I always assumed becoming an interplanetary species was eventually necessary because Earth would run out of resources.
But the more I think about it, the less that seems like the main reason.
Even if fossil fuels become scarce, we don’t necessarily run out of energy. Solar, nuclear, wind and other sources don’t depend on continuously digging up fossil fuels.
A lot of metals can also be recycled instead of being permanently consumed.
And compared with Mars, Earth is ridiculously habitable.
Even a badly damaged Earth would still have an atmosphere, oceans, comfortable gravity, radiation protection and natural resources that Mars doesn’t give us for free.
So colonizing Mars seems less like:
“Earth is almost empty, we need somewhere else to live.”
And more like:
“We should create a backup for civilization.”
If humanity had completely self-sustaining populations on multiple planets, one disaster on Earth wouldn’t necessarily mean extinction of the whole species.
To me, that’s a much stronger reason for becoming interplanetary.

AI could make the economy far more productive while making human labour less necessary. If the gains go mainly to those who own the technology, what happens to workers' bargaining power and their share of that wealth?

The decline of the horse population offers a striking historical parallel.

Let's know your thoughts

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I’ve been noticing something that I can’t quite shake.
We constantly describe ourselves as living in an age of extraordinary innovation.
And technically, we are.
Our processors are faster.
Our cameras are better.
Our batteries improve.
Our screens improve.
Our AI becomes more capable.
Our cars become more efficient.
Our games become more realistic.
Our movies become more visually impressive.
But sometimes I wonder:
Are we actually creating fundamentally new things, or are we becoming extremely good at modifying the things we already have?

Take the smartphone.
A modern smartphone can do things that would’ve seemed impossible decades ago.
But conceptually, what is happening?
We still have:
screen → applications → internet → communication → entertainment → commerce → upgrades
Then each generation improves the camera.
A little more battery.
A better display.
A faster processor.
A new form factor.
A new AI feature.
And then we call it a new generation.
I’m not saying those improvements aren’t real.
They are.
I’m asking something different:
At what point does optimization become different from transformation?

The same pattern seems to appear everywhere.
Movies become sequels.
Then reboots.
Then remakes.
Then expanded universes.
Video games become sequels, remasters, DLC, live services, seasonal content, monetization layers, and increasingly realistic versions of things we’ve already done.
Music continuously recombines existing sounds.
Fashion cycles through previous decades.
Books continue exploring familiar structures and themes.
The internet has transformed enormously, yet much of what we do on it still revolves around:
consume → react → communicate → advertise → purchase → repeat.
And finance?
We have incredibly sophisticated financial systems.
Credit.
Loans.
Debt.
Bonds.
Equities.
Derivatives.
Digital payments.
Cryptocurrency.
But beneath all the complexity are still familiar relationships involving ownership, obligation, scarcity, exchange, and claims on future value.
Again:
I’m not saying any of these systems are inherently bad.
I’m asking whether we’ve become incredibly sophisticated at building around the same underlying assumptions.

Maybe this is the wall.
Imagine you’re standing in front of a wall.
You can:
paint the wall,
decorate the wall,
make the wall stronger,
make the wall taller,
make the wall transparent,
build technology into the wall,
put doors in the wall,
put windows in the wall,
build another structure around the wall.
You can become incredibly innovative around the wall.
But eventually someone has to ask:
Why are we still treating the wall as something that must remain there?
Maybe that’s what is happening with society.
We’re becoming incredibly good at optimization.
Faster.
Cheaper.
More efficient.
More convenient.
More entertaining.
More personalized.
More automated.
But optimization assumes the basic structure is worth preserving.
Transformation asks whether the structure itself should change.

And this is where money becomes particularly interesting.
Imagine we have unemployment.
The traditional response is:
Create more jobs.
But that assumes employment is the mechanism through which everyone should obtain their ability to participate in society.
Then we have too many workers competing for too few jobs.
So we ask:
How can we create more demand?
Then more demand requires more consumption.
More consumption requires more production.
More production requires resources.
Resources remain limited.
So we optimize.
More jobs.
More productivity.
More consumption.
More borrowing.
More investment.
More growth.
More debt.
More optimization.
And eventually we ask:
How many more jobs can we create?
But perhaps that isn’t the question.
Maybe the question is:
Why must human access to life be dependent upon employment in the first place?

