The content explores a potential dystopian future driven by rapid AI advancement, where widespread job displacement leads to extreme economic inequality and societal collapse, driven by corporate profit motives and the inherent nature of AI development.
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Headline after headline is about yet
another company laying off thousands of
workers due to AI. If you're wondering
what signs to look for to tell if you're
about to be laid off, I'm going to
explain step by step how exactly AI
could take your job. This video is a
scenario based on the intelligence
curse, a deeply researched and widely
circulating report in the AI industry.
The Federal Reserve chairman Jerome
Powell says the AI hiring apocalypse is
real. Job creation is pretty close to
zero. Let's imagine you're the CEO of a
firm with a thousand employees, most of
whom are junior or entry- level. A new
AI company approaches you with a pitch.
An AI [music] agent that can do the work
of a junior employee for 1/5if of the
cost. The more aggressive firms in your
sector immediately fire most junior
employees, but you're cautious. You're
skeptical that this new AI can replace
humans, so you treat it as a tool.
Instead of outright replacing [music]
humans, everything the AIs do is subject
to human approval. But within months,
the AI agents are outperforming most of
your human employees. This comes as a
shock to you. But the experts aren't
surprised. From 2019 to 2025, the length
of tasks AIs [music] could perform
doubled every 7 months. This is just the
trend continuing. And here's the thing,
you might feel uneasy with these
developments. But you can't get out of
this situation because the more that
your employees rely on the AI tool, the
faster and better their work becomes. In
fact, your top performers are now the
ones who let the AI do everything before
clicking approve. For basic tasks,
humans in the loop aren't improving the
work. They're slowing it down. And if
you can see that, so can your board.
Every day, more and more AIs join the
workforce. The board is happy with the
extra productivity, but not with the
payroll. They have a question. Why
aren't you firing the unproductive human
employees? You argue to keep them on
humanitarian grounds. You don't want
your workers to be replaced by AI. The
board isn't convinced, but you warned
them that mass firings would be bad PR
for the company, and that is enough to
get the board off your back for now. End
of quarter, your earnings are up, but
your competitors, the ones who replaced
humans entirely, have reported even
higher earnings at a fraction of your
costs. In any other economy, your
results would be a win. But here, you're
losing market share, and your stock
price takes a massive hit. So, the board
delivers an ultimatum. Fire the
unproductive junior employees or we'll
replace you with a new ruthless CEO who
will replace all of your junior staff
with AI. You know that you can't do any
good if you get fired. So, saving some
jobs is better than saving no jobs. So,
you compromise, firing half your junior
staff. You hang on to your own role and
convince yourself that maybe someday, if
the board allows it, you'll be able to
hire all your old staff back. After all,
no one else is hiring them, so they'll
still be on the job market. But AI
progress doesn't slow down. At this
point, your managers are managing more
AIs than humans. And every month, the AI
agents improve, doing more and more
work, while the human employees remain
[music] stagnant. AI has set a new
standard that all junior human employees
are failing to live up to. So, the board
wants you to fire all of them. You offer
a compromise. All junior employees will
be put on a performance improvement
plan, giving them one last chance to
prove their worth to the company and to
prove that they can do the work that's
just as good as AI. A month later, a
tiny handful of exceptional junior
employees who have proven their worth
are promoted to management, but over 90%
of them are fired. One of them is Alice.
She begins searching for a new job, but
finds that no one is hiring. All other
firms in the sector are laying off staff
as quickly as they can get away with.
From her kitchen table, Alice scrolls
through the headlines. [music] GDP is
climbing. The stock market is booming
under the new productivity gains from
AI. And yet, unemployment rates are
approaching 12%. Worse than any point
since the Great Depression. She's just
part of the statistic. And it's about to
get worse. The new generation of AI
agents doesn't just intend to replace
the junior staff. It comes for the
managers. These systems can coordinate
entire teams of AIS, track every
decision in real time, and optimize
workflows with a precision no human
manager can match. All at a fraction of
the cost. When you look at your ORC
chart, it's AIS managing AIS, and the
numbers prove it works. At your next
quarterly performance review, the
numbers are better than ever, but the
board is furious. To them, the results
only confirm what they've been saying.
Human managers can't compete. Your
reluctance to cut them loose looks like
weakness. Again, you offer a compromise.
All human managers are now on a
performance improvement plan. Prove you
can be as good as an AI or lose your job
for failing to meet standards. A month
later, 90% of your human managers are
gone. At this point, unemployment has
passed 15%, [music] rapidly approaching
20%, with job loss numbers five times
worse than the Great Recession. Yet, the
stock market keeps rising thanks to AI
field productivity. For Alice, now 6
months into her failed job hunt, the
message is clear. No one's coming to
save her. So, she decides to fight back.
