People, before you start readin’, pour yourself a drink. You’re going to need it.
What happened?
Bill Gates went on Jimmy Fallon’s late-night show a week ago and did what billionaires do best, he calmly explained how the world is about to change in a horrifying, irreversible way. And when he said that, the audience clapped like trained seals. Now, Fallon is a man whose greatest talent is making everything sound like a party, and he nodded along when Gates laid out a future where AI handles everything, like medicine, education, labor, and leaving us humans with, well, nothing.
Gates said “We are going to work two or three days a week”, as if that is what’s going to happen.
Because that’s the dream they always sell us, isn’t it?
AI will take over the drudgery. The tedious work, and we’ll all sit on beaches, sipping our coctails, except history always tells a different story. Every single time that automation has replaced workers, the wealth hasn’t been spread around. The people at the top just get richer and the rest of us are fighting for the scraps.
Fallon possibly experienced the first existential crisis of his career. He asked, “I mean, will we still need humans”. Gates just smirked. “Uh, not for most things”.
The gullible audience laughed.
Fallon gasped.
And just like that, the man who helped kick off the digital revolution let it slip. . . “The next revolution doesn’t need us anymore”.
Read: Bill says: only three jobs will survive
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The three-day workweek lie
Uncle Bill said that AI will let us work just three days a week.
You know who else works three days a week?
Yup, indeed: The unemployed.
History doesn’t show that automation leads to some utopian leisure for all. . . If that’s what you want, go build a kibbutz, revive the harmony society, or become a colchoznik and implement a decentralized AI over there. But automation, when it is centralized, has always lead to mass layoffs, wage stagnation, and entire industries that were crumbling overnight. And the day that AI gets the lying under control, it will strike hard.
The only people who get the good version of this future are going to be the ones who own the AI.
The rest of us. . . We get to “reskill” into whatever scraps they leave behind for us. Maybe we’ll all become prompt engineers. Oh shit, AI is already replacing those too.
You know, when was the last time a corporate executive saw a productivity boost and said, “Let’s give the workers more time off”?
Never.
They don’t free up your time, they free up their payroll.
Every historical wave of automation, from the assembly line to e-commerce, has promised efficiency and at the same time they were leaving millions to beg for whatever work remained. And here we are again, being fed the same fairy tale while the architects of this technological coup are busy securing their seats in the future, and they are leaving the rest of us to play musical chairs with no music and no chairs.
But don’t worry, the WEF says.
The government will step in.
Maybe we will get universal basic income, and Sam will finally get his chance to sell his Orb from hell!
Maybe the wealth from AI-driven productivity will be shared!
Maybe billionaires will finally find generosity in their coal-black hearts!
Or… maybe they’ll do what they’ve always done which is pocket the profits, offshore the taxes, and tell you to go “learn to code” (hi Bill, hey Zucky). But AI will learn how to code better than you. And it never needs a weekend.
AI Is here to replace you, not help you
The sales pitch is always the same.
AI will “solve” problems.
We don’t have enough doctors, but AI can diagnose you, not?
We don’t have enough teachers, but sure, AI could tutor your kid.
It all sounds great, until you realize that AI is making human expertise irrelevant. And when humans become irrelevant, they become disposable.
Gates says that AI will provide “great medical advice” and “great tutoring” for free, which is hilarious if you’ve ever actually used AI for anything important. These systems don’t understand medicine. They don’t understand human psychology. They just predict words. And still, we are supposed to trust them to diagnose cancer and teach children?
Sounds really airtight.
This is the same logic that gave us self-checkout machines that still require an employee to fix them every three minutes. Yet we’re supposed to believe AI will handle neurosurgery.
Sure.
Gates wasn’t only playing the bad guy. He reassured everyone that although AI will take over medicine, education, manufacturing, and logistics, we would still have. . . . . SPORTS!
So, humanity’s final purpose is watching two people hit a ball with a stick.
That’s what we’re clinging to now?
We might not have jobs, meaning, or control over our own future, but at least we can still watch a ball fly through the air.
Never mind that AI is already writing music, painting pictures, and generating scripts, so why wouldn’t it eventually create sports teams? We already have AI boxing teams, and the money being spent on betting is as real as you can get. Read AI based BattleBots! if you want to know what’s cooking.
The only reason that AI isn’t playing baseball yet is because no one has figured out how to make BIG money off it.
Yet.
Just give it time.
The “AI will do the tedious work” myth
Oh, AI will take the boring jobs first? You probably have heard the theory before. And the WEF’s Future of Work report wants you to believe this as well. But here’s the reality; Automation always starts with low-wage workers, you know, the ones without lobbying power, before creeping up the food chain.
