McKinsey recently published a report saying AI could automate 57% of US work hours.
The debate that followed was predictable: Will jobs disappear? Will skills evolve? Will humans and machines partner?
Everyone is missing the point.
The question isn’t whether AI will take jobs. The question is whether the mechanism that has allowed humans to participate in the economy for 300 years still works.
I don’t think it does.
The Invisible Assumption
Every major economic theory since Adam Smith rests on a simple idea: humans enter the economy through labour.
You start somewhere. You learn. You get better. You move up. Your wages rise with your skills.
This is the ladder.
Smith’s division of labour assumes it. Ricardo’s comparative advantage assumes it. Marx’s labour theory of value assumes it. Solow’s growth model assumes it. Modern human-capital theory assumes it.
The ladder wasn’t a policy. It was the entry mechanism for human participation.
Why This Time Is Different
Previous technologies replaced muscle. Tractors reduced farm labour. Robots transformed factories. But new industries still required humans to start at the bottom and learn.
AI breaks this pattern.
AI enters the economy already capable. There is no “junior AI” learning the ropes. No apprenticeship. No gradual climb. AI starts at the top of the capability curve on day one.
The expert jobs may evolve, but the entry-level work—the place where humans once learned by doing—is disappearing.
A ladder with no bottom rungs isn’t a ladder.
Where the Value Goes
When the entry mechanism breaks, value doesn’t vanish. It moves.
It flows to capital—whoever owns the models, the compute, the data, the infrastructure.
For more than a century, capital was forced to share value with labour because it depended on human workers. That dependency created the middle class.
AI breaks the dependency.
Hiring shifts from OpEx to CapEx. Instead of wages, you pay for compute. Instead of a team, you buy an agent.
Productivity gains don’t disappear—they concentrate.
We drift toward intelligence rentier capitalism , where economic power comes not from doing the work but from owning the systems that do it.
The Crisis of Participation
A job wasn’t just income.
It was how people participated in society.
It funded governments through labour taxes. It created identity and dignity. It offered upward mobility. It gave ordinary people a stake in the system. It formed the backbone of communities. It made democracy work.
When the ladder breaks, participation erodes across all these dimensions simultaneously.
The tax base shrinks because capital is harder to reach. Social mobility freezes. Identity fractures. The shared experience of work dissolves.
The economy grows while the number of people who feel included shrinks.
The Political Delusion
Here’s what strikes me: our entire political spectrum is arguing about a ladder that no longer exists.
Conservatives say: let the ladder work freely. Progressives say: strengthen the bottom rungs. Socialists say: the ladder is rigged. Libertarians say: remove the obstacles.
They disagree on everything except one assumption: the ladder is still there.
Both sides assume the solution to poverty is “get a job.” Both assume the tax base comes from labour. Both assume mobility comes from climbing.
If the ladder collapses, every ideology built around it loses coherence.
We are watching a political class argue over toll rates on a bridge that has already collapsed.
What Replaces It
I don’t have the full answer, but the outlines are emerging.
On the human side: the scarce resource is no longer doing work—it’s deciding what work should be done. We move from skills to judgment. From labour to agency. From execution to direction.
On the capital side: if labour is no longer the entry point, then capital must become one. Not charity—participation. Data dividends. AI equity. Shared stakes in the systems replacing the ladder.
UBI keeps people alive. Ownership gives people a role.
We need a new mechanism that lets people participate in an economy where execution is automated.
What Comes Next
We are living through the greatest redefinition of economic value in centuries.
If we keep applying 20th-century thinking to a 21st-century reality, we get the worst of both worlds: record productivity and record exclusion. A hyper-productive owner class at one end, a disenfranchised majority at the other—and the ladder that once connected them lying in pieces.
The ladder is gone. What do we build instead?