When Robots Do the Work and the Shopping
A popular internet meme is the idea of “Late-Stage Capitalism” — a sarcastic label for capitalism’s “end game.” Its features include extreme inequality, corporate dominance, and an economy where absurd or exploitative norms start to feel routine. It suggests the system is bending toward profit accumulation over human needs and ecological health.
There’s a strong possibility this is just the internet’s version of the perpetual battle between capital and labour… but what if it’s actually a necessary bridge to the next stage? A new kind of economic system? A system where human employment becomes redundant?
First, let me backtrack. I’ve written before about why I don’t think there’ll be a job apocalypse due to AI — TL;DR: if there are no jobs, there can’t be any customers, and if there are no customers, there can’t be any companies. I’ve also written about the potential for a Robot Economy — an entirely new industry layer. But what if we combined the two?
What if there was a job apocalypse? No human employment. No human customers. And instead… the robots took our place. The robots stood in for the humans, did the work, and bought the products – literally. Crazy thought, I know.
In that instance, I’m not even sure what we’d call it. It becomes some kind of post-capitalist economy — or maybe capitalism without humans.
Because if AI is coming for our jobs, how will the AI billionaires continue to make money if there are no employed people capable of buying AI services… or even buying the products from the companies that buy AI services? This is where we need imagination. And we have to remind ourselves that the idea of “employment” itself is only a few hundred years old.
Maybe the billionaires won’t maintain their riches by selling products to us — but by selling things to the AIs and Robots themselves. The AIs become the new population of consumers.
Instead of retailers selling food, clothes, and entertainment to human consumers, tech companies sell energy, memory, network access, processing power, spare parts, repair services, software upgrades, security patches, insurance, identity credentials, API access, compute “rent,” data access, model licensing, and hardware subscriptions to the AIs — so they can do their jobs as agent contractors for other corporations (or whoever “owns” the AIs).
The AIs could then earn some kind of crypto for completing their agentic tasks — tasks contracted on a blockchain — and then spend it with technology companies that provide the resources they need to function.
It could “work” because, at the very least, AI agents can be programmed to value the crypto as much as the billionaires need them to. So instead of nine billion human customers, you get trillions of agentic AI customers.
It’s not as weird as it sounds. In a way, we already have this. Cars need to pay road tolls. Houses need energy. Phones need network access. We just pay these things on behalf of the low-fi machines we currently use.We’re already the middlemen buying for our machines.This would be similar — just with us removed from the value chain.
This could be dystopian… but maybe, just maybe, it could be a good thing. A human corporate slave population being “released” by owners who no longer have use for us?
We have to remember: we were not born to be employees. It just evolved that way. So this could be a shift in the capitalism scheme we’ve all been born into.
It’s possible the AIs could create a new form of abundance where we still get access to the services and physical needs we rely on — but there’s an underlying AI economy doing the work for us, and we get low-cost (or free) access to the outputs.
Of course, this depends on either:
- Being able to own some AIs, or
- Having a benevolent Government that makes everyday consumption a human right — like we already do (sometimes) with government services like healthcare and education.
Two very big ifs.
In this world, digital capitalism’s human attention economy would fizzle out. Commodities like food and housing would become broadly available — no longer asset classes worthy of constant speculation, optimisation, and obsession.
So all that’s left for humans to do is the real stuff we actually want to do…
Sure, it sounds like a utopian pipe dream — but all the good things we take for granted today once were.
Keep Thinking,
Steve.
** ** Get me into do an AI keynote at your next event. I’ll use this as my testimonial!