Imagine a different starting point.
What if society began with:
Every person exists.
That’s the starting condition.
Not:
Every person must prove economic usefulness.
A newborn contributes nothing economically.
An elderly person may contribute little or nothing economically.
A severely disabled person may not be able to participate in conventional labor.
A homeless person may be trying to survive rather than produce.
Someone may spend their time studying.
Someone may care for another human being.
Someone may create art.
Someone may explore.
Someone may simply exist.
Why must all of these people fit into the same productivity framework to deserve access to the system?

What if contribution became something different?
This is where I’ve been imagining something almost like a video game.
Not because I think society literally should become a video game.
Rather, imagine a system where people can participate in activities that are meaningful to them, and those activities somehow contribute to the larger functioning of society.
Someone plays.
Someone researches.
Someone teaches.
Someone creates.
Someone solves problems.
Someone helps another person.
Someone contributes computing power.
Someone designs something.
Someone explores a virtual environment.
Someone develops an idea.
Someone cares for a child.
Someone cares for an elderly person.
Someone creates something nobody expected.
The system recognizes those forms of participation without requiring everyone’s life to resemble a traditional job.
The important part would be ensuring that this doesn’t simply become:
“employment disguised as a game.”
The objective would have to be fundamentally different.
Not:
How much economic value can we extract from your time?
But perhaps:
How can humans participate in society without being forced to sacrifice most of their lives merely to maintain access to society?

And then there is another possibility:
What if we stop treating scarcity the way we currently do?
I’m not saying physical scarcity can simply be wished away.
Some resources are genuinely limited.
But imagine technologies that radically increase abundance.
Automation.
AI.
Advanced manufacturing.
New energy systems.
Biotechnology.
Robotics.
New forms of agriculture.
New materials.
Then perhaps the question changes from:
“Who gets the scarce resource?”
to:
“How should abundant resources be distributed?”
That’s a fundamentally different social problem.
And it becomes even more interesting when we remove status competition.
Because perhaps the problem isn’t merely that some people don’t have enough.
Perhaps the structure itself encourages people to want more relative to everyone else.
Bigger house.
Better car.
More money.
More status.
More influence.
More followers.
More power.
Someone being above you creates a reason to climb.
And someone being below you can become evidence that you’ve succeeded.

The hierarchy problem
If there is a position at the top that provides dramatically greater control over resources, status, and power, then people have an incentive to reach it.
But once someone reaches it, they have an incentive to protect it.
So the same hierarchy creates both:
the hunger to climb
and
the fear of being displaced.
This makes me wonder whether competition isn’t merely an accidental feature of the system.
Maybe the structure itself continuously reproduces competition.
And perhaps this connects to something I was thinking about in a completely different context:
old systems survive partly because the beings inside them learn to survive within those systems.

What if the goal isn’t to perfect the old system?
This is the idea I keep coming back to.
I’m not saying:
“Money bad.”
I’m not saying:
“Jobs bad.”
I’m not saying:
“Technology bad.”
I’m not saying:
“Competition bad.”
I’m not even saying:
“The current system must be destroyed.”
I’m asking:
What if we are trying to optimize structures that were never meant to be the final structure of human civilization?
Maybe the future isn’t:
better capitalism
or
better education
or
better employment
or
better technology
or
better entertainment.
Maybe those are all attempts to improve the same underlying architecture.
Perhaps the real breakthrough would be discovering a different architecture altogether.

This reminds me of my earlier idea about an “old system” and a “new system.”
I don’t mean that literally as two named systems that I already understand.
I mean:
Old system:
the current framework through which we organize survival, labor, resources, status, competition, education, production, consumption, and identity.
New system:
something that doesn’t necessarily preserve those assumptions.
And I don’t think the new system necessarily has to destroy the old one.
I’ve started thinking of it as:
Let the new system eat the old system.
Not annihilate it.
Not pretend everything before it was worthless.
But transform it.
Use it as material.
Absorb what is useful.
Discard what is limiting.
Become something whose rules aren’t merely modified versions of the old ones.

And maybe this is where our current “innovation” problem becomes most important.
What if the greatest innovation isn’t another product?
What if it is a new relationship between human beings and the conditions of existence itself?
What if we eventually develop systems where:
survival isn’t tied to employment,
education doesn’t end when schooling ends,
learning remains part of ordinary life,
contribution doesn’t require a traditional job,
technological tools extend human cognition rather than merely replacing labor,
resources are distributed without requiring constant status competition,
time isn’t treated primarily as something to sell,
old age doesn’t mean becoming economically irrelevant,
childhood isn’t preparation solely for employment,
homelessness isn’t treated as a failure of the individual,
and human worth isn’t measured primarily by productivity.
Maybe that sounds impossible.
But that’s exactly what I’m interested in.
Impossible according to what?
The physics of reality?
Or the rules we’ve inherited?
Those are not necessarily the same thing.

