{"id":244100,"date":"2026-09-16T09:02:21","date_gmt":"2026-09-16T14:02:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/09\/tech-unemployment-the-future-of-labor-in-an-ai-driven-economy"},"modified":"2026-09-16T09:02:21","modified_gmt":"2026-09-16T14:02:21","slug":"tech-unemployment-the-future-of-labor-in-an-ai-driven-economy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/09\/tech-unemployment-the-future-of-labor-in-an-ai-driven-economy","title":{"rendered":"Tech Unemployment: The Future of Labor in an AI-Driven Economy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/tech-unemployment-the-future-of-labor-in-an-ai-driven-economy2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p><audio controls style=\"width:625px;\"><source src=\"https:\/\/feeds.soundcloud.com\/stream\/1826320692-singularity1on1-the-future-of-labor.mp3?_=1\" type=\"audio\/mpeg\"><\/audio><\/p>\n<p>For most of history, capital needed labor. That was the deal.<\/p>\n<p>Capital needed workers to turn investment into returns. Workers needed capital to earn a living. The balance shifted back and forth, and in the 1970s productivity and wages started drifting apart, but the basic dependence never broke.<\/p>\n<p>A few years ago I argued it would. My reason was that, for the first time, capital can create labor instead of hiring it.<\/p>\n<p>That changes the whole deal. It also changes who needs to be paid, and that includes more than workers. Throughout history, the people enforcing order also had to be paid.<\/p>\n<p>I later turned the essay into a podcast op-ed. Last November I added a short update about two economic signals that tracked each other for twenty years and then split apart in 2023. You can probably guess what launched just before that.<\/p>\n<p>Harari warned of a \u201cuseless class.\u201d I think there is another possible outcome, one we have never had the option of before. Which one we get is not a technology question.<\/p>\n<div class=\"more-link-wrapper\"> <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/09\/tech-unemployment-the-future-of-labor-in-an-ai-driven-economy\">Continue reading \u201cTech Unemployment: The Future of Labor in an AI-Driven Economy\u201d | &gt;<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For most of history, capital needed labor. That was the deal. Capital needed workers to turn investment into returns. Workers needed capital to earn a living. The balance shifted back and forth, and in the 1970s productivity and wages started drifting apart, but the basic dependence never broke. A few years ago I argued it [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":737,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-244100","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244100","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/737"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=244100"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244100\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=244100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=244100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=244100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}