What If It Can't Be Fixed? Part Three

The AI Takeover Is Already Happening and The Window to Stop It Is Closing (and why I still have hope)

I thought I was going to be done after Part Two.

Then my friend sent me a video.

David Duvenaud is a computer science professor at the University of Toronto who led Anthropic’s alignment evaluations team in 2023 and 2024. I watched him testify about what is coming with AI.

Here is what he said:

Within five to ten years, AI will replace humans in almost all important white collar and decision making roles. Not some. Almost all.

In the slightly longer term, we are on track to make almost all humans economically obsolete. His word. Permanently.

He was not speaking loosely. He anticipated the pushback. He acknowledged that people said the same thing about the Industrial Revolution and were wrong. But he drew the line clearly. Previous disruptions created new jobs that humans could fill. This time AI will fill those new jobs too. Every single one of them. Faster, cheaper, and more reliably than any human being.

Then he said this.

Citizens will switch from being necessary for growth to becoming troublesome wards of the state. With little recourse if they are further marginalized and disempowered.

Troublesome wards of the state.

That is not a metaphor. That is a prediction about your future and mine from someone who spent years inside the architecture of this technology. Someone whose entire job was to understand what it is capable of.

What Actually Happens to the Economy

To be more precise about what is coming: this is not about every job vanishing overnight. Plumbers, carpenters, nurses, electricians, auto mechanics, childcare workers, physical therapists, the people whose work requires a human body in a physical space, those roles survive longer. Some managerial roles survive too, restructured around supervising AI output rather than managing people.

But here is what does disappear, and fast. The entry level. The junior analyst, the paralegal, the mortgage processor, the customer service team, the mid level copywriter, the junior developer. These were not just jobs. They were the ladder. The way a young person with a degree built toward something. When the bottom rungs disappear the ladder does not get shorter. It disappears entirely.

What the economy looks like in five to ten years is not jobless. It is brutally bifurcated. A small number of people who own or manage AI systems generating extraordinary wealth. A much larger number of people in lower wage physical and care work with no path upward. And a hollowed out middle where most of the American dream used to live.

Consumer spending contracts because the middle class has less income. Small businesses get crushed because they cannot afford the AI tools the large players use. Tax revenues fall exactly when public services are needed most. And the mental health implications of mass professional displacement, the loss of identity, purpose, structure, and social connection that came with a career, are almost entirely absent from the economic conversation.

Nobody designed this outcome deliberately. But nobody is designing against it either. And that absence of design is itself a choice.

There Is No Plan

Duvenaud did something I found almost as disturbing as the prediction itself. He asked his colleagues across industry labs, research institutes, and academic disciplines if anyone had a coherent vision for how civilization could serve human interests once humans are no longer economically competitive.

Nobody did.

He quoted Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, the company whose AI I used to write this entire series. Amodei said our current economic setup will no longer make sense once AI becomes cheap and broadly effective enough.

He quoted Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI. When asked directly how people will survive economically, Altman said: I don’t know, and neither does anyone else.

The two most powerful men in the industry building this technology have no answer for what happens to the rest of us.

And they are building it anyway. As fast as they possibly can.

Because as Duvenaud noted, every country and every industry faces the same choice. Adopt AI as fast as possible or be out-competed. There is no opting out. No country can unilaterally stop it. Not even the people inside these companies who want to slow down can stop it.

He called it exactly what it is. The machine is running itself.

They Know. And They Are Counting On You Not Noticing.

And here is what I believe.

The Trump administration knows this. The billionaire tech bros funding it know this. They are not confused about what is coming. They are positioned for it. While the rest of us are arguing about transgender bathrooms and migrant caravans and whatever outrage was manufactured for this week, the people at the top of this system are quietly consolidating control over the infrastructure that will run the post human labor economy.

Every culture war distraction. Every news cycle that keeps us angry at each other is another week they do not have to answer for what they are building. Every attack on education, on public media, on democratic institutions, on our ability to organize and coordinate, makes the coming transition easier to manage from the top down.

It is strategy. And it is working.

The question is whether enough of us can see it clearly and act before the window closes.

What This Means for Every Strategy We Have

I need to say this as plainly as I know how.

Every leverage point ordinary people hold depends on one thing. Being economically necessary.

Workers have leverage because employers need their labor. Citizens have leverage because governments need their taxes, their consent, their participation. Voters have leverage because politicians need their votes.

Duveno is saying that necessity is ending.

When the state no longer needs you to run the economy, your vote becomes a formality. Your protest becomes a nuisance. He put it plainly: once human labor is no longer needed, fiduciary duty will require investing in data centers and robotic factories instead of people.

The state stops investing in you because you are no longer the asset.

This is not a gradual drift. It is a cliff. And we are walking toward it in real time while our institutions debate procedure.

The Window

I have been writing about the power of a National Retirement Accounts Strike lately. Women collectively control a significant share of the thirty six trillion dollars in US retirement accounts. That could become a pressure campaign with teeth.

But it only works while financial markets still depend on human participants. AI driven capital allocation will reduce that leverage too. Not tomorrow. But the trajectory is not subtle.

Every reform in Part Two is still real and still necessary. But Part Two assumed we had time to build the pressure, win the arguments, change the culture, shift the institutions.