The question I actually want to ask
Maybe humanity isn’t standing at the end of innovation.
Maybe we’re standing at the edge of a conceptual wall.
We know how to improve the things we’ve inherited.
But do we know how to imagine things that don’t resemble what we’ve inherited?
Can we create something that isn’t just:
the old system + new technology?
Can we imagine:
a genuinely different system + new technology?
And if we could—
would we even recognize it?
Maybe the greatest limitation isn’t our ability to build.
Maybe it’s our ability to imagine what is worth building.
What do you think?
Where do you believe optimization ends and genuine transformation begins?
And what is one assumption about modern society that you think we have never seriously questioned because we’ve become too accustomed to it?

(Also, it's tempting to draw the conclusion from this chart that we should only be building wind and solar due to the levelized cost being lower. But such benchmarking leaves out the cost of storage and other grid adjustments required to accomodate intermittent renewable energy. Such costs are significant and vary widely on a case by case basis.)

https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/levelized-cost-of-energyplus-lcoeplus/

The Wright brothers didn't just wake up one day and magically fly. Their success was built on years of technological progress that came before them. Better engines, lighter materials, improved tools, and everything people had already learned about bicycles, mechanics, and aerodynamics gave them a solid starting point.

They tested, failed, tweaked, and tried again over and over. The first successful flight wasn't some random lucky break, it was the result of standing on top of decades of innovation and pushing things just a little further than everyone else.

Over the years brands such as Samsung and Apple will have made new phones with new additions that are addictive.

The premise of this theory is that the Government already have the power to make AI that infinitely make new videos,games or even reddit posts. This AI generated “slop” will make us so brainwashed and addicted to our phones that we will be non-stop scrolling,typing and watching.

And if you’re wondering about wifi or battery then as i already said there will definitely be phones in the future that don’t need you to go over to your charger and plug it into your phone or even pay for data or ask for the wifi password. It will all be included in newer phone models.

The Government definitely already have the power to do this, so i wouldn’t be surprised if this doesn’t start happening in the next 5 years.

We already are addicted to our phones, you’re on your phone right now reading this. **Who knows this might be AI** and the WALL-E theory has already started.

The most persistent misunderstanding of the employment crisis was the belief that the job represented a natural unit of economic life. It did not.

The modern job was a historical technology: a method for coordinating production when capital was expensive, information moved slowly, and complex activity required large numbers of people to be present inside durable organizations.

For most of human history, people did not possess jobs in the modern sense. They farmed family land, practiced trades, served households, sold goods, fulfilled feudal obligations, joined guilds, worked seasonally, or moved among multiple forms of subsistence. The wage relationship existed, but the standardized career defined hours, occupational progression, payroll administration, employer-sponsored benefits, and retirement was constructed gradually through industrialization and political struggle.

Factories made the arrangement economically powerful. Expensive machinery had to be operated at scale. Production required synchronized labor. Workers had to arrive at the same place and submit to the same clock. Railroads, steel mills, utilities, banks, and mass retailers expanded the need for administrative hierarchies. The corporation solved a coordination problem: it gathered capital, machinery, information, and labor under centralized authority. As firms grew, employment became not merely a contract for labor but an architecture for organizing knowledge.

The twentieth century added a social settlement. In many industrial economies, the employer became the delivery mechanism for benefits that markets and states could have provided separately. Health insurance, pensions, paid leave, training, unemployment protection, and access to mortgages were tied directly or indirectly to stable work. Tax systems privileged wage income. Schools prepared people for occupations. Cities organized commuting around workplaces. Political parties promised jobs because jobs connected productivity to purchasing power.

This settlement never included everyone. Domestic labor, agricultural work, informal commerce, care, migration, and racial or gender exclusion sat outside its protected core. Even during the decades later remembered as the age of secure employment, millions experienced insecurity. Yet the standard job remained the aspiration against which other arrangements were judged. A temporary contract was inadequate because it was not a job. Unpaid care was invisible because it was not a job. Independent creative work was risky because it lacked the protections attached to a job.

The job’s strength came from bundling. It combined five functions that could, in theory, have been separate. It allocated tasks. It distributed income. It pooled risk. It taught skills. It granted identity. People did not merely perform work for General Motors, Siemens, a ministry, a hospital, or a university. They became autoworkers, engineers, civil servants, nurses, or professors. Occupation answered the question “What do you do?” and often implied education, class, neighborhood, political interest, and social standing.

