes from general to local.

And once it's local, the question stops being a moral crisis about justice and becomes a logistics problem. Logistics problems have boring answers, and boring answers are fine. I don't need to name the mechanism, because once the stakes collapse, almost any reasonable mechanism will work.

Which brings me to another objection people raise constantly. What about inheritance? You'd still pass your house to your kids. Objects can be inherited, and they should be. What ends is the inheritance of claims on other people's labor. Today, inherited wealth is inherited command over human lives, and that's a very different thing from inheriting a building.

So the honest position is this. Scarcity doesn't disappear. Humans will still compete over the things that stay rare, the way we always have, and for most of human history the currency of that competition wasn't money at all. Status doesn't vanish. It just stops being denominated in survival.

What ends is scarcity in one domain determining your outcomes in all the others. That's not the elimination of scarcity. It's the separation of scarcity from human subjugation.

Which is the thing actually worth wanting.

The part where this could go badly

I want to be careful here, because the failure mode of this entire essay is sounding naive.

The risk isn't that the machines take over. That's the science fiction version, and it distracts from something more mundane and more likely.

The real risk is that abundance arrives and access to it gets gated.

A world capable of producing everything, with a paywall around it. Infinite supply, artificial scarcity, enforced by whoever owns the means of production and has no remaining need for the rest of us. Not as workers. Not as soldiers. Not even as customers, if they're producing for each other.

Technology determines whether abundance is possible. Politics determines whether it's shared. Those are two entirely different problems, and only the first one solves itself.

That's why the ownership question isn't a policy detail. It's the whole fork in the road. Everything optimistic in this essay sits downstream of it, and there is nothing automatic about getting it right.

I'm not predicting the good version. I'm saying it's available, and that we're currently sleepwalking past the decision that determines which one we get.

Who do we become

Which brings me back to the objection people raise before any of the others.

If nobody works, where does meaning come from?

I think that question is more revealing than the people asking it realize. Because underneath it sits an assumption so deep we've stopped seeing it. That human worth is produced by economic output.

For nearly all of human history, to survive was to work. So work became identity. Identity became meaning. And meaning became tied to economic output.

We've held those together so long that we've mistaken them for the same thing.

I reject the idea that humans would lose meaning if jobs disappeared. Humans are meaning making machines. We generate it from relationships, art, exploration, philosophy, competition, curiosity, and learning. Most of all we generate it from experiences that produce emotion. We were doing this for tens of thousands of years before anyone drew an org chart.

And go back to where we started. A hundred people, $100 million each. Almost none stay in the same job.

That tells you something we usually avoid saying out loud. Most people aren't working primarily for meaning. They're working because survival requires it. Meaning gets attached to the structure afterward, because we're built to find meaning in whatever we're already doing.

But some people would keep going. Genuinely. That matters and I don't want to flatten it. For some people their work is the meaning, and they'd continue without a dollar attached. Artists would still make art. Builders would still build. Scientists would still push at the edge of what's known. Entrepreneurs would still find problems and attack them.

Creativity is one of the most human things there is.

The difference isn't whether people do things. It's whether they chose them.

The end of one phase

Maybe humanity has spent its entire existence optimizing for survival, and we're approaching the first moment where we could optimize for something else.

Maybe we've never actually seen what humans look like when survival isn't the primary game. Every civilization we've built, every philosophy we've written, every structure of identity we've inherited was designed by people whose baseline condition was scarcity. We have no idea what we are without it.

The transition will be disruptive. Likely more disruptive than anything in living memory. There will be economic dislocation, identity crises, political instability, and a stretch of years where it genuinely looks like the pessimists were right.

But a painful transition doesn't mean a bad destination. Most people alive today couldn't survive the world their great grandparents considered normal, and wouldn't want to. But we adapt. It's the single most reliable thing about us.

So maybe the future where AI takes every job isn't the collapse of humanity.

Maybe it's the end of one phase of civilization and the beginning of another. A phase where people spend their time creating, learning, building, exploring, connecting, thinking, and being present. Not because they're forced to. Because they want to. Because they choose to.

Honestly? That sounds like a world I'd rather live in.

I could be wrong about all of this. Wrong about the timeline, wrong about the mechanism, wrong about which direction the politics break. That's fine. These are theses to be tested, not certainties to defend.

But I think it's worth considering that the future we're most afraid of might be the one that frees us.

And if some part of you has been resisting this entire essay, if a world without money feels less like a possibility and more like a category error, I understand. A fish can't see water. It has spent its whole life inside it, so the water isn't an environment. It's reality itself. Money is our water. Every one of us was born inside it and has never lived a single day outside it. Of course it's hard to imagine the world without it. But that difficulty was never evidence the idea is wrong. It's evidence of how deep we're in.

Because the thesis underneath this whole essay is simple. If machines do all the jobs, humans no longer need money. The hard part was never the economics. The hard part is what comes after. Deciding how we actually want to spend our time, and building a shared vision of the future worth spending it in.

And maybe the real question was never what humans will do when AI takes the jobs.

Maybe the real question is this.

Who do we become when survival is no longer the primary game?