Transcription
Hello my friends. Welcome to the Hello Tomorrow podcast where we make sense of what's next in 15 minutes every week. I'm your host Josh Allen Dystra. As always, I'm going to do my best to cut through the noise and expose the systems that are secretly shaping our future. Our goal, leave here with a little bit more clarity and a lot more optimistic rebellion.
Today, let's start with the wrong question everybody keeps asking. Will AI take my job? I get it. That question's terrifying because it's personal, but it's also incomplete. There's a better question than if AI will take jobs because it will and it already is happening. You're noticing the hiring slowdown, right? 2025 was the worst year for hiring since 2009 with the exception of COVID year 2020.
Now, I don't want to minimize the impact of AI taking jobs. It's just beginning. It's going to be enormously disruptive. And there's actually a bigger question lurking in the background, namely this. What kind of economic system tries to eliminate human labor without replacing income and yet still expects the world to keep functioning as is? I am not hearing this talked about enough, so we're going to talk about it today.
Here's the crux of it. If AI works the way capital hopes it will, capitalism won't break because AI fails. It'll break because AI succeeds. Why? Because if you're running a business, you can't fire your customers and then expect them to buy your stuff. Doesn't work like that. There's a simple loop that runs the modern economy. Labor, wages, income, consumption, revenue, and then back to labor. A company pays labor, that's you, in wages, which become your income. You have some left over, so you buy things. consumption, which is another company's revenue, which they use to pay their labor. Feels familiar, right?
In the way that modern life currently works, this loop is not optional. It's what we might call loadbearing. It's holding up the house. We break or pull out one part of the loop, things are not going to function the way they do now. Period. We'll call this the loop that holds up the world. For most of the last century, we've treated this loop like a law of nature. It's not. There's nothing natural about this loop. It's not a law of physics. It's a system we built. So, when a technological innovation like AI comes around, everything reorganizes.
Let's talk about who is getting reorganized first. This time, as I mentioned back in the state of AI episode from October, with AI, the automation's coming for the so-called white collar folks first. Now, I want to take a moment and adjust my language. Blue collar versus white collar might roughly communicate what I mean. It's also a bit classist and has some undertones of elitism. So, I'm going to shift my language to labels I suggested way back in my first book. Probably should have thought of this. Builders and architects.
As I mentioned then, I consider these categories to be equal in importance, just different in method of contribution. Architects are what we often call leaders and managers. They draw plans and create strategies. Their work's essential because without them the wrong stuff might get built. Now builders, what we often call makers or creators, they do stuff, turn ideas into real things. Their work's essential. Without them, nothing actually happens.
Throughout history, most big technological disruptions have generally hit builders first. Architects were more insulated, not because they were more valuable as humans, but because their jobs were simply less automatable. Most of our big shift tech innovations of the past few centuries have gone like this, where builders are taking the brunt of the transitional pain. You'll sometimes hear folks talk about what's happening now as some sort of second coming of the industrial revolution. But if we properly understand builders and architects and historical cycles, we notice that's actually not right at all because the industrial revolution replaced builders, not architects. The industrial revolution mechanized execution. It also largely left meaning and legitimacy largely intact for architects as it created new elites faster than it destroyed old ones. Architects stayed architects. Managers stayed managers. Priests stayed priests. Was the industrial revolution painful, sometimes brutal, totally transformative? Yes, all those things. But it was not what we're experiencing now because it was not a legitimacy crisis for the architect layer. This time is.
So if there's a historical analog that actually holds up for this time with AI, it's not the cotton gin or the factory or the assembly line. It's the printing press. Why? Because it shattered the containers around who was allowed to think. Before the printing press, the architects, the priests, scholars, political elites, they were interpreters of reality. Truth had a chain of custody. Thinking, explaining, legitimizing the world. Those were all elite functions precisely because those things were hard to reproduce. The printing press collapsed that scarcity. Suddenly, ideas could move without permission. Interpretation escaped the cathedral. Competing worldviews spread. And for maybe the first time, architects faced an existential crisis. If anyone can read, write, and interpret, what exactly am I for? The chaos that followed wasn't just economic. It was psychological, spiritual, existential. Then we had a bunch of innovations that hit builders over and over and over. But now AI is going to trigger another crisis for architects for maybe only the second time. And this is going to happen in the very near future when cognition becomes cheap. People whose identity and status are built on being the ones who know will be forced to confront the same terrifying question as the priests of Yore. What exactly am I for?
Now, while architects aren't the majority of the workforce by numbers, they do generate most of the taxable income the system depends on, and they have disproportionate access to leadership roles, institutions, and systems. Last time, this reckoning literally took centuries. This time I think we're going to try to metabolize this thing that's philosophically similar, but we're going to do it on a much larger scale. There's almost 8 billion more humans on Earth now than there was 500 years ago. And I suspect we're going to attempt to make this transition in probably less than a decade cuz we crazy like that now. So this is the first challenge. This is going to be a deep identity crisis for the group. that's basically been untouchable for half a millennia.
