Greater productivity, sure. To what end?
AI doesn’t just eliminate jobs. It removes whole layers of economic participation. Customer support, transcription, logistics, research, translation, design—fields that employed millions are vanishing beneath a wave of automation. It begins at the margins and accelerates inward.
The result isn’t just unemployment. It’s demand collapse. The unemployed don’t spend. The underemployed cut back. And as businesses lose customers, they automate more to survive—deepening the spiral.
This isn’t creative destruction. It’s economic strip-mining. The wealth created by AI accrues to those who already control capital, compute, and scale. The rest watch as both labor and relevance slip away.
Even reskilling is a mirage. AI evolves faster than humans retrain. Today’s hot job is tomorrow’s training data. By the time a worker adapts, the system has moved on.
Left unchecked, this creates a caste divide: a thin layer of elite technocrats and a vast population of economic dependents—useless to the system, except as data generators or content consumers.
No society survives long when the majority can no longer participate in production or decision-making.
The deeper risk isn’t job loss. It’s the unraveling of shared economic purpose.
