Today, let’s start with the wrong question.

Everyone keeps asking: “Will A.I. take our jobs?”

I get it. That question is terrifying because it’s personal. But it’s also incomplete.

There’s a better question than if A.I. will take jobs — because, spoiler: it will, and it’s already happening (you’re noticing the hiring slowdown, right? 2025 was the worst year for hiring since 2009, with the exception of COVID year 2020).

I don’t want to minimize the impact of A.I. taking jobs (it’s just beginning and it’s going to be enormously disruptive) AND there’s actually a bigger question lurking in the background, namely: What kind of economic system tries to eliminate human labor without replacing income… and still expects the world to keep functioning as-is?

I’m not hearing this talked about enough, so we’re going to talk about it today.

Here’s the crux of it: if A.I. works the way capital hopes it will, capitalism won’t break because A.I. fails. It’ll break because A.I. succeeds.

Why?

Because if you’re running a business, you can’t fire your customers and then expect them to buy your stuff.

The Loop That Holds Up The World

There’s a simple loop that runs the modern economy.

Labor → wages → income → consumption → revenue… and then back around again.

A company pays labor (that’s you) in wages which become your income. You have some left over so you buy things (consumption) which is another company’s revenue, which they use to pay their labor. Feels familiar, right?

In the way that modern life currently works, this loop is NOT optional. It’s what we might call “load-bearing” — it’s holding up the house. We break or pull out one part of the loop and things will NOT function the way they do now. Period.

Let’s call this The Loop That Holds Up The World.

For most of the last century, we’ve treated this Loop like a law of nature. 

It’s not.

There’s nothing natural about this Loop — it’s not a law of physics. It’s a system we built.

So when a technological innovation, like A.I., comes around, everything reorganizes.

Let’s talk about WHO gets reorganized first, this time.

Builders & Architects

As I mentioned back in the State Of A.I. episode from October, with A.I. the automation is coming for so-called “white collar” workers first. 

I want to take a moment to adjust my language. “Blue collar” versus “white collar” might roughly communicate what I mean, but it’s also a bit classist and has some undertones of elitism. 

So I’m going to shift my language to labels I suggested way back in my first book: “Builders” and “Architects.” As I mentioned then, I consider these categories to be equal in importance and different in method of contribution.

Architects are what we often call leaders and managers. They draw plans and create strategies. Their work is essential because without them, the wrong stuff might get built.

Builders are what we often call makers and creators. They do stuff. Turn ideas into real things. Their work is essential, because without them, nothing actually happens.

Throughout history, most big technological disruptions have generally hit Builders first. Architects were more insulated, not because they were more valuable as humans, but because their jobs were simply less “automatable.”

Most of our big shift tech innovations of the past few centuries have gone like this, where Builders take the brunt of the transitional pain.

You’ll hear folks talk about what’s happening now as some sort of second coming of the Industrial Revolution, but if we properly understand Builders and Architects and historical cycles, we notice that’s actually not right at all — because the Industrial Revolution replaced Builders, not Architects. 

This Is NOT Like The Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution mechanized execution. 

It also largely left meaning and legitimacy largely intact for Architects, because it created new elites faster than it destroyed old ones.

Architects stayed architects.

Managers stayed managers.

Priests stayed priests.

Was the Industrial Revolution painful, sometimes brutal, and totally transformative? Yes.

But it was NOT what we’re experiencing now, because it was not a legitimacy crisis for the Architect layer. This time it IS.

This IS Like The Printing Press

If there’s a historical analogue that actually holds up for A.I., it’s not the cotton gin or the factory or the assembly line. 

It’s the printing press. 

Why? Because it shattered the containers around who was allowed to THINK.

Before the printing press, the Architects — priests, scholars, political elites — were interpreters of reality. Truth had a chain of custody. Thinking, explaining, and legitimizing the world were elite functions precisely because those things were hard to reproduce.

The printing press collapsed that scarcity. 

Suddenly, ideas could move without permission. 

Interpretation escaped the cathedral. 

Competing worldviews spread. 

And for maybe the first time, Architects faced an existential crisis: If anyone can read, write, and interpret… what exactly am I for? 

The chaos that followed wasn’t just economic — it was psychological, spiritual, existential.

Then we had a bunch of innovations that hit Builders over and over and over.

But now, A.I. is going to trigger another crisis for Architects, for maybe only the second time, in the very near future.

When cognition becomes cheap, people whose identity and status are built on being the “ones who know” will be forced to confront the same terrifying question as the priests of yore: What exactly am I for? 

And while Architects aren’t the majority of the workforce by numbers, they do generate most of the taxable income the system depends on, and they have disproportionate access to leadership roles, institutions, and systems.