First, cashiers go.
Then customer service (hi Klarna).
Then junior analysts, designers, marketing agency workers.
Then programmers.
Then doctors.
And by the time you realize your own job is on the chopping block, the billionaire class is already sipping cocktails on a floating city where human workers aren’t allowed.
And let’s talk about who decides what is “tedious” in the first place.
The tech elite love to frame this as a humanitarian effort, freeing people from soul-crushing tasks, and allowing you to focus on more creative, or meaningful tasks, but somehow, it’s always their jobs that remain untouched.
No one is building AI to replace venture capitalists, hedge fund managers, or corporate lobbyists.
Instead, they’re perfecting algorithms that turn real human expertise into a disposable commodity. But rest assured, your friendly neighborhood billionaire will always have a need for personal assistants, security teams, and high-end butlers.
And don’t fall for the “AI will just assist humans” lie, either. That’s the bait before the switch. They introduce AI as a tool to help professionals, making them reliant on the system, then, once the AI improves and lies less, they cut the humans out entirely. Read: (2) MIT study: Think carefully before you start interbreeding humans with AI | LinkedIn
It is already happening in journalism, the Guardian announced a strategic partnership with OpenAI, and just recently the New York Times, began integrating AI tools into its newsroom, and the Associated Press has always been at the forefront of new stuff and they have been using it now for a few years. The strategy is simple. Devalue expertise, flood the market with AI-generated alternatives, and then tell anyone who complains that they just need to “adapt”.
You think that this isnt’s the case?
Why do all of the major players suddenly introduce Deep Research?
Meanwhile, the profits get funneled upwards, and you’re left retraining for the next job AI is about to steal. But don’t worry, they say, “AI will create new jobs!”
Oh really?
Where, exactly?
And for who?
Suuure, AI will create some new roles. For the top 1% of experts who can actually build and control the tech.
The rest gets automated out of existence.
This isn’t just about job loss. This is about the death of the middle class.
When factory workers were replaced by machines, they were told to learn to code. Now coders are being replaced by AI, and suddenly, there’s no new safety net. The brutal truth is that automation doesn’t create better jobs. It creates fewer jobs. AI isn’t a labor-saving tool, it’s a human-replacing tool. And once corporations realize they don’t need a middle class, they’ll stop pretending they do.
Gates let the truth slip out on national television. Humanity is becoming redundant. AI can do most things better, cheaper, and faster. And it’s only getting stronger.
T
AI Is evolving faster than anyone can regulate it
I have seen how this plays out before. Time and again. A new technology arrives. It promises to make life better. It gets rushed to market. Then, before anyone realizes the damage, it’s too late. Tim (B.L.), invented the internet to make us better people (he really did). To make information available to everyone. But instead, it buried us under an avalanche of misinformation, ads, and porn.
Tim wanted internet to be good. Internet is not. Tim is sad. Tim wants another internet. Tim made [Home – Solid](https://solidproject.org/#:~:text=Solid is an evolution of,of public and private data.). Tim is happy. But nobody likes Solid. Tim is sad again.
Social media was supposed to connect us. Instead, it turned half the population into conspiracy theorists. Crypto was supposed to democratize finance. Instead, it fueled money laundering and scams. Now AI is here, and the people building it are promising it will fix everything.
And who exactly are making these promises?
Gates, Scam, Wassabi, Skum, Pitch-AI, Wu-Tang, Zucky, Amoral, and Bozo are*.
A.k.a. the same people profiting from this chaos.
These guys aren’t concerned about “societal-scale risks”. If they were, they wouldn’t be throwing billions of dollars at making AI smarter, faster, and harder to control.
Oh, but don’t worry.
There’s an “AI Action Summit” where world leaders and tech billionaires get together to discuss how to “govern AI”. Because that’s worked so well before, hadn’t it? Tech CEOs have a long history of self-regulation. Just look at social media. No harm done there.
- Gates as himself (cause that’s bad enough), Scam = Sam, Wassabi (Demis Hassabis – Deepmind), Skum = Musk, Pich-AI = Pichai (Google), Wu-Tang (Jensen Huang), Zucky as himself, Amoral = Amodei, and Bozo = Bezos the Benevolent.
AI is getting cheaper. That’s bad.
The hype around DeepSeek, is that they built a ChatGPT competitor in just two months with only $5.6 million. That’s a fraction of what OpenAI spent on GPT-4. And it works just as well. Maybe even better. But have you ever seen their books? Nah. Thought so.
But if it is true, that would be the real nightmare.
