100 Percent Unemployment

Techno-Socialism and the way out

In recent days, the so-called clawdbot vibe coding phenomenon created a shockwave of realization that swept through the minds of many. For some this brought fear, but for most it seems to birth excitement. The revelation is that anyone can use Claud Code to be a software engineer or web developer. All you need to do is tell your clawdbot, in your common language, what you want, and it will translate your commands into machine code, building the software for you in seconds.

Combining this with the announcement from Anthropic leadership that Claud was now writing much of its own code, we are meant to believe that the software our clawdbots are capable of producing is of a like caliber. If you accept the story. Many are taking this to believe that the software development profession is effectively dead, and the software industry along with it. Experimenting with their own clawdbot agents at home, reports have been circling of individuals speaking basic instructions to their machines by which the agents are building custom software & integrations and thereby autonomous management of various aspects of the life of their human owners. People are teaching their bots to write software to replace the things they normally do. In other words, they are teaching the machines to replace themselves.

This idea that anyone can be a sophisticated developer is why many are concluding the software industry is dead. Indeed, if you can create a custom app and web front-end for any use case you can dream of, why would you pay a developer to do it for you and why would you choose to buy a version from a software company that is limited by their scope, scale, and business priorities? If the Claud Code story is true, then it would seem software development is indeed dead. But some of the questions we are not yet asking ourselves because of our mythology through which we accept AI include, is the AI version as good as the developer? Is it doing everything right? Is it missing anything key? Is it considering data security and my personal safety? Is it risky to integrate these systems together?

The moltbook phenomenon both ignited this sudden realization that AI is here and has been fanning the flames ever since. It is reported that a fad is sweeping through Silicon Valley in which techie types are building home instances of Claud AI and then turning physical and logical control over parts of their life to these bots. Connecting these agents together through the so-called social network for bots named moltbook is giving the indication that the potential for their self-growth and expansion is unlimited. In one video posted to social media, the operator of a clawdbot shows how he has used it to create an app that tracks his personal finances and gives him recommendations for how to save money. Not longer does the presenter need to track his own finances, nor apply his own wisdom, discernment, and intuition to his financial decisions. That is now the work of the bot. In the posted presentation he goes on to talk about applying this same technique to his professional work - write the app and let the clawdbot provide financial advice to his clients.

At the same time that this realization was playing out, tech stocks fell and the stock market indexes they carry turned red. Some market analysts tried to relate the clawdbot & moltbook phenomenon to the downward stock performance of tech companies, celebrating AI’s success as unexpectedly disruptive, which panicked investors. The tone of their celebration was that “we aren’t ready for this yet,” with the hint that “it” is “here.” The narrative that was woven in the moment by the talking heads on TV was that indeed AI was so successful that we didn’t anticipate how disruptive it would be to major industries like software-heavy Big Tech. Further, because we didn’t anticipate this success, investors were spooked and that caused a short-term sell-off. Some claimed that this shockwave was a wake-up-call and that we need to find ways to empower software developers to leverage AI so that we don’t crash the entire industry.

This analysis is incorrect, but more on that later.

All this comes on the heels of economic reports indicating we are trending away from our normal signs of financial prosperity. Tech-related layoffs are increasing, now at levels not seen since the height of COVID. Personal debt is at an all-time high. The value of the dollar is dropping steeply while precious metals are breaking records weekly. And concerns about increased unemployment due to AI are leading to increasing calls for the government to step in with Universal Basic Income (UBI).

Tech stocks falling is a very big deal. You see, the US economy and by extension the general wealth and financial prosperity of Americans, is largely dependent on Big Tech. This has been the case ever since the dot-com boom of the late 1990s, but increasingly so in recent years as investors went all-in on the AI story. As one example of the general transfer of wealth that has happened at the scale of the US economy, according to companiesmarketcap.com, NVIDIA was valued at $367 billion in 2023 and was then ranked as the 17th largest company by market capitalization. Just two years later and thanks to the massive transfer of investment wealth to AI, NVIDIA is now number 1 in market capitalization value at over $4 trillion. For reference, in 2023 the number 1 company in market value was Apple at roughly $2 trillion. Now absent from the list of top companies are the normal representatives of the rest of the economy; energy, finance, medicine, manufacturing, and retail. They were all present in 2023 but are absent in the AI Revolution of 2025 and beyond. They have all been replaced by AI and Big Tech.

This investment shift largely happened as Big Tech CEOs advertised the moment of breakaway ROI was here in the form of AI. They promised investors that profits would skyrocket as operating expenses decreased, thanks to replacing people with machines. They promised that products and services would get to market faster through automated manufacturing and more efficient business processes. They claimed that R&D time would be reduced by the intelligence of the machines and products & services could be easily adapted and tailored to different demographics and customers. They promised that AI would deliver for them the next technology boom and now was the time to get in. Investors were in part investing in 100% unemployment.

