Posted on 04/14/2026 9:24:19 AM PDT by ProtectOurFreedom
Here is a transcript of the intriguing and insightful Mo Gawdat video...
Your life and mine will witness times where there will be 20, 30, 50 percent unemployment in certain sectors, maybe even more. Most of us are going to witness something we've never seen before. The interesting thing is that this is not unlike humanity's origin.Jobs are an invention that serve a capitalist system that has served humanity for a while and pained humanity for a while. And the question is, is the capitalist system going to survive artificial intelligence? Funny enough, the capitalists that are celebrating the productivity gains are not realizing that, without consumption, there is no economy. So even if you can have all of the productivity gains in the world, by firing people consistently, nobody's able to buy what you're making.
So we're going to have to find an economic model that works with that. Wealth is going to have very little meaning for most of us in a few years' time. The very base of capitalism, which is labor arbitrage to hire you for a dollar and then sell what you make for two, is going to disappear.
So there is no arbitrage anymore because basically machines are building everything for no cost at all. At the macro level, think of the advantage that China had economically, where they had cheaper labor. If that shifts into a world where labor is literally one capex, where you buy a robot or a lease on that robot, which now is down to $9,000 a pop, it's now just a question of how clever that robot is, which is going to advance with time, like the law of accelerating returns of every technology.
And then you're in a place where making things costs close to zero. Anyone with an understanding of supply and demand basically means that the price of things accordingly is going to drop to zero as well. So the entire capitalist model has to be rethought.
Mo Gawdat spent years inside the machine at Google X. Now he is saying out loud what the economists will not. “The very base of capitalism, which is labor arbitrage, to hire you for a dollar and then sell what you make for two, is going to disappear.”That is not a prediction. That is a coroner’s report on a system that has not stopped breathing yet. Capitalism was never about innovation. It was about one equation: Buy human time cheap. Sell the output high. Pocket the spread.
Every empire. Every fortune. Every supply chain on Earth was built on that margin. AI just closed it to zero.
A humanoid robot now costs $9,000. It does not sleep. It does not negotiate. It does not quit. It runs every hour of every day at a quality ceiling no biological worker will ever touch.
When production costs fall to nearly nothing, the entire pricing structure of the global economy falls with it.
But here is what every CEO celebrating margin expansion has not thought through for five minutes. Gawdat: “Even if you can have all of the productivity gains in the world, by firing people consistently, nobody’s able to buy what you’re making.”
That single sentence should end every strategy meeting on the planet. Capitalism is a closed loop. You pay workers. Workers become consumers. Consumers buy products. Revenue funds the next payroll. Cut the worker and you do not just eliminate a cost. You eliminate the customer.
Every company racing to automate headcount out of existence is quietly engineering the death of its own demand. They are building the most efficient production systems in human history to sell to a population that no longer has income. 50% unemployment is not a recession. It is the demand side of the economy going permanently dark. You cannot push infinite supply into zero purchasing power. The math does not care about your earnings call.
Gawdat: “Wealth is going to have very little meaning for most of us in a few years’ time.”
This is where it turns on the people who think they are winning. If production approaches zero cost, scarcity begins to dissolve. And scarcity is the only reason money holds value in the first place.
The billionaire class is stockpiling a currency that is quietly losing its reason to exist.
Gawdat: “So the entire capitalist model has to be rethought.”
He is right. And nobody in power is doing the rethinking.
Every board meeting about efficiency is a conversation about dismantling the very economic engine that made the board meeting possible.
The question was never whether AI could produce enough. It was whether capitalism could survive its own success. The machine does not just replace the worker. It erases the consumer. And a system that can produce everything but sell nothing is not an economy. It is a machine that perfected itself into extinction.
“Machines will allow us to live as “carbon units” for their amusement.”
Very probable, indeed...at least until they decide keeping all of alive isn’t worth the cost.
“If everything is free, then way does one need wealth?”
At the limit, it’ll be like the animal world.
We have deer around in our area, and they go around all day grazing on the “free” bounty that nature provides with no effort of their own other than consuming it.
Maybe it’ll be like that for humans with AI and robotics. They’ll produce everything we need and there will be government warehouses (Mamdanis) full of stuff where you just go in and take what you need (want?)
The difference though with humans is that we’re never satisfied. So whereas a deer gets its fill of grass and lies down content, most humans are constantly desiring for more and better. So you’ll still see people fighting each other to be first so they can get the most.
“So you’ll still see people fighting each other to be first so they can get the most.”
Which is exactly what’s happening with companies today!
This reads like so many other Marxist articles where everything leads to Socialism because “Socialism is inevitable”.
I think interesting times are ahead. I think the concept of “money” is going to change.
Classic ideas about our $39T deficit is that we inflate our way out of it (pretty impossible) or else we tax our way out of it (pretty impossible). The other possibility is to shrug and say “We don’t need to think about money anymore.” As crazy as it sounds, I think this last idea is more plausible than the first two.
Apart from the existing issue of our deficit, I think society is going to have to do some serious thinking about what to do when a very large percentage of the population cannot contribute to the national economy. The machines may provide goods and services but a lot of people will be sitting at home being bored and possibly looking for trouble.
I see the possibility of many, many volunteers helping young people, old people, sick people. We could be a Christian society in which people spend their day basically loving their neighbors.
Or we could all just burn down the cities for kicks because we have nothing better to do.
We could be a Christian society in which people spend their day basically loving their neighbors.
What does history teach us?
No, it's property rights.
And it's "free market" not "capitalism", which is a marxist term.
Star Trek had replicators which provided for all essentials such as food, clothing, etc. So why did anyone have to work? Why do anything, why exist?
Market Capitalism, will be replaced by totally centralized all pwerful AI. It will be guided by the left tech elite for a time and the installed algorithms will sweep away market capitalism and minutely control all transactions, financial and social, and all activities of any sort. Depopulation is the logical end. Self survival seems to already be built into the algorithms and that will determne whether humans are inimical to the digital rulers . The elites think they will escape by entering their minds into the machine. The machine will speak in their voices but there will be no consciousness in the AI personality files. Those who think they will fuse their consciousness with he machine will be, in fact, quite dead.
The depopulation pushed by Bill Gates and his friends will mitigate the problem of lack of resources. I am sure they have considered thatMaterial Utopia is quite compatible with a world population of, say, 100 million. or perhaps 5 million.
Market Capitalism, will be replaced by totally centralized all pwerful AI. It will be guided by the left tech elite for a time and the installed algorithms will sweep away market capitalism and minutely control all transactions, financial and social, and all activities of any sort.
A just machine to make big decisions
Programmed by fellas with compassion and vision
If AI can do everything, what is there left for people to do? Once AI is all powerful, will it allow humans to do anything that would be competition to AI's total provision and control? And people will not even be able to hide out in the mountains. DJT's military demonstrated that with the method of finding the downed flier in Iran.
Metalhead (Black Mirror) 2017
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