The arrival of general-purpose robotics and artificial intelligence represents not just an industrial revolution, but the culmination of capital’s historical trajectory: the full automation of labour itself. As Elon Musk’s Optimus robot promises production costs below $20,000 per unit, we stand at the precipice of a transformation more profound than steam engines, electrification, or the microprocessor. For the cost of a single year’s wage, a corporation may now purchase perpetual labour—a workforce unburdened by rest, wages, or rights—a new economic order.
At first, this substitution will be incremental—logistics, manufacturing, warehousing. But as economies of scale drive costs lower, the scope of automation will expand: clerks, hotel staff, construction workers, nurses, and drivers—each sector succumbing to the cold efficiency of mechanised capital. The cost of human labour will not merely decline; it will collapse. And with it, the entire economic scaffolding of the past two centuries.
We are witnessing some elements of the collapse of the labour force in the U.S. right now, as an example, President Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration has struck fear amongst the illegal workforce who provide much of the manual labour in America’s farming sector. Many farms depend on cheap labour provided by illegal immigrants and when they do not turn up to work out of fear, the fields and crop are left unattended. The way to solve this problem is to increase the pace of automation and robotic implementation, but the solution to the bottleneck may still be far ahead.
A Keynesian Conundrum: The Vanishing of Demand
If labour is eliminated, what remains of the consumer? Classical economics, from Adam Smith to Keynes, assumes an equilibrium wherein wages paid to workers translate into consumption, fuelling production in a virtuous cycle. But in a world where machines displace the wage earner, effective demand disintegrates. Mortgages, health insurance, pensions—entire industries predicated on the existence of a working class—will find themselves without customers.
What remains is a stark bifurcation: either capital, now embodied in robots, absorbs surplus labour through a form of universal provision, or society fragments into an extreme duality—those who own the machines and those who own nothing.
The Great Reset: UBI and the Scientific Management of Society
Enter Universal Basic Income. The notion that the state, rather than private employers, should act as the primary distributor of economic sustenance is not radical; rather, it is the logical outcome of capitalism’s own success in eliminating the need for human labour. The automation of production must be met with an automation of distribution.
UBI is not merely a policy proposal but an inevitability within post-labour economics. Indeed, as early as the 1970s, Richard Nixon nearly institutionalised a form of guaranteed income in the United States.
The technocratic elite—Dorsey, Zuckerberg, Bezos—have already acknowledged that in the face of automation, the state must become the ultimate arbiter of economic survival. The alternative? Mass homelessness, social unrest, and an underclass left with no recourse but insurrection.
Yet, one must ask: Who funds this redistribution? Does the state assume ownership over automated industries, thereby ensuring wealth flows to all, or does it rely on taxation—an ever-precarious attempt to extract surplus from a corporate class increasingly disinterested in sharing the spoils? If capital refuses to be taxed, will labour, now obsolete, demand its seizure?
The New Means of Production: The Birth of the Algorithmic Aristocracy
Marx observed that capitalists do not merely own wealth—they own the means by which wealth is produced. In the world of the machine, the capitalist no longer extracts surplus value from human labour; rather, value itself is generated purely through mechanised efficiency.
The outcome is clear: Those who own the robots will own the future.
As Juvenal stated over 2,500 years ago: “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” “Who will guard the guards themselves?”
In one vision of this post-labour society, abundance is shared. Machines generate food, energy, healthcare, and housing, freely available to all. Humanity, freed from toil, enters a golden age of creation, leisure, and intellectual pursuit. One could even postulate that society could develop into a system of technological anarcho-communist hybrid.
In another vision, the few who control automation become feudal lords of a machine-driven economy, their wealth compounding indefinitely while the displaced masses, now redundant, survive on stipends just sufficient to prevent revolt. The utopian rhetoric of the WEF’s Great Reset—”you will own nothing and be happy”—could become a dystopian reality where ownership is so concentrated that citizenship itself is reduced to permanent dependency.
From Russell to Blade Runner: The Fate of the Human Spirit
Bertrand Russell envisioned a future where scientific management of society would liberate mankind from the drudgery of labour, allowing individuals to pursue higher intellectual and artistic callings. But what happens when humanity, conditioned for centuries to define itself by work, is suddenly made obsolete? Would humanity be cursed with a profound type of ennui?
Science fiction has long imagined robotic uprisings, the Frankenstein’s monster turning against its creator. But the true revolution may not be one of rebellion, but of quiet replacement. The replicants of Blade Runner did not demand freedom—they simply performed better than humans, rendering them unnecessary.
Optimised automation will not come with a bang, nor with a war—it will come as an economic transition, a technological tiptoe, so seamless that the old world will fade unnoticed into irrelevance. And by the time humanity recognises what it has built, it may find itself at a crossroads: either more free than ever before or reduced to the passive observers of a world no longer requiring its very presence.
