Three weeks ago I told you AI is capital. New software on the capital side of the formula. No will, no wants, no agency, and I stand by every word of it. Here is the part I left out. It is worse than anything the doomers are selling.
Look at an oil state. Venezuela. Congo. Equatorial Guinea. Enormous wealth, wretched people. That is mechanics, and it repeats every time. When the money comes out of the ground, the ruler stops needing you to bring it in. He needs a pipeline and a few guards. Not your schooling. Not your health. Not your consent. Now think about what you have actually been handed in your life. Free schools. Clean water. Antibiotics. The vote. Every one of those was bought with your usefulness, because a state that needs productive workers has to grow them first. That is the deal. Nobody ever told you it was conditional. It always was.
Two writers call the next bit the intelligence curse. Drago and Laine, this year, worth an evening of your time. Their point is plain. Put the oil under the datacentre instead of the desert and the same arithmetic runs in London. Revenue stops arriving from forty million wage packets and starts arriving from four companies. At that moment the state's interest in your weal turns from self-interest into charity. And Gnadenbrot is the line that gets cut in every budget round ever written.
You do not need conscious machines for this. Watch the graduate schemes. They freeze first. Then junior hiring collapses. Then the layer above it goes, and the layer above that, up the pyramid, until the only people left in the building are the ones who own the building. That is not science fiction. That is a hiring plan, and parts of it are already sitting in your own industry's numbers this year. Go and check them.
Now the honest objection, because it is a good one. Abundance. If the machines make everything cheap, who cares about wages? Fair. But cheap bread has never once been the same thing as a claim on the bakery. Prices decide what you can afford. Ownership decides who gets asked. A man with falling costs and no capital is comfortable and voiceless, and comfort handed down by someone who does not need you can be withdrawn by someone who does not need you. Ask any tenant.
So stop arguing about whether the thing will wake up. Wrong question, and a convenient one for everybody selling you the answer. The question is what you hold on the day your labour stops being the reason anyone in power has to care what happens to you. Not a policy. Not a petition. Not a retraining scheme with a nice logo. A claim on the production itself, in your name, compounding while you sleep.
The pipeline is being laid right now. Decide which end of it you intend to be standing on. Nobody asks you twice. become capital.