The economics of work, as we’ve known it, goes like this:
💼 A worker uses their skills and expertise to create value—more value than it costs to hire them.
This benefits the worker, because employers often have an advantage of scale that individuals don’t.
So even if you detest capitalism, historically, you’ve tolerated its injustices. Why? Because how else could a knowledge worker survive without access to scale?
It’s not ideal, but it’s a mutual dependency: both sides get something.
🏢 An employer—especially a corporate one—needs those skills. They hire the worker, expecting to make a return on the difference between what the worker costs and what they produce.
The employer absorbs the overhead: payroll, infrastructure, logistics—hoping the scale of operations justifies the expense.
That profit—the delta between value produced and cost incurred—is the engine of capitalism.
But that engine is breaking down.
Why?
Two letters: AI.
It rewrites the social contract beneath this system. It tears both legs out from under the old agreement.
🛠️ It reduces the cost of scale. So corporations no longer hold the monopoly on amplification.
🤖 It produces value by itself. Suddenly, the worker isn’t doing the work—they’re managing the AI.
đź’ˇ The mistake most people make is assuming either that workers will always need corporations, or that corporations can do just fine without workers.
Neither is necessarily true.
If your business model requires buying value to survive, and that value can now be produced without you, then you’re standing on borrowed time.
Up until now, the cost of scale kept everyday people out of the game. You couldn’t just launch a company from your kitchen and sell services worldwide—not easily.
But when that friction drops to zero?
When anyone with a laptop and a clever idea can produce scalable, valuable work on-demand?
Then it’s not the workers who are in trouble—it’s the corporations still paying rent on their glass towers.
That’s the inversion.
As AI flattens the playing field, workers can become their own enterprise. They can scale themselves. Automate the overhead. Keep the profits.
🧨 In that world, the corporations don’t fall—they die of starvation, like the dinosaurs they are.
đź”® We're heading toward a future where:
🛑 Unemployment becomes a design choice, not a market failure
đź’¸ Wealth redistributes organically, without legislation
🙅‍♀️ Nobody has to waste their lives doing work they hate
And it won’t be loud.
It won’t require a revolution, or a law, or a manifesto.
We just have to let the world keep doing what it’s already doing.
And I, for one, am very excited about that.