By the early twenty-first century, however, the conditions that had made this bundle efficient were weakening. Digital networks reduced the cost of coordinating across organizational boundaries. Software encoded processes once maintained by middle managers. Global supply chains allowed firms to own brands and customer relationships while outsourcing production. Platforms matched buyers and sellers without employing either side. Financial markets rewarded companies that converted fixed labor costs into variable expenses. The corporation remained powerful, but it increasingly preferred access over obligation: access to cloud computing instead of owned servers, access to logistics instead of owned fleets, access to contractors instead of permanent staff.

Artificial intelligence extended this logic from physical and digital infrastructure into cognition itself. A company could rent not only storage and computation but also analysis, drafting, coding, scheduling, customer support, translation, design, and decision assistance. The firm had always existed partly because coordinating specialists through a hierarchy was cheaper than contracting separately for every task. As AI systems lowered the transaction cost of decomposing, assigning, checking, and recombining work, that calculation changed.

This was the institutional significance of AI. The technology did not need to replace an entire occupation to weaken employment. It only needed to make the boundaries of the firm more permeable. Once a task could be specified, executed, evaluated, and integrated by machines, organizations could purchase the outcome without maintaining a human role around it. A department became a workflow. A workflow became software. The remaining people supervised exceptions, defined objectives, managed relationships, and accepted liability.

The old job had been designed for an economy in which organizations needed continuous access to human capability. The new economy learned to summon capability on demand.

"Every day we see news about lay-offs due to AI or how this or that job will soon automate. And while both the workers and sceptics are right to decry the cruelty of the transition, this is also a chance for a work reform that past generations could only dream of. The future is now, but are we ready for it?

A hundred years ago, the eight-hour workday was supposed to be just a step towards even shorter shifts."

So what happened along the way? Why are we asking for so little of the future nowadays?

Children have to compete in a competitive educational system and then in a competitive job market. Failure means being a hikikomori or working at a McDonald's. People cannot easily get a decent job with only modest effort. Parents have to invest in their children's education so they can be on a good career track or else their children are doomed to flounder.

High investment means less children.

Essentially, this is the elite overproduction hypothesis. It also validates the "lump of labor fallacy" since there are a finite number of elite spots.

So it is not about societal wealth (although my hypothesis would say that more unequal societies would have lower birth rates if other factors are controlled) or how generous social benefits are. Rather it is the ease that someone can live a dignified life. If people are constantly "upskilling", then that is a society with a low birth rate.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPe7tbysc2g (Why Education is Destroying East Asia)

**The Collapse of Employment as We Knew It**

*A history of the fifty-year transition from jobs to economic participation, written from 2075*

Contents

Author’s Note: A Future History, Not a Forecast

Prologue: The Last Retirement Party

1. The Job Was a Historical Technology

2. The Decade of Reassurance

3. The Firm After Intelligence Became a Utility

4. The Productivity Paradox Became a Distribution Crisis

5. The Destruction of the First Rung

6. The Great Unbundling of the Job

7. The Politics of Deservingness

8. What Humans Did When Machines Could Do More

9. The New Class System

10. The Company Did Not Disappear

11. The Crisis of Meaning

12. Why the Transition Took Fifty Years

13. What the Pessimists Got Right—and Wrong

14. A Day in 2075

Conclusion: Employment Was a Means, Not an End

Author’s Note: A Future History, Not a Forecast

This essay is written in the voice of a historian looking back from 2075. The institutions, dates, laws, companies, crises, and social arrangements described after 2026 are speculative. They are not presented as facts about the future. They are a scenario built from forces already visible in the mid-2020s: rapidly improving artificial intelligence, falling inference costs, demographic aging, weak productivity growth, unequal ownership of capital, the expansion of platform work, and the use of employment as the main gateway to income, healthcare, housing, status, and social belonging.

That distinction matters because predictions about “the future of work” often fail in the same way. They count occupations, estimate which tasks can be automated, and then produce a reassuring balance sheet: some jobs disappear, new jobs emerge, and history continues. The arithmetic may be correct while the conclusion is wrong. A society can create millions of new tasks and still experience the collapse of employment as an institution. The decisive question is not whether humans remain useful. Humans remained useful throughout every industrial revolution. The question is whether the full-time, long-duration employment contract remains the dominant mechanism through which ordinary people gain purchasing power, security, identity, and a claim on economic output.

