I'm worried about where things are going
In a Nutshell
AI and automation are racing toward a fully automated economy that will render most humans economically useless and structurally powerless. This creates an overdetermined path to technofeudalism, where capital owners control production with AI and robotics while treating the rest of the population as redundant biomass. The speaker warns that without collective action now, humans will lose their remaining leverage and face a future of surveillance, exclusion, and irrelevance.
These notes were generated by AI and may contain inaccuracies.
The speaker opens with bad news and worse news: society is heading for technofeudalism, an outcome described as overdetermined or inevitable. Noah Harari has popularized the term "useless class," referring to the point at which AI outstrips human intelligence, rendering anyone whose livelihood depends on intelligence economically useless forever.
In online and social media circles, the term is darker: "permanent underclass," often framed as "prepare to be a member" or "you have a year or two to escape." Both terms are considered too generous because they imply civic standing that may not exist. History shows disempowered, marginalized, and disenfranchised people whose treatment was far worse than any "class" label suggests.
Chinese peasants under corvée labor systems were forced into service and died in large numbers building ancient China's mega projects such as canals and the Great Wall. Their service was not permanent slavery but was forced and often lethal. China could afford to waste lives because fertile river valleys produced an annual crop of humans treated as a renewable, disposable resource. Mortality rates on these projects were often above 50%. In a fully automated economy with robotic soldiers and AI agents, human bodies become a net negative to the economic system.
The Nazis used the term "useless eater," originally applied to disabled people, which the speaker finds more apt than "class" terminology for describing how most humans will be treated.
The speaker was initially resistant to this worldview until researching it for the next book. Enlightenment-era ideas of natural rights are described as legal fictions. The grandiose language of the Enlightenment and romantic thinkers came after bloodshed had already occurred. Events like the American Revolution and Glorious Revolution are remembered proudly but were bloody affairs. Wealthy thinkers wrote elegant language afterward to justify the new order.
The next book centers on a "realist theory of rights." All human rights and dignity have been secured through coercive force—strikes, revolts, or mass withdrawal. Arguments about divine rights serve mainly as shelling points for rallying, but coercive extraction of concessions is what actually works.
Rather than using Nazi terminology, the speaker proposes the term redundant biomass for how most humans will be treated under a fully automated regime.
The darkest scenario described is a self-sealed system in which capital owners secure all production—from mines and farms to luxury goods—using AI and robotic security, monitor the rest of the population with automated surveillance, and simply wall them off.
The speaker once dismissed such ideas as too conspiratorial and impossible under democracy. After examining the historical record, the speaker no longer relies on the goodwill of power. The British Empire allowed millions of Bengalis to starve because the food was wanted for other purposes and wrote off the labor loss as a temporary shortage—an act by a so-called civilized people.
At a Duke University talk, the speaker warned that human nature remains dangerous. A student claimed society has evolved beyond such behavior, but the response was that evolution is not that fast and human nature reasserts itself under pressure. Westerners living in stable, safe environments for generations easily forget how humans can behave when stakes are high.
Several powerful trends pull in the same direction. The first is geostrategic competition between the US and China—Cold War 2.0—which guarantees AI, robotics, and automation will remain first-class political and capital priorities for decades. In that timeframe, automation will surpass all human capabilities.
The second force is capitalism and neoliberalism. The data center and AI buildout is the largest private mega project in human history. By 2030, trillions will have been spent on AI infrastructure, eclipsing every previous mega project, public or private. The Apollo program and Manhattan project have already been surpassed.
The third force is rational economic decisions combined with creative destruction. Every business, household, and government chooses the cheaper option. AI and robotic goods and services will be significantly cheaper, better, and faster. Multiplied across 340 million Americans, millions of businesses, and 200 nations, this creates an attractor state: a maximally automated economy covering all production and military functions. Humans are slow, dumb, and expensive—the weakest link in technological systems.
The speaker identifies as a techno-optimist and techno-progressive but also a structural realist who takes incentive structures, attractor states, and macro trends seriously. Signs of technofeudalism are already visible: the YouTube channel was demonetized by Google (the "feudal lord") over an arbitrary policy violation, eliminating more than a quarter of income. The appeal process is automated and reviewed by a non-English-speaking worker checking boxes. Tech figures claim the market will resolve issues.
Full automation has the potential to be beautiful: fully automated cancer research, space exploration, environmental rehabilitation, solar farms that build themselves, and schools that solve Bloom's two-sigma problem. Automation can liberate people from drudgery and create abundance.
The same automation that liberates also renders humans economically, structurally, and politically irrelevant. The book Labor Zero examines the economic and household income questions of the post-labor world and is scheduled for launch in July or August. The next book will address civics, power, and governance in a post-labor world.
The outlook is grim, but a brighter path remains possible. Capital owners are still dependent on human labor for now, giving people a collective veto through the ability to halt all production. However, that veto power is being lost inch by inch to automation.
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