Last time, this reckoning literally took centuries. 

This time, we’re going to try to metabolize something philosophically similar, but on a much larger scale (there’s almost 8 billion more humans on earth now than there was 500 years ago), and I suspect we’re going to attempt to make this transition in probably less than a decade.

So this is the first challenge: this will be a deep identity crisis for the group that’s basically been untouchable for half a millennia.

Capitalism Does Not Guarantee Income

But remember where we started — A.I. isn’t just coming for the Architect’s identity, it’s also coming for their INCOME.

Here’s something we don’t really talk about: capitalism does not guarantee income. And it never has. Ever.

Markets are phenomenal at allocating resources through price. When something is scarce, markets are quite good at sorting out who can get that thing.

Markets are terrible at ensuring most people can afford to live.

The reason modern capitalism hasn’t already collapsed in the 20th century wasn’t because markets suddenly became humane. It’s because we wrapped markets in governance containers.

What do I mean by “governance containers?” 

Minimum wages. Child labor laws. Labor protections in general. Unions. Public education.

None of these came from markets.

All of these constrain markets.

Here’s the sentence that should make us shift in your seat a bit: what we know as the “middle class” was NOT a market-based outcome. 

It was a governance project.

Early industrial capitalism did exactly what our version of capitalism is doing now: generated incredible gains for a few while making huge swaths of the population slaves to Industry.

Eventually, governance structures were created to make sure people got paid, not because the Market’s heart suddenly grew three sizes, but because unpaid people just don’t stay peaceful.

But this only happened AFTER it destabilized our societies.

Strikes.

Riots.

Labor movements.

Revolutions.

Income as we know it didn’t appear because markets wanted it to. Income was forced into existence because, it turns out, systems collapse when people can’t freaking live.

That’s the historical backdrop we’ve conveniently forgotten. 

Income wasn’t really part of the package, it became a survival necessity.

Who Buys Your Stuff, Robots?

So, back to now.

Losing our jobs wouldn’t be so scary, of course, if we had another way to get income. The problem is most of us don’t. Our labor is what we trade to get to income. And this is true for most Builders and Architects alike.

As in all technological disruptions, capital is going to use A.I. to eliminate labor because labor is… inconvenient. 

I get it — we humans are dreadfully biological — but without labor people don’t have income which means they can’t participate in consumption… which means Capital is also automating itself out of relevance. Because this time, the goal of the technology is quite literally to do everything a human can do (this is probably the most generally accepted definition of AGI). 

We all see the problem, right? If no one has any money, who actually buys the stuff your robots make, Capital?

The strange irony here is that this happening wouldn’t actually be capitalism failing, it’d more be like capitalism completing its own logic — like the snake that kills itself by eating its own tail. 

It’s just an animal doing exactly what it was designed to do! (In this case: make more capital.)

So why doesn’t capital just… stop? Why keep feeding a creature that’s inevitably going to eat itself?

Because “income stability” is not priced into executive incentives. Whoops!

Margins are.

Market share is.

Stock price is.

System survival five years from now? Bummer… not on the dashboard.

It’s another “Don’t Look Up” moment — I know I keep referencing this movie, I really hope you’ve seen it!

Capital doesn’t concern itself with things like “collective survival.” It’s already concerned entirely with competitive advantage!

Markets correct prices, they do not preserve societies. Sorry! Capital is just not in that business!

Capitalism Is Not A Growth System

Here’s the deeper story underneath all of this, and it brings us back to The Loop.

As much as we’ve been told that it is, capitalism is not really a “growth” system. It’s a system that feeds on growth — it can only function while The Loop That Holds Up The World keeps spinning, and what keeps it spinning is continual growth. 

But continual growth only happens when there’s something continual to extract — here are the five most common ones: labor, energy, land, attention, or debt (which is extraction of your future labor).

For the last century+, it’s been completely understandable to confuse capitalism with growth because we had those five things in great abundance to extract from. 

When labor stops being cheap here, you can go to another part of the world. When people stop watching TV commercials you can capture them through an endless scroll on Facebook. When a 30-year mortgage doesn’t cut it, why not take a 50-year loan instead! (Did you hear about this 50-year loan idea last fall? Crazy.)

But doesn’t it feel like we’re reaching the natural limits of extraction?

Aren’t you tired of the endless extraction parade?

That exhaustion you feel isn’t personal. It’s systemic.

The Six Stages Of Panic

In a nutshell, here’s the problem:

In the very near future, A.I. will catalyze a massive identity crisis for a huge group of people while also devouring their income engine by pulling their labor (and therefore their income) out of The Loop That Holds Up The World. 