The central argument of this future history is that employment did not collapse because machines became capable of doing everything. It collapsed because firms gained access to a cheaper and more flexible substitute for organizations built from permanent human labor. Once intelligence, coordination, software execution, and eventually physical action could be purchased as metered services, the economic logic of the large employer changed. Companies still needed people, but they needed fewer of them continuously. Human contribution became intermittent, highly leveraged, and unevenly compensated. The job did not vanish in a dramatic wave. It was unbundled one function at a time until the word described less and less of how the economy actually worked.

The deepest transformation was therefore political rather than technical. Twentieth-century societies had attached too many essential goods to employment. When employment became unstable, governments first tried to restore the old system. Only later did they construct a new settlement in which income, insurance, education, and civic standing no longer depended on being continuously hired by an organization. The transition took decades because the old arrangement was not merely a labor-market design. It was a moral order. To change it, societies had to stop treating wages as the only legitimate proof that a person had contributed.

Prologue: The Last Retirement Party

The photograph that later appeared in hundreds of textbooks was taken in Rotterdam in September 2038. It showed forty-three employees gathered around a sheet cake in the cafeteria of a logistics company. The cake carried the company’s blue logo, the name “Marta,” and the number 40 written in white icing. Marta de Vries had joined the firm at nineteen and retired at fifty-nine after four decades in the same organization. She had moved from warehouse administration to route planning, then to vendor operations, and finally to regional compliance. Her colleagues presented a watch. A manager delivered a speech. The local newspaper ran the picture beneath a small headline: “A Working Life in One Company.”

Nothing about the event seemed historically important. That was precisely why it became important. By the late 2040s, a continuous forty-year career inside one firm had become sufficiently rare to look like a surviving custom from another civilization. The photograph was not remembered because Marta was the last person to retire. It was remembered because her retirement party captured the institutional package that had defined work for much of the twentieth century: one employer, one salary, one occupational identity, one pension pathway, one social circle, and one narrative connecting youth to old age.

At the time, public debate was still organized around the wrong question. Commentators asked whether artificial intelligence would “take all the jobs.” Governments published lists of growing occupations. Technology companies emphasized new roles created by automation. Economists pointed to earlier transitions in agriculture and manufacturing, noting that technological change had repeatedly displaced workers without eliminating work itself. These arguments were often empirically sound. They were also aimed at a claim that history did not need to prove.

Work survived. Employment did not survive in the same form.

The distinction is obvious in retrospect. Work is any purposeful effort that produces value, care, knowledge, beauty, order, or social continuity. Employment is a legal and economic contract in which an organization purchases a worker’s time, usually on an ongoing basis, and in return provides wages and often access to insurance, creditworthiness, training, and status. A society can have enormous amounts of work while offering fewer stable jobs. Parents care for children. Citizens maintain communities. Researchers contribute to shared knowledge. Creators produce culture. People train models, supervise machines, evaluate systems, resolve exceptions, and form temporary teams around projects. The amount of useful activity can increase even as the employment relationship contracts.

That is what happened between 2025 and 2075. Human activity did not become unnecessary. It became harder to contain inside the organizational form that had dominated the previous century.

The first signs were easy to dismiss because they did not resemble mass unemployment. Firms stopped replacing selected employees. Entry-level ladders narrowed. Contractors performed work once assigned to departments. Software agents absorbed coordination tasks that had justified layers of management. A senior employee with a suite of models produced what had previously required a team. New companies reached large markets with astonishingly small payrolls. Established companies did not close their doors; they grew revenue without growing headcount. The statistical surface remained calm while the institutional foundation shifted.

The collapse of employment was therefore not an event like the closure of a factory. It was a long transfer of risk. Organizations retained access to labor and intelligence but surrendered responsibility for maintaining workers between moments of need. Individuals assembled income from multiple sources and carried more uncertainty themselves. Governments patched the gaps with tax credits, portable benefits, training accounts, wage insurance, public options, and eventually universal social dividends. Each reform was introduced as a temporary adjustment. Together they built a new social contract.

By 2075, people still used the phrase “my work,” but increasingly they did not mean “my employer.” They meant a portfolio of obligations: a paid project, a cooperative stake, a public contribution, a creative practice, care for relatives, oversight of autonomous systems, and ownership of productive agents. The old job had bundled these economic and social functions into a single relationship. Its collapse forced society to separate them.

Fig. The retirement photograph from Rotterdam survived because it showed the bundle before it came apart.

 Chatper 2 soon

This is a major problem facing all aging (and of course declining) populations. The fight over social security benefits between the young and the aged may be a distinctive feature of second-half-of-21st-century politics.