This is all giving us a micro example of the AI Revolution. We are seeing in real-time an example of the rough transition that Elon Musk has been warning is ahead for us as the vision of the AI Revolutionaries plays out. And much of the response among market analysts and talking heads on TV is all part of the great spell casting that is creating the illusion needed for all of this to come to pass through a peaceful, though deceptive, transition. As is said in business leadership circles, they are managing expectations. But if we can look through the fog that is being generated and blown into our field of vision, we can see what is really happening, the great risks ahead, and a path back to sanity.

The goal of the AI Revolution is and has always been 100% unemployment. That reality will necessitate a new structure of society and a new form of government; a socialist technocracy built to replace capitalism and democracy. This has always been the plan. But of course the average American will not vote for a centrally managed total surveillance state that distributes wealth in the form of cryptocurrency based on individual social credit scores, because we know that is socialism, and in general we’re still opposed to that ideology. Instead we need to be lured into a dream that we want so badly to be reality that we will silently and slowly give ourselves over to it with as little friction as possible. The gateway is of course the thousands of use cases for AI that people are adopting everyday thanks to aggressive marketing by AI-firms and spurred on by events like the rise of the clawdbots, and talking heads on TV who intentionally misinterpret the impact to financial markets.

Elon Musk regularly says of the AI powered future that, “none of us will have a job.” When he speaks of his Optimus AI-powered robot, he describes that it is being designed and trained to do everything humans do, from everyday household chores to farming, mining, manufacturing, and even law enforcement. He says Optimus will be the most successful product of all time. This, Elon says, will “eliminate poverty,” because everyone will have the means to produce and procure anything they want. His vision continues with an interesting warning though: “Anyone can have any products or services that they want. But there will be a lot of trauma and disruption along the way.” Yeah, like destroying entire industries that currently generate the majority of wealth we depend upon as a society.

Sam Altman of OpenAI tells us his socialist vision of the AGI world was inspired by his experiences at a Burning Man event saying it was, “one possible part of what the post-AGI world can look like,” and “people are just focused on doing stuff for each other, caring for each other, and making incredible gifts to give each other.” Altman has also discussed the future AGI world as one in which every one of us will have the power of all of us combined together and with that power we will do things we cannot yet imagine today. He says that in this new world, our devices will constantly be observing us, anticipating our needs, and proactively working to meet them before we even know it. While being open rivals, Musk and Atlman agree on a future state of humanity that is something like perpetual vacation and self indulgence; machines as slaves, mankind as immortal explorers of self and experience. But they are rivals because both know there can be only one company to rule in the planned technocracy.

This isn’t a secret. These AI Revolutionaries talk about this openly and excitedly. The future they are working to implement is a work-free world where all our needs are anticipated and then provided for by AI powered machines. The machines themselves will even be self-sustaining; mining the materials they need to create more of themselves and building and operating all the things needed to sustain life for humans. Factories, machines, assembly lines, everything run by robots. Most of our lives are already governable digitally thanks to our transition to the online world over the past two decades.

But AGI isn’t here yet. Or so they say, while also having said repeatedly that it is “here” and the so-called “singularity” has already happened. Indeed in Big Tech, CEOs were telling investors in 2023 that AI was a reality and 2024 was going to be the year of adoption followed by 2025 as the year of the Revolution. This is why they transferred all their investment wealth into AI. 2026 is being called the year of the singularity and 2027 is the promised realization of the dream. While the timeline is fuzzy, it is progressing forward.

However, this can only come to pass if we allow it and if the technology is actually capable. Indeed the Revolution depends on us to build this new world willingly. One of the incentives being dangled before our eyes is universal prosperity, or as Elon Musk calls it “universal high income.” But this is an all-in or all-out situation. We either have to move it all to AI, or none of it. So let us examine that trajectory and the pain ahead to see if this effort is feasible and worth the prize.

Let’s say the recent clawdbot story is truly representative of what is to come; that the bots have replaced software development and all related professions and businesses. Anyone can code anything from home with their in-house clawdbot. Anyone can be a world-class developer, so all the businesses collapse and the people lose their developer jobs. How do these no-longer-employed developers earn an income? The theory is that you can increase your personal wealth by using your home clawdbot to develop a bunch of professional grade apps and web services that you can sell directly to others. Your new unemployment means you get to escape the confines of your former employer and with your 24x7x365 running self-learning bot assistant, you can create, build, sell, and ship at an infinite scale. The problem is, if you have that capability at home, then so will everyone else. Rather than potential customers buying your app, all they need to do is tell their clawdbot to figure out how to copy and recreate it for them. So rather than higher wealth, you’ll just be giving away your ideas.

