Unemployed: The Death of Human Necessity
September 5, 2025•447 words
"AI could create a “Mad Max-like scenario” where previously valued skills become nearly worthless, leaving workers pressed into low-paid service roles with minimal training." - David Autor
"Vonnegut, reflecting on technological displacement, noted that in Player Piano, “machines frequently got the best of it, as machines will.” - Kurt Vonnegut
Technology’s promise has led to “the widespread elimination of work,” beginning with its “degradation” into mere labor. - Albert Borgmann
We stand on the edge of collapse, staring into a future where the United States and Canada are shaken and dismantled piece by piece. The rise of superintelligence and AGI is not a slow evolution but a swift execution, brutal and precise. Dr. Yampolskiy warns that by 2027 unemployment will reach levels so extreme that today’s nightmares of 10 or 20 percent joblessness will look like relics. Imagine a world where 99 percent of society is automated, where your labor means nothing, and every keystroke, every screen, every circuit is owned by a machine. By 2030, even the scraps of work left will vanish, robots will fill the factories, dominate warehouses, harvest the fields, and patrol the streets of Detroit, Toronto, Vancouver, and Chicago. What was once employment will become a memory, a ghost.
Retraining, is on a lifeline. An oil worker in northern Alberta may be herded into a technology program, only to find that the very AI they were told to embrace has already replaced their future work. Humanoid AGI marches into factories in Alberta and Ohio, dismantling retraining schemes before they even begin. Professions long thought untouchable, law, medicine, accounting, even the teachers who once guided us from high school through university, fall one after another. In New York, a robotic surgeon operates without error, without fatigue, without pause. Human skill, once a source of dignity, becomes irrelevant.
This is where the true crisis begins. The collapse of meaning is not. In Ontario, a former autoworker wakes each morning to empty hours, stripped of the pride once carried on the factory floor. Farmers in Saskatchewan watch machines work their fields while their own hands hang useless at their sides, their free time transformed into a prison. Across north America millions of idle men sink into despair, fueling crime, addiction, and unrest. Governments, still clinging to the illusion of authority, scramble to keep pace, but AGI out-thinks them at every turn.
This is not the warning of some distant dystopia. It is the diagnosis of the blindness you live with today. The signs are all around you, but you cling to the myth that society will adapt. What you face is not unemployment, it is the death of human necessity itself.