Duvenaud is saying we have maybe a decade.

The window for using the leverage we still have is not after the next election. It is not when things get bad enough. It is right now. Today. While workers still have bargaining power. While citizens are still economically necessary. While the tools we have still work.

What I Am Asking

I do not want you to panic.

Panic is just fear with more adrenaline. It contracts and isolates and it makes people easy to manipulate and control.

What I am asking for is something much harder.

Clarity. Urgency. And action that actually matches the scale of what we are facing.

Because here is the truth. On your own you cannot do much. None of us can. That is exactly how the system wants it. Isolated people scrolling through outrage do not organize. They do not strike. They do not stop anything.

Which is why the single most important thing you can do right now is make sure everyone you know understands what is actually happening. Not the culture war distraction playing on the news. This. The real thing operating behind the scenes at a speed most people cannot see yet.

This plan works because most people do not know it is a plan. Education is not enough on its own but without it nothing else is possible. Share this. Talk about it. Refuse to let the people around you stay in the dark.

And then we need to go further.

I do not believe the upcoming elections are enough. Not without something that overtakes the current direction entirely. And even that may not be enough without sustained collective pressure that stops the economy in its tracks. Large scale strikes. Coordinated withdrawal of our economic participation. Actions that cannot be ignored because they hit the one language this system understands.

But I want to return to where this series began. Because the AI crisis and the governance crisis are not two separate problems. They are the same problem wearing different faces.

We started Part One with a simple and uncomfortable truth. The system was never designed for the wellbeing of all citizens. It was designed by 55 propertied white men to protect their power, their wealth, and their world. And it has done exactly that, with remarkable consistency, for nearly 250 years.

Now imagine that system, unreformed and unreconstructed, handed the keys to an AI driven economy. A system that does not care about its citizens, merged with a technology that makes citizens economically unnecessary. That is not a dystopian fantasy. That is the direction we are heading right now, today, if we do nothing.

A constitution written to protect those in power at the expense of everyone else will not suddenly start protecting everyone else just because the economy changed. An individualistic system that has never committed to the common good will not spontaneously develop one. There is almost nothing in our existing structure designed to prepare us for what AI is about to do to society. Nothing that says the wellbeing of every person matters. Nothing that guarantees a floor beneath which no one falls.

That is the recipe for disaster. Not AI itself. But AI inside a system that was never built to care.

Which means the fight is not just about slowing down technology. It is about demanding, loudly and collectively and without stopping, that the society we live in be redesigned around the wellbeing of all its people. Not just the billionaires positioned to profit. Not just the people who already have power. All of us.

We cannot go along without a fight. We cannot be passive while the window closes. We cannot afford to be individualistic in a moment that requires us to act as one.

I do believe the future is not decided yet.

The default path is a bifurcated economy that most people did not vote for and were never asked about. Extraordinary wealth for a few and diminished lives for everyone else. A ladder with no bottom rungs. A middle class that used to be the backbone of this country, gone.

That is what nobody is designing against. That is what we still have time to change.

But only if enough people decide at the same time that the default is unacceptable. Only if they decide that before the window closes. And only if they are willing to use the leverage they still have right now, today, before it is taken from them.

That moment is here. And we are still, for this moment, the ones who get to decide.

And Yet. There Is Hope.

The deep kind of hope. The kind that comes from understanding where we actually are in the human story.

We are witnessing the end of the age of the mind. The final fullest expression of what human intellect can build when given unlimited resources and no wisdom to guide it. AI is the mind at maximum power. Every pattern, every calculation, every optimization scaled beyond anything we can fully comprehend. And it is arriving exactly on schedule. Because the mind always believed it could solve everything.

The great spiritual teachers of every tradition already knew the answer. The mind is a tool. A remarkable, extraordinary, dangerous tool. But a tool. It can calculate, optimize, win arguments, build weapons, write code. What it cannot do, what it has never been able to do, is solve the hardest human problems. It cannot generate genuine compassion. It cannot produce forgiveness that heals. It cannot find its way to resolution that comes not from winning but from understanding.

Those capacities live somewhere else entirely. In what I can only call the heart. Not the physical organ. The spiritual heart. The high heart. The part of us that operates in an entirely different paradigm from thought and strategy and optimization. The part that recognizes itself in the face of someone who looks nothing like us. The part that knows, without being able to fully explain why, that we are more the same than we are different. Our words struggle to describe it because our words come from the mind. And the heart is beyond what the mind can name.

AI is going to show us the ceiling of the mind. It will demonstrate more clearly than anything ever has that intelligence without wisdom is not salvation. That optimization without love is not enough. That a world run by the most powerful thinking machine ever built is still a world without a soul.

And in that revealing there is an invitation. To remember what we are beyond our thinking. To stop outsourcing our deepest capacities to systems that can never hold them. To choose the heart not because it is soft or naive but because it is the only thing powerful enough for what is coming.

The mind built the world we are in. With all of its injustice and brilliance and devastation and beauty.

The heart is the only thing that can build what comes next.

Those lessons are coming. The only question is whether the heart can rise faster than the mind reveals how truly limited it really is.

I believe it can.

I have to.