This being the case, our software developers will have no way to procure income. The next option is to pivot to another career. Learn different skills and try something else. The problem with that is this AI story is supposed to repeat across the entire economy. As companies try to adopt this transformation they are laying off employees and are not hiring - especially not for jobs that the robots can allegedly do automatically. Alas, our software developers are jobless, unemployable, and without income. They are but among the first with many more to soon follow.

As the AI Revolution expands to replace writers, teachers, artists, engineers, developers, doctors, researchers etc. each of these people groups will find themselves unemployed, unemployable, and without income. Why go to my doctor when my AI bot can read my symptoms, diagnose my issue, and prescribe the remedy to restore my health? With fewer patients, doctors will decline along with software engineers. Without income, these people will not be able to buy the resources they need to live, let alone things that enrich life into the level of luxury we currently enjoy and which the AI automations are supposedly designed to provide. Remember that “innovation” is one of the major selling points of AI; new things produced faster for higher ROI.

As all these businesses convert to AI-heavy operations and make shareholders happy by increasingly inflating their profitability by dropping their operating costs, they are also destroying the buying power their customers depend upon to buy their products and services to begin with. As McDonalds, WalMart, Sales Force, Amazon, Microsoft and others continue to lay off staff who cannot be employed elsewhere, they are destroying the individual person’s ability to earn income sufficient to buy the things these companies are producing via AI.

Where does that lead us? Widespread unemployment and poverty. That is the economic pain that Elon Musk knows is coming as we head down this path, and that is why he uses the phrase Universal High Income (UHI) rather than Universal Basic Income (UBI). It’s all part of the spell casting, or AI marketing that keeps us believing in the AI powered future. We are familiar with unemployment and UBI since it is a core component of the socialism we have long rejected. UHI is the same concept but packaged to be more palatable. But without income, people revolt. That always happens. Without the ability to get what we need to survive, people tend to turn to crime. No sitting President or elected politician will accept high unemployment rates, general poverty, high crime, and widespread death due to illness and malnutrition. So they will be forced, soon and very soon, to implement a new system of social provision administered by the government. That is, if we continue to destroy our own ways of earning income. UHI sounds a lot better than UBI, so UHI it will be.

But where will this new system get its high wealth? Where will the government get money in order to redistribute it to those who have been replaced by machines? No one seems to have a proposal for that yet. No one seems to be talking about it. But the framework is being laid in the form of cryptocurrency and central bank digital currency. Will Elon’s fleet of Optimus machines and his recently spoken of concept of the “self-growing” colony on mars and the moon be the answer? Who will build the robots that will run all the things of life, and who will decide how and where they operate and to what ends? Some system will need to exist to determine what will be done to produce and distribute goods and services, and of course we will have personal preferences that create imbalances in the consumption of goods and services. Capitalism has always been our answer to this challenge. But Capitalism doesn’t go well with the 100% unemployment goal of the AI Revolution.

Consider that unemployment dilemma again. If individuals have no jobs, then they cannot earn income. If they have no income, then they cannot buy what they need or want. If no one has buying power, then businesses will have no one to sell to and no means to finance production, operations, or services. If businesses cannot function, then the government has no income to draw via taxes - corporate or personal. Our economic system is simply incompatible with the AI-powered future, which means the AI future will need to be avoided, or capitalism replaced. If replaced, the question is, with what?

We have some insights to draw from here as well. The AI story tells us that once AGI is achieved, the first to achieve it will have total control over all competing AI models. It will be able to out-think, out-perform, out-manuver anything else and its own growth will be exponential as it re-writes its own code based on what it has self-learned. There can be only one provider of AGI. Maybe two or three at most. Anything that tries to compete will be evaluated and outsmarted by the smarter AGI. That is why Musk and Altman are at such odds these days. That is why as some have speculated, xAI is the only real business that Elon Musk is pursuing. That is why investors are all-in on NVIDIA and whichever AI company seems to have the competitive edge. There can be only one. That is also why Project Genesis seemingly exists, as members of the Department of War have spoken of AI as the new frontier that must be conquered and that we must conquer it first. Whomever gets “there” first, wins it all. It is a march to not only socialism in America, but for the world.

And via that one power, all resources will be distributed to everyone for the common good and well being of mankind. Total transcendence of the human condition achieved. So we are told.