She joins rallies, writes opeds, and
throws her voice behind one big idea:
UBI, a universal basic income that would
guarantee every citizen $1,000 a month.
It sounds like hope, but the backlash is
immediate. Critics point out that $1,000
per month for every citizen would eat up
twothirds of the budget, sending the
country further into debt while
rewarding people for not working. Some
economists take Alice's side, offering
justifications for UBI. They say the
increased tax revenue from GDP growth
will cover it and inflation will
effectively reduce the national debt.
But the debate ends when the US
administration's AISAR weighs in. His
verdict is blunt. UBI is a utopian
fantasy and the administration will veto
any bill proposing it. Alice is
devastated, but no one is surprised. The
AISAR's comments perfectly echo what he
said back in June 2025. The left
envisions a posteconomic order in which
people stop working and instead receive
government benefits. In other words,
everyone on welfare. This is their
fantasy. It's not going to happen. For
Alice, the fight feels over. For AI,
it's just [music] beginning. The same
month the UBI bill dies, AI clears its
next milestone. In 2025, it could handle
tasks that took hours. Now the newest
generation can run monthsl long projects
without any human input or oversight.
The board has seen AI replace and
surpass all junior level employees, all
middle managers, all senior managers.
Now all that's left is the executives in
the seauite. They stop short of firing
all of you outright, leaving you on the
org chart in name only. Every day you
participate in the humiliating ritual of
coming to the office to review the AI's
work. And each day with increasing
horror, you realize that the AI is doing
a better job than you could ever
possibly hope to. After all, how could
it not? The AI has more knowledge than
you. It has more training than you. And
because the AI CEO can monitor every
single decision made within the company
with perfect accuracy, it has insight
into operations that no human ever could
match. Unemployment smashes through 25%,
[music] breaking every historical
record, even the worst days of the Great
Depression. On the same day that the S&P
500 hits a new all-time high with record
stock [music] growth,
Ellis's landlord is taking her to court
to evict her family from the house she's
called home for the past decade. So, she
jumps on a bus to Washington DC and
joins a 100,000 people swarming the
National Mall, chanting, "Humans first!"
and waving UBI banners. But you wouldn't
know it from the news. TV networks
barely mention it. On social platforms,
live stream links vanish from feeds
under the guise of violence prevention
and misinformation. The same censorship
playbook, authoritarian states perfected
years ago in the pre-ai era. America,
[music] the world's oldest democracy,
claims to still have free speech, but
the online platforms that control the
spread of information silence the
protest. Turnout at the next [music]
rally plummets. Families keep losing
jobs. healthcare and homes, but the
story almost fades from public view.
Alice can't believe what she's seeing,
but when she tries to talk to her
neighbors, they brush her off. Keep up
with the job search. Sometimes the job
market is hard. Half the people she
talks to refuse to believe her when she
says that this [music] time it's
different. Alice then realizes something
that has always been true. People's
politics aren't driven by numbers,
they're driven by vibes. And the vibes
during Alice's most recent protest are
all about the breakup between a pop star
and her star athlete boyfriend with
millions of posts arguing over who's to
blame. As if that mattered more than the
collapse of the job market. And while
the public obsesses over celebrity
drama, the real drama is unfolding in
the boardroom and it's about to land
squarely on your desk. You're still the
CEO technically, but the board calls you
in to confirm what you've already
suspected. The AI is doing your job
better than you ever could. Your company
is now run by an AI CEO. It makes every
decision, flawlessly executes them,
monitors every part of the business with
perfect precision, and works 24/7
without pause. It has beaten every
target the board set. You're only human,
and that makes you obsolete. The stock
market keeps climbing, but only AI
companies selling to other AI companies
are breaking records. The rest, the ones
selling food, clothing, or anything
meant for humans, are drying up. With
25% unemployment and rising poverty,
there's simply less [music] profit in
selling to humans. Politicians take
note. Most of the government's tax
revenue, and most of their campaign
donations are coming from AI firms and
their shareholders, so the AI economy
that funds them becomes their main
constituency. In the years to come,
public schools crumble. With no need to
prepare a new generation for the
workforce, why should public schools be
anything more than glorified daycare?
Instead of reading and math classes,
kids now spend all day watching AI
generated entertainment served by a
screen that's cheaper than a teacher
with an education degree. The few
remaining universities are exclusivemies
for the children of elites, hearkening
back to the pre-industrial days of the
18th century when less than 1% of people
received a university education. And
with AI driving all innovation and
productivity, upward mobility has now
been completely eliminated. The only
wealthy people left are those who
acquired their wealth prior to the AI
takeover of the economy or those who
inherited it.
