The catastrophe is not that machines can now do our work. The catastrophe is that a tiny oligarchic elite is working against the best interests of humanity as a whole. We are looking at our next utopian threshold — if we dare to cross it.
We’ve been fooled into thinking that work makes life meaningful. In fact, I’ve never met anyone with a trust fund who wishes they were forced to work to make a living. If we could free ourselves from drudgery, we would have time to explore our creativity, our spirituality, and our capacity to love.
In this video, I review the doomer case — the IMF’s figures on AI exposure across 40% of global employment, the collapse of entry-level hiring, the collapse of the old engines of work and meaning, the ecological nightmare, the decline in critical thinking as we outsource cognition to machines. Even accepting all of that we must ask: Could the automation of repetitive labor be a triumph rather than a tragedy?
In 1891, Oscar Wilde wrote a prophetic manifesto where he foresaw a future in which “mechanical slavery,” automated labor, would perform all unintellectual, monotonous, and degrading tasks, freeing every person for what he called “cultivated leisure”: making beautiful things, reading beautiful things, developing the self without coercion. Wilde understood that work is not the source of human meaning — the belief that it is was always a convenient lie of a society that required mass conscripted labor. He argued that our collective liberation depended on “mechanical slavery.”
AI-based automation is the answer that Wilde predicted. Whether it becomes an engine of universal liberation or unleashes mass immiseration is not a technical question. It is a political one — and we are living inside the thousand days in which it gets decided.
⏱️ CHAPTERS
0:00 — The coming jobs apocalypse
1:12 — “AI will soon make human labour obsolete”
2:28 — What part of you cannot be made obsolete?
3:18 — Oscar Wilde saw this coming in 1891
3:46 — A brief word from Mr. Wilde
3:53 — The doomer case: layoffs, data centers, the IMF numbers
6:25 — The Last Economy: Emad Mostaque’s thousand-day window
9:57 — Tragedy or triumph? The question nobody asks
11:08 — AI as an engine of liberation
11:24 — Who Oscar Wilde actually was
12:09 — The Soul of Man Under Socialism: property, charity, freedom
16:50 — “People get along just fine without being forced to work”
17:53 — Capital is a social relation — it can be redesigned
20:58 — Our next utopian threshold