When 99% of Humans Become Irrelevant
What happens to everyone else when the people who own the machines no longer need their work
I’ve been thinking about a future that sounds extreme, but if you keep following the logic of AI and robotics, I don’t think it’s that difficult to imagine.
Imagine that robots can eventually do basically everything humans can do.
They can build houses, manufacture electronics, mine resources, grow food, drive trucks, repair machines, build factories, write software, do research, and operate entire companies.
And not only can they do these things, they can build and maintain the machines that do them.
At that point, something very strange happens.
The people who own the AI, robots, factories, energy infrastructure and raw materials don’t really need most other people anymore.
They mostly need energy, materials and the infrastructure that allows their machines to keep operating.
And this is where I think things get really uncomfortable.
It’s not that humans become irrelevant.
It’s that
99% of humans could become irrelevant to the people who own the machines.
For most of history, even the richest people have depended on everyone else.
If you owned a huge factory, you still needed workers.
If you owned a mine, you needed miners.
If you owned farms, you needed farmers.
If you owned a company, you needed people to actually do the work.
Your money ultimately gave you access to other people’s labor.
But imagine removing that dependency completely.
Imagine owning an automated mine, automated factories, autonomous transportation, massive energy production and AI controlling everything.
The machines extract the materials.
Other machines manufacture the robots.
The robots maintain the factories.
AI coordinates everything.
And the whole system keeps expanding.
At that point, money starts to become a secondary thing.
The real asset is the machine that produces everything.
And it’s worth being precise about why.
Think about what money actually did for a rich person before.
It was never the point.
It was a claim on other people’s time.
A billion in a bank account was useful because it could be turned into engineers, builders, drivers, farmers, lawyers and factory workers.
It was a promise that strangers would do what you needed, because they needed the money back.
That is all money has ever been at that level. A way to convert numbers into human effort.
Now take the humans out of the exchange.
If your machines mine the ore, run the factories, build more machines, grow the food and write the software, then what are you actually buying?
You aren’t buying labor, because the labor is already yours.
You aren’t buying access to production, because you own the production.
What’s left worth having is energy, raw materials, land, and the machines themselves.
And once you own enough of those, money stops being power and becomes a scoreboard.
That’s the part I think people miss when they argue about billionaires.
Wealth today is a claim on a system that still needs people.
Take the people out of the system and wealth is no longer a claim on anything. It becomes the thing itself.
A rich person needed money because they needed us.
They wouldn’t need the money if they didn’t need us.
That’s what makes this different from previous technological revolutions.
We’ve always replaced some human work with machines, but there was always another job somewhere.
This could be different.
If machines eventually become capable of doing essentially all economically useful work, there may not be another job waiting for the people who lose theirs.
And then what happens to the other 99%?
But economically, they may no longer be necessary.
And I keep thinking about an analogy.
Now imagine that billions of people suddenly start living inside that farm.
From the perspective of the owner, those people aren’t workers.
They aren’t needed to produce anything.
They consume resources.
They occupy land.
They interfere with the automated system.
They demand access to what the farm produces.
They can also challenge the owner’s control over it.
From the owner’s perspective, they could start looking less like participants in the system and more like an intrusion into it.
That’s why the image of weeds keeps coming to my mind.
99% of humanity could become like weeds growing inside someone else’s automated farm.
Not because they are less human.
Not because they have suddenly become worthless as people.
Simply because the system no longer needs what they provide.
And that’s a very different kind of inequality.
Today, if you are poor, you can still sell your labor.
You can learn a skill.
You can start a company.
You can work for someone who owns the machines.
You have some economic leverage because the machines still need you.
But what happens when they don’t?
If the machines can do the work, maintain themselves and build more machines, then the leverage of human labor could disappear almost completely.
At that point, the most important question may no longer be who has the most money.
Because whoever controls those things controls the production of almost everything else.
And if productive capacity can reproduce itself, that power could become incredibly concentrated.
That’s the part of this future that interests me.
People often talk about AI taking jobs.
I think that’s too small a way of looking at it.
The much bigger question is what happens when 99% of humans are no longer economically necessary to the people who own the machines.
And I want to be clear about where I think the danger actually sits.
It isn’t the machines.
A system that can do everything is not a threat on its own. It has no interests. It doesn’t want the farm.
People talk about AI as if the risk is that it wakes up one morning and decides it doesn’t need us.
The more boring possibility is that it never decides anything, and a small number of people decide it for the rest of us.
The risk isn’t that AI stops needing humans.
It’s that the people who own it stop needing humans.
That is a very old problem wearing new hardware. Concentrated power, with no particular reason to care about the people it has power over.
AI is not the danger. The 1% who no longer need the other 99% might be.
At that point, we aren’t really talking about unemployment anymore.
We’re talking about a completely different relationship between humans, ownership and power.
And I don’t see an obvious reason why that relationship automatically remains the same one we have today.