This scenario might seem far-fetched,
but it doesn't take [music] much for
this dystopia to become a reality. For
this scenario to work, you only [music]
have to believe in a few things. AI will
continue improving up to and past the
point of human intelligence.
Running a human level AI will eventually
be cheaper than paying a human for the
same job.
Private companies exist to maximize
profit and when given the chance will
replace human employees with AI. Even
the firms that initially resist will
eventually be forced by competitive
pressure to replace humans with AI.
The media will be or is already largely
controlled by corporations that have the
mechanisms to throttle the spread of
ideas that they see as destabilizing.
The government is also driven by
incentives. And in a world where most
tax revenue comes from AI firms, it will
largely cater to the interests of AI. Do
any of those sound implausible to you in
the next 5 years? Think about how
different the world was 5 years ago
before the emergence of AI tools like
chatbt. You might argue, well, we've
been here before. Every wave of
disruptive technology has always
replaced some jobs, but people have
always found some new ones. And you'd be
right. AI isn't the first time we've
seen a new technology threaten to
replace human labor. But AI is unique
because the companies building it have
[music] explicitly made it their goal to
replace all human labor. Open AI
literally made it part of their founding charter.
charter.
And to make matters [music] worse, AI
can accelerate the spread of the paradox
of plenty. When technology or resources
make a country richer while keeping most
of the citizens poorer by concentrating
wealth in the hands of a few individuals
and corporations, we've already seen it
with oil and minerals. Why is Venezuela,
owner of the world's largest oil
reserves, enduring near famine
conditions? Why is the Congo sitting on
trillions of dollars in mineral wealth
while its people are among the poorest
[music] in the world? Or look at
Nigeria, Africa's biggest oil producer
with an appalling poverty rate of 47%.
This is the resource [music] curse. Oil,
diamonds, and gold can make a country
rich on paper, yet individual citizens
can still go hungry. In fact, when a
country's wealth is more concentrated in
a single extractive industry, it becomes
a natural recipe for corruption. Whoever
owns the oil rigs or diamond mines has
all the money they need to buy off the
generals, judges, and media. But how can
we avoid this? The countries that
escaped the resource curse were the ones
that had human-driven industries, where
the wealth wasn't owned by a single
person and dug out of the ground, but
created by human labor.
Countries like Taiwan or South Korea
didn't have a natural resource jackpot.
The only way that these countries could
become richer and more powerful was by
investing in their people. Giving people
access to food, nutrition, and schools
so that they'd grow up to be more
productive citizens capable of designing
better smartphones, [music]
microchips, and entertainment. When your
biggest industries rely on human talent,
the humans have the bargaining power to
demand [music] better living conditions.
But now AI threatens to take that
leverage away. It could do what oil did
to countries like Venezuela and Russia,
concentrating power and wealth in the
hands of a small number of corrupt
oligarchs at the expense of everyone
else. A kind of wealth that benefits the
few while making everyone else poorer.
In a world where AI can do everyone's
job for less money, humans have no
leverage, no bargaining power to demand
a higher minimum wage. This is called
the intelligence curse.
We want a future where AI uplifts humans
without [music] replacing humans. So,
how do we prevent AI from replacing us?
What are the things we should let AI do?
And what are [music] the things we
shouldn't let it do?
We need to keep an eye on three [music]
things. Whether AI is intelligent,
whether it's autonomous, and whether
it's general. We can have a highly
intelligent AI that is good at only one
specific thing. Take Alphafold, the AI
that won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in
2024. It's good at one specific thing,
predicting protein structures. It takes
research that might have taken months or
years and accomplishes it in hours. It's
a massive scientific breakthrough, but
Alpha Fold is only good at one specific
thing. It helps medical research, and it
doesn't threaten humanity's future. We
can also have AIs that are intelligent
and autonomous. Look at self-driving
cars. Driving is a complex task that
requires an advanced AI. to safely
navigate the roads. And these cars are
also autonomous, but they don't have
general intelligence. A self-driving
Whimo car is only good at one thing,
driving. The part where AI becomes
dangerous is when it becomes general. A
general AI is good at everything. And
we're getting closer to seeing general
AI with LLMs and multimodal AIs like
cloth and GBT. An AI with general
intelligence could replace human workers
at practically every job, which again is
the goal that OpenAI openly admits to.
But the danger isn't just that the AI
will make humans irrelevant. A general
intelligence that's good at everything
could learn to improve itself or create
new AIs. It can become more and more
powerful exponentially until it [music]
becomes a super intelligence, far
smarter than even the smartest humans.
AI scientists are terrified that this is
not only possible but likely to happen.
Watch this video next to understand
[music] exactly how a super intelligent
AI takeover might happen based on a
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