When AI is about to become cheap and accessible, and not only a giganormous investment only the few can afford, that means it is going to be everywhere. In customer service, law enforcement, finance, healthcare. It won’t just be big companies deploying it. Every startup, scammer, and dictator will have their own AI. And since AI can now be built on a shoestring budget, there’s no stopping it.
Nvidia’s stock crashed when investors realized AI companies might not need to keep buying mountains of expensive GPUs to build better models. The AI boom was supposed to be a hardware gold rush. Turns out, it’s a software revolution. AI doesn’t need to be expensive to be powerful. And that means the floodgates are open, and more reasons for corporations to invest in this stuff to kick people out – no matter if it works or not.
Talking about “work”. . . .
The future of work? There isn’t one.
Tech billionaires love to dangle the fantasy of a three-day workweek in front of us, and so did uncle Bill, because he was trying to appease us – the plebeians. As if that’s what automation will bring. But history tells us that when jobs disappear, people don’t work less.
They just stop working.
They get replaced.
They get desperate.
When factories were automated, workers didn’t get more leisure time.
Hahahahaha (cynical laughter). They got laid off.
When e-commerce replaced retail, workers didn’t get new, 3-day cushy jobs. They ended up in Amazon warehouses, where they now have to race against an algorithm to meet impossible quotas. AI isn’t going to free you from labor.
It’s going to make you obsolete.
Gates and the rest of his billionaire friends will be fine. They’ll be on their yachts, enjoying the world they remade. The rest of us. . . We get to “retrain”.
That’s the word they always use.
Also the World Economic Forum in their “Future of Work” Report.
But retrain for what, exactly?
Read:
The end is nigh for your career. Yes, yours!
Is your job safe from AI? Find out with this skill score
‘Doomsday clock’: it is 89 seconds to midnight
Governments won’t save you. They can’t even keep up.
The only thing that is more terrifying than AI itself is how unprepared the world is for it.
There’s no real regulation around it, apart from some vague talk about “Ethical AI”, and “AI for humankind”.
There is no big plan.
No oversight.
The people who are in charge of making plans barely understand how their email works, and they are supposed to control artificial intelligence?
Good luck.
World leaders gather at these AI summits every year, where they smile for the cameras, and release statements about how they’re “monitoring the risks”. And then nothing happens. Because AI is too profitable to slow down.
Just look at the intricate web of who invests in who: Bill says: only three jobs will survive
We already know how this ends.
AI will keep advancing. It will replace more jobs. It will be embedded in everything from law enforcement to government. By the time politicians realize the scale of what’s happening, it’ll be too late to do anything about it.
Read:
AI schools. Because replacing teachers with robots is clearly the next step
We need to seize the means of AI
If we want to keep our livelihood, we need to prevent artificial intelligence from becoming a tool of oppression controlled by a select few. We must collectively reclaim control over its development and deployment.
The current trend of AI monopolies consolidating power within a few corporations is a dangerous path that threatens humanity. AI is an extension of corporate greed, and it is pushing further inequality and is going to deepen societal divides.
One of the solutions is decentralization.
MIT is pushing for decentralized AI. That is a radical vision to break the stranglehold that Big Tech has over AI. Rather than allowing a handful of monolithic entities to control everything from data to algorithms, decentralized AI disperses control across a network of independent agents. It is powered by federated learning, blockchain, and peer-to-peer networks. Their ultimate goal is to create a more equitable AI ecosystem where no single party has monopolistic power over the technology.
Governments also must play an active role in implementing policies that promote open-source AI initiatives. The EU has noticed this, but as usual, they can’t act on it. Instead, they let billionaires run the show again.
This open access will democratize AI. It will allow developers and researchers from various sectors and regions to contribute to its growth. In turn, this approach can prevent AI from becoming a proprietary asset that only serves the interests of the rich and powerful.
One of the most critical steps in reclaiming AI is the establishment of public data trusts.
Data is the lifeblood of AI, and the current centralized and illegal nature of data collection is a risk for fairness and equality (hallo Dutch Government, Hi @8Vance)
Blockchain also has a role in the new governance of AI.
If you truly want to decentralize decision-making and promote transparency in the development and deployment of AI systems, the blockchain prevents the concentration of power in the hands of a few entities.
Anyway, the futureis definitely not going to be some utopia where we all work less and live happy, and fulfilled lives. It is a world where AI wants to run everything, wealth gets even more concentrated, and the rest of us are _________? I don’t know.
And you know what? Maybe Gates is right. Maybe we’ll still have baseball.
Signing off from yet another jar of SSRIs.
Marco
Well, that’s a wrap for today. Tomorrow, I’ll have a fresh episode of TechTonic Shifts for you. If you enjoy my writing and want to support my work, feel free to buy me a coffee ♨️
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