Now, remember where we started. AI isn't just coming for the architect's identity. It's also coming for their income. Here's something we don't really ever talk about. Capitalism does not guarantee income. And it never has ever. Markets are phenomenal at allocating resources through price. When something's scarce, markets are quite good at sorting out who can get that thing. But markets are terrible at ensuring most people can afford to live. The reason modern capitalism hasn't already collapsed in the 20th century wasn't because markets suddenly became humane. It's because we wrapped markets in governance containers. What do I mean by this? Governance containers are things like minimum wages, child labor laws, labor protections in general, unions, even public education. None of these things came from markets. All of those things actually constrain markets. Uh here's the sentence that should make us shift in our seat a little bit. What we know as the middle class was not a market-based outcome. It was a governance project.
Early industrial capitalism did exactly what our version of capitalism is doing now. Generated incredible gains for a few while making huge swaths of the population slaves to industry. Eventually, governance structures were created to make sure people got paid. Not because the market's heart suddenly grew three sizes, but because unpaid people don't stay peaceful. But this only happened after it destabilized our societies. Strikes, riots, labor movements, revolutions. Income as we know it didn't appear because markets wanted it to. income was forced into existence because it turns out systems collapse when people can't freaking live. That is the historical backdrop we've conveniently forgotten. Income wasn't really part of the package. It became a survival necessity.
So, back to now, losing our jobs wouldn't be so scary, of course, if we had another way to get income. The problem is most of us don't. Our labor is what we trade to get income. And this is true for most builders and architects alike. As in all technological disruptions, capital's going to use AI to eliminate labor cuz labor is inconvenient. Right? We humans are dreadfully biological. But without labor, people don't have income, which means they can't participate in consumption, which means capital is also in danger of automating itself out of relevance. Because this time, the goal of the technology is quite literally to do everything a human can do. This is probably the most generally accepted definition of AGI.
So, we all see the problem, right? If nobody has any money, who actually buys the stuff your robots make? Capital. The strange irony here is that this happening wouldn't actually be capitalism failing. It'd be more like capitalism completing its own logic, like the snake that kills itself by eating its own tail. It's just an animal doing exactly what it was designed to do. In this case, make more capital. So, but why doesn't capital just stop, right? Like why keep feeding a creature that's inevitably going to eat itself? Because I think I think this must be it because income stability it's not priced into executive incentives. Oops. Margins are market share is stock price is system survival five years from now. Bummer. Not on the dashboard. We've got another don't look up moment here my friends. I know I keep referencing this movie. I hope you've seen it. Capital doesn't concern itself with things like collective survival. It's already concerned entirely with competitive advantage. Markets correct prices. They do not preserve societies. Sorry, capital is just not in that business.
Here's the deeper story under all of this. And it brings us back to the loop. As much as we've been told that it is, capitalism is not really a growth system. It's a system that feeds on growth. It can only function while the loop that holds up the world keeps spinning. And what keeps it spinning is continual growth. But continual growth only happens when there's something continual to extract. Here are the five most common ones. Labor, energy, land, attention, or debt, which is actually extraction of your future labor. For the last century plus, it's been completely understandable to confuse capitalism with growth because we had those five things in great abundance to extract from. For example, when labor stops being cheap here, you just go to another part of the world. When people stop watching TV commercials, you can capture them through an endless scroll on Facebook. When your 30-year mortgage doesn't cut it anymore, why not take a 50-year loan instead? Seriously, did you hear about this 50-year loan idea last fall? It's crazy. Anyway, doesn't it feel like we are reaching the natural limits of extraction? Aren't you tired of the endless extraction parade? That exhaustion you feel, it's not personal. It's systemic.
So, in a nutshell, here's the problem. In the very near future, AI will catalyze a massive identity crisis for a huge group of people while also devouring their income engine by pulling their labor and therefore their income out of the loop that holds up the world. Oh, and also these people have disproportionate access to the way our systems function. So, [snorts] what comes next?
If AI follows the same kind of reaction curve as I think we've seen in the past with something like the printing press, here's what I think we should expect. One, early dismissal. It's just a tool. We've kind of been there, done that. We've moved beyond that first step into the second step, which is this is a multiplier, right? This multiplies my architect power. I think that's where we are now. So, what comes after this is something that I call the panic switch, right? The panic switch gets flipped when we start saying this is dangerous and needs to be regulated. That will be immediately followed by an aggressive rebranding step four. And the the rebranding will be architects are essential to maintain order. Right? Like last time we saw builders being labeled essential. I think this time we're going to see architects. There'll be a a rebranding language efforts to make architects essential because we need them to maintain order. And then that will be followed by five protection of architects, right? This is going to be kind of like proposed bailouts for the architect class because we need to protect our high status groups followed by urgent regulation, right? Build as this is just responsible human oversight. This is all for our safety that we protect these folks. I don't think any of this is going to happen because architects are inherently evil. I think this is going to happen because power behaves predictably when its legitimacy is threatened. So, we're going to know the panic switch has been flipped when AI stops being framed as a productivity tool and starts being framed as a threat to order. That's the signal. Once that signal appears, the rest of the list, I think, is going to follow pretty quickly.
