When AI Kills the Bottom Rung: It's Time to Build a New Kind of Ladder
A few days ago, I read something that hasn’t let go of me.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently warned that AI could eliminate up to 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs within five years. He suggested that governments may be downplaying the threat—not because it's untrue, but because they don’t know how to respond to the scale of what's coming.
This isn’t alarmism. It’s a systems warning.
If this plays out the way he suggests, we’re not just looking at unemployment—we’re looking at the unraveling of the economic model most of the world still clings to. Capitalism, for all its innovation, was never built for machines that don’t sleep and don’t get paid.
🧯 Band-Aids on a Broken System
We’re starting to hear familiar solutions:
Universal Basic Income (UBI): Financial floor, sure—but what about meaning?
Reskilling programs: We can't all become data scientists or AI whisperers.
Automation taxes: Without global enforcement, they’re a leaky bucket.
These are reactions, not transformations. They patch holes in a ship that might not be seaworthy anymore.
And let’s be honest: none of this addresses the real issue—
We already have enough.
🌍 We Have the Resources—We Just Don't Have the System
For the first time in human history, we have the capacity to create a baseline of safety, education, food, housing, and healthcare for every person on this planet. We are no longer constrained by scarcity. We are constrained by distribution, access, and design.
The old model—generate value through human labor, distribute wealth through wages, justify inequality through effort—is breaking down. Not because it's evil. Because it's obsolete.
If machines can produce abundance, why are we still pretending we're poor?
🔄 What Comes Next: The Super-Hybrid System
We don’t need to choose between late-stage capitalism and watered-down socialism. We can create something new—something that fits the moment.
A super-hybrid economic model could include:
Commons-Based Tech Ownership
Treat core AI and infrastructure like utilities—publicly accountable, broadly owned.
Shift profits from shareholders to stakeholders, including the communities generating the training data.
Participation Economy
Everyone gets a base income, but can earn more by contributing to what matters: caregiving, climate action, education, open-source projects, crisis response, and more.
These are the things automation can’t meaningfully replicate—our human edge.
Personal AI Agents
Equip people with AI tools that help them negotiate, learn, create, and collaborate.
Give everyone a seat at the tech table, not just those with elite access.
Global Data Dividends
Our data built these models. We deserve a cut.
Every human becomes a shareholder in the digital economy.
This is not a dream. It’s a design problem.
💣 Adapt or Collapse
The AI era won’t just disrupt markets—it will expose our value system. If we let productivity gains consolidate into the hands of the few, we’re not just risking instability. We’re greenlighting collapse.
But if we act now—if we think big—we can build a world where no one is scraping for survival in the shadow of machines printing abundance.
We have the intelligence. We have the resources. We just need the framework—and the will.
🛠️ Time to Build the New Ladder
It starts with rethinking the goal of an economy. Not just to produce. Not just to profit. But to liberate human potential.
A world where AI takes over drudgery, and humans lean into care, creativity, curiosity, and connection? That’s not a threat. That’s a milestone.
But we’ll never get there by clinging to models built for another century.
We need a new ladder—one that doesn’t just reach upward, but widens.
And we need to start building it now.