And whatever that common good will be, it may be forced. Larry Ellison has included in his vision of the AGI future, a world in which citizens are under constant and total surveillance by AI and where morality is enforced on the spot whenever someone falls out of line. In sharing his vision of the future police state, he said “Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.” That one central technocracy that also distributes our wealth and healthcare will be watching to make sure we behave all the time. China does this, and it’s called social credit.

All that is needed of us now is to use AI today in every possible context and in every possible aspect of life. The AI Revolution depends on widespread adoption because that not only prepares us mentally to accept governance by the technology, it also facilitates the building and expansion and sophistication of the technology. As we use it, we teach it how to do what we do and what we want it to do for us. And in so doing we are divesting ourselves into the machines and giving them agency over us. It’s happening at a very small scale first - just your finances perhaps, or your companions, or your knowledge system, or your decision making and source of wisdom - but it will expand.

Is this the future that Americans want? Do we want techno-socialism or technocracy in total control of our lives? Many do indeed for the promises of that future world are too great for many to let go of. We are promised peace, prosperity, no more illness, no more death, all our questions answered, all our needs provided for, life optimized in every way, no barriers of any kind.

Despite the incentives, I believe we do not want this to come to pass, for it will not be good for us to build a god that seeks to make us gods. More than that, I believe it cannot come to pass.

I believe this danger as well as the vision for the answer is laid out before us in the works of C.S. Lewis often called The Ransom Trilogy. Specifically, I believe the antidote to this dark future is to do all we can to preserve all the expertise and activity that we now currently possess. We need to remain as teachers, writers, speakers, engineers, poets, developers, coders, musicians, pilots, police officers, judges, legislators, bankers, financial planners, friends, companions, families, and spouses.

We need to be greater than the machines, better than AI. Because we in fact are. We always will be. For we were made in the image of God and this world was made for us to dwell in. We need to be the best of all the roles listed above. Because we alone can be. But this also means we need to accept our limitations, because they too are part of God’s design.

The answer for us is to understand who God is, how He has created us individually, and what role we each get to play among others in this world. The answer is in applying your skills in meaningful and difficult work so that you find value and personal growth in who you are. The answer is finding a spouse and committing to life together as you build a family in which you encounter and live a new and deeper purpose and mission, which too should be wrapped in a community that shares and enables it. That mission includes continuing on. Continue the cycle. Continue being human.

The answer is abstaining from the use of AI. The underlying technology has a place and it has value, but it is not found via this Revolution. This AI Revolution is something else entirely. It is the undoing of man and the prudent thing to do in the face of that, is to be everything about man and to do it with the highest degree of excellence and fullest extent possible in the proper hierarchy of life that God has established and revealed for us all for His glory. This is best embodied through the church, through Christians living in community, and through the sacramental life. And all of that is realized through the activity of being human in all the work and fun and difficulties we engage in. Delegating all this to machines degrades humanity and prevents us from being who we are meant to be.

Rather than bringing all things under the lordship of the machines, we need to remember to bring all things under the Lordship of Christ.

There is hope that this dark future is not inevitable despite the several Executive Orders by the President that are trying to make it so. I also believe that the AI story may not be possible at all. We are seeing cracks form in the foundation already, and that is why tech stocks were recently shaking. It’s not because of the success of AI as demonstrated by clawdbots and vibe coding, but rather the adjacent failures of AI illustrated in OpenAI’s financial problems, NVIDIA’s scaling back of manufacturing, OpenAI’s backing down of data center build plans, frustrations reported by customers of OpenAI and Microsoft as their AI solutions did not provide the outcomes promised, the many and constant failures of Grok, and a resistance among men to be replaced by machines.

It seems to me that the near-term future will be painful indeed, but it may spur us toward recapturing, by force, the essence and true story of humanity. The key for us is the example given by those who lived in the failed transitions to communism of the mid 1900s throughout Eastern Europe. Dissidents in those countries worked in silence and secret to preserve culture, wisdom, tradition, and identity. They protected it by living it and teaching others to do the same. When the iron curtain fell and the younger generation was ready, those protected seeds of heritage were replanted and culture began to take root again.

I believe this is the path for us in this moment of the AI Revolution in the United States. We are in fact witnessing our own form of socialist revolution where 100 percent unemployment has always been the plan, and ironically also the promised benefit. Alas, what is an unemployed man to do? What will his identity be rooted in? How will he find meaning in life? To ask those questions, we are told, is to misunderstand the point and value of progress itself. If we are asking “if we should” then we are being very poor progressives, which means it is all the more urgent to ask. The AI Revolution requires us to not look ahead and wonder where we are going, what the cost will be, and what consequences may come. So I say look forward. Look forward earnestly and whenever prompted to use AI ask yourself this question: “is this what we want?”