Oceania or the Jetsons

Free column today. Most are not free because I have bills that an honest man can’t pay. So I humbly ask that you become a subscriber. Still only $5…

I have some smart friends. Recently they’ve helped me dive a bit further into this AI thing. I still can’t grasp all of it, but the parts I do get scare me. AI capability is doubling every 7 months. This isn’t something coming down the line. This is here, now. Soon we’ll all be surrounded by data centers. And soon after that, the husks of empty data centers once they figure out how to how to put these things into space.

Far fetched you say? Let me explain exponential growth to you. If you start with one penny and double it every day for 365 days, in a week you’ll have 64 cents. In two weeks you will have $81.92. At the end of the year you will have $23,283,064,365,386,962,922,993,458,483,701,209,377,007,718,975,940,461,590,710,916,634,841,600,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. So yea, in another 7/14/21/28 months we might look like the fucking Jetsons. Or Oceania. Hard to tell.

AI has already replaced some of the low hanging fruit jobs, and it’s being projected by one of the architects of modern AI that white collar workers will be largely “unnecessary” by the 2030s.

That’s an interesting choice of words, isn’t it?

This morning I read a piece by an AI engineer, who admitted that he doesn’t write code anymore. Boris Cherny, the head of Claude Code at Anthropic, admitted on X that he hadn’t written any code by hand in over two months…and that AI now writes 100% of the company’s production code.

So yea, AI is engineering itself. Or something. I don’t fucking know. But this sounds really weird. And ominous. Like Frankenstein sending Boris Karloff to the store.

Initially this type of doomsday scenario sounded a bit too Year-200-ish to me. I recall those days when planes would fall out of the sky at the stroke of midnight because the guy from “Office Space” put the decimal in the wrong place. Or something like that. The Y2K scare made lots of people lots of money. The company I worked for at the time hired a room full of “consultants” to deal with a non-existent problem that could have been tested by simply turning the clocks ahead. Me and my co-workers were given sizeable bonuses for all the extra hours we put in, even though we mostly just sat around and played catch with a Nerf football and ate lots of company bought pizza. As it turned out January 1, 2000 was just as stultifyingly boring in the IT world as December 31st, 1999. But the boy who cried wolf got TONS of overtime. All was still right with the world.

Now? Not so much. Now I’m wondering what comes first—my retirement or the collapse of the world’s economy. So much for learning how to golf.

So let’s fast forward to the 2030s…..a time where all the bean counters and Excel spreadsheet warriors and IT goons and the managers hired to make sure all of them punch in and out correctly are at home trying to find ways to keep the heat on. I can hear your suggestion from here. “Learn a trade!” you say with the admittedly deserved arrogance of somebody who is doing just fine and is not saddled with 6 figures of college debt. I must warn you however that I cannot call Joe the Plumber to fix my sink because I don’t have any money to pay him. So this means that Joe the Plumber is also fucked.

Interesting, no?

And what is the plan for this type of circular financial catastrophe?

We don’t have one. We are in the midst of teaching machines how to get rid of us, which is the sort of dystopian shit that made Planet of the Apes so creepy. Pretty soon we’re all gonna be Charlton Heston literally pounding sand.

The wild card in all this is how the oligarchs who run this nation will be able to hang on to their billions when the masses are all tapped out. These bros have been skimming 40% of my salary off the top for 40 years. I work so they have to. What exactly are they going to do now that I’m “unnecessary”? Good luck asking Boris Cherny to clean your fucking yacht.

At this point it might be prudent to suggest the concept of the Universal Basic Income, which, to put it as simple as possible for the chuds in the back afraid of idle brown people, might be the only feasible way to keep consumer demand alive when their jobs disappear too. A society without income cannot sustain ANY labor market. Not trades. Not caregiving. Not food service. Not housing. Not healthcare. Not education. And, alas as we have seen, no yacht maintenance.

Of course since nobody has a job there would be no tax revenue to fund such a thing.

Which would mean that the value AI creates would have to be taxed. The tax base shifts from labor to capital, which would not make the billionaires happy. Yet their happiness stops being relevant once the very system that produces their wealth crashes. It’s hard to be a robber baron with empty cubicles.

Or, as one of my aforementioned smart friends put it…”how realistic is it to think that most of humanity will just sit back and become essentially useless, starving and homeless while surrounded by abundance that only 1% of society can afford?”

In other words, be careful what you wish for, and keep your eyes peeled for a modern day Robespierre.

Maybe you bros should have whiteboarded this shit first.

In a bit…

—tf

ps - A reminder that my new record “Floods, Pills, Forsaken People and More Songs About Trains” is available now. You can get it here……and I sure hope you do.