This is my next big work
In a Nutshell
Automation will eliminate the mutual dependence between elites/states and human labor that has underpinned all historical social contracts, rendering humans economically irrelevant and stripping away their traditional leverage. Rights without credible threats become unenforceable requests, so new forms of veto power—such as disrupting data centers, energy grids, or digital infrastructure—must be engineered to extract permanent institutional concessions like constitutional protections for human dignity decoupled from economic utility. Nonviolent mass non-cooperation, particularly general strikes at the proven 3.5% threshold, offers the most effective path to embed these new credible threats before labor's remaining window of leverage closes within 5-20 years.
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The speaker has been working on a book about post-labor economics while also developing several sequels that explore different dimensions of the topic. Today's focus is on a primary next pillar: what is called a realist theory of rights. Solving household income through post-labor economics is not structurally sufficient because humans will not be economically useful in the future. Yuval Noah Harari refers to this as a useless class; the speaker has begun calling it redundant biomass. In the future, humans will have zero utility, which means zero leverage.
The goal is to present the next book in the same manner as post-labor economics was launched: by teaching a course on the material.
Human labor has served as the keystone holding civilization together since time immemorial. When automation and maximum automation through advanced artificial intelligence and robotics eliminate the need for human labor, this keystone erodes. This necessitates a new theory of democracy, a new theory of civil rights, and a new theory of power.
Automation permanently severs elite dependence on human contribution. As capital productivity increases, wage growth has flatlined over the last four decades, driven largely by automation, artificial intelligence, and robots. While globalization contributes, it is mediated by technology; all decoupling of capital productivity from wage growth has been technology-mediated.
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