Oh, and also, these people also have disproportionate access to the way our systems function.

So, what comes next? If A.I. follows the same kind of reaction curve as we’ve seen in the past with something like the printing press, we should expect something like this:

1. Early Dismissal (“It’s just a tool”) ← been there, done that
2. This Is A Multiplier (“This multiplies my Architect power”) ← where we are now
3. The Panic Switch (“This is dangerous and must be regulated”)
4. Aggressive Rebranding (“Architects are essential to maintain order”)
5. Selective Protection (“We need to protect our high-status groups”)
6. Urgent Regulation (“This is responsible human oversight and for our safety”)

None of this will happen because Architects are inherently evil, but because power behaves predictably when its legitimacy is threatened.

We’ll know The Panic Switch has been flipped when A.I. stops being framed as a productivity tool and starts being framed as a threat to order.

That’s the signal.

And once that signal appears, the rest of the list is likely to follow very quickly.

So when exactly will the Panic Switch get flipped? 

Basically this is going to happen when A.I. starts sufficiently embarrassing the Architects.

What do I mean? It will be the quiet moments in office buildings you probably won’t see. When recommendations from a GPT start outperforming senior humans again and again. When boards notice that VPs and consultants and lawyers have stopped adding real value to the conversation. When leaders begin deferring to machines without announcing it.

Enough of these moments will birth an Architect legitimacy crisis.

One thing I don’t think will trigger elite panic? Layoffs.

Architects are likely to weather layoffs with a spirit of “it won’t happen to me” for a long time. I think they’ll only truly panic when their status erodes. When they feel their prestige weakening. When their identity — not just their income — is threatened.

Architects don’t fear tools they think make them stronger, they fear tools that make them look optional.

But I suspect many Architects will only notice the difference when it’s too late.

That’s the truly dangerous part.

Because by the time Architect panic kicks in, there’s a good chance income has already eroded, institutions are already strained, and social trust has already gotten thin. 

The real problem with this is that late-stage panic doesn’t produce elegant solutions. It produces blunt, harsh ones. It’ll likely be regulation by way of crisis, which probably means bailouts for some and “good luck” to everyone else.

That’s the pattern.

The Optimistic Rebellion

So what do we do with all this?

Honestly, I’ve felt… disturbed since I finished writing this a few days ago. Just because I think I’m right doesn’t mean I like these conclusions. And part of me is still wrestling with what the most constructive response to this is. 

As I think you know, I am obsessed with really just one question: How do we create the future we want? Obsessed! Frankly, I’m still processing how we do that in light of what I think is coming.

Side note: sometimes this feels like I’m narrating a sci-fi novel, not describing the actual near future. It’s surreal that this is happening.

But here’s one thing I can tell you with certainty: you and I, we’ll do this together. I’ll be here as we go, doing my best to make sense of what’s next.

For now, today, I do have a few thoughts about what we do when the “panic signals” start appearing.

When we start noticing these signals — the language shift, the rebranding of Architects as “essential,” the sudden urgency around control — here are three things that will actually matter. And I think they matter even now, before the panic signals begin… who knows, maybe our collective energy and conversations and action can shift this in a different direction!

First: keep the conversation focused on income.

Architects in power will desperately want to talk about re-skilling, new careers, and “jobs of the future.” That’s comforting… and mostly irrelevant. Jobs are a delivery mechanism for income. Income is the thing that keeps people housed, fed, and sane. Every time the conversation drifts toward identity and aspiration, pull it back to the simplest question on the table: how do people get money while this is shaking out? We can start asking this now.

Second: watch who gets protected and who doesn’t — and say it out loud.

When panic hits, protection will not be evenly distributed. Some groups will get carve-outs, exemptions, bailouts, and “moral cover” with narratives like “these are our new essential workers who will protect us from A.I.” Everyone else will just be told to adapt. The most powerful move isn’t outrage — it’s clarity. Quietly, persistently naming asymmetry before it becomes normal is one of the few things that actually changes outcomes. We can do this right now, too.

And third: don’t let panic become your operating system.

Transitions like this don’t just disrupt economies — they scramble our psychology. Fear pushes people toward speculation, scapegoating, and authoritarian shortcuts. Staying human under pressure isn’t passive, it’s stabilizing. For everyone around you. Slowing decisions, refusing zero-sum thinking, and keeping your moral frame intact is how we will avoid making our worst choices at exactly the wrong moment. We can practice this right now, too!

Right now, I think that’s the work.

Not “predicting” the future.

Not out-hustling the machine.

It’s noticing when fear starts making decisions — and refusing to let it be the smartest voice in the room. Speak up, stay calm, and be courageous, my friends. Together, maybe we can nudge this in a different direction!