So when exactly does this panic switch get flipped? Basically, it's going to happen when AI starts sufficiently embarrassing the architects. What do I mean by that? These are going to be mostly happening in quiet moments in office buildings that you probably don't get to see. It's going to be when recommendations from a GPT start outperforming senior humans again and again. It's going to be when boards notice that VPs and consultants and lawyers have stopped adding real value to the conversation. It's going to be when leaders begin deferring to machines without announcing it. Enough of these moments is going to birth an architect legitimacy crisis. And one thing I don't think will trigger architect panic is layoffs. I think architects are going to weather layoffs with the spirit of it won't happen to me for quite a long time. I think they're only going to truly panic when their status erodes, when they feel their prestige weakening. When their identity, not just income, is threatened. Architects don't fear tools they think make them stronger. They fear tools that make them look optional. But I suspect many architects will only notice the difference when it's already too late. And that I think is the really dangerous part because by the time architect panic kicks in, there's a really good chance income has already eroded. Institutions are already strained and social trust has already gotten really thin. The real problem with this is that latestage panic doesn't ever produce elegant solutions. It produces blunt, harsh ones. It's likely going to be regulation by way of crisis, which probably means bailouts for some and good luck to everyone else. That's the pattern.
So, what the heck do we do with all this? Honestly, I felt disturbed since I finished writing this a few days ago. Just because I think I'm right about this doesn't mean I like these conclusions. And part of me is still wrestling with what I think the most constructive response to this will be. As I think, you know, I am obsessed with really just one question. How do we create the future we want? Obsessed. Frankly, I'm still processing how to do that in light of what I think is coming. Now, there's one thing I can tell you though with certainty. You and I, we'll do this together. I'll be here as we go doing my best to make sense of what's next. For now, today, I do have a few thoughts about what we do when the panic signals start appearing.
Now remember these signals, the language shift, the rebranding of architects as essential, the sudden urgency around control, right? When that starts happening, here are three things that will really, really matter. And I actually think they might matter even more now before the panic signals begin cuz who knows, maybe our collective energy and conversations and action can shift this in a different direction. So first one, we need to keep the conversation about income. Keep our focus on income. The architects in power, I think, are going to desperately want to talk about reskilling, new careers, jobs of the future. It's comforting and kind of irrelevant, right? Jobs are just a delivery mechanism for income. Like income is the thing that keeps people housed and fed and sane. So every time the conversation drifts toward identity and aspiration, pull it back to the most simple question on the table. How do people get money while this is shaking out? We can and should start asking this now. Keep the conversation focused on income.
Second, we need to watch who's getting protected and who's not and say it out loud, right? When the panic hits, protection will not be evenly distributed. Some groups will get carveouts, exemptions, and bailouts, and moral cover with narratives like, "These are our new essential workers who will protect us from the AI." Right? Everyone else is going to be just told to adapt. The most powerful move here isn't outrage. It's clarity. We need to quietly, persistently name this asymmetry before it becomes normal. Hopefully, this is one of the few things that could change the outcome here. We can do this right now. Start watching who's going to get protected and who's not and say it out loud. All right.
And the third thing, don't let panic become your go-to operating system. We can't let panic become our operating system. Remember, transitions like what's happening don't just disrupt economies. They scramble our psychology. Fear pushes people towards speculation and scapegoating and authoritarian shortcuts. Staying human under pressure. That's not passive. It's stabilizing for everybody around us. Slow down decisions. Refuse zero sum thinking. Keep your moral frame intact. This is how we avoid making our worst choices at the wrong moments. We can practice this now, too. Don't let panic become your go-to operating system.
I think right now that's the work, right? It's keeping the conversation focused on income. It's watching who's get protected and who's not and speaking out about it and not letting panic become our go-to operating system. This is the work. It's not about predicting the future. It's not about out hustling the machine. It's about noticing when fear starts making our decisions and refusing to let it be the smartest voice in the room. It is not. Speak up. Stay calm. Be courageous, my friends. Together, maybe we can nudge this in a different direction.
If this helped you see things more clearly, please share it with just one person you think should hear it. If I can help your leaders make sense of what's next, come find me at joshallen.com, josh lan.com. One more thing, please come back next week. I'm going to be building on today's topic. Uh, I'm not going to say too much about it now, but in making this episode, I had a bit of a mind-blowing realization about something that impacts every single one of us every single day. And I'm going to turn it into a full episode. We're going to talk about it next time. All right, that's all for now. Thanks for listening. See you next week. [music]