Marx and Understanding the Post-AI World

AI is unsettling me.

On one hand, with AI in the palm of my hand, I feel more and more powerful, accomplishing more and more tasks, and creating things I wouldn’t have been able to create even a few months ago. On the other hand, I can’t shake the feeling that this ever-more-powerful creature will, at some point, render humans useless.

For now, I’m safe. For now, AI is multiplying my productivity, not replacing me. For now, I still have a lot to give.

But I don’t know how much longer this "now" will hold.

In the future, who knows, maybe AI will leave me no room to contribute to society. In the future, who knows, I might be equivalent to a product with zero demand.

I love Opus 4.5 and GPT-5.2. But Opus 12 and GPT-15 frightens me.

Enter, Marx

I believe the best way to predict the future is to read old, Lindy books.

Thus, to understand what the post-AI world will look like, I return to Marx. Even as someone who is pro-capitalism, I hold Marx in high regard as one of the thinkers I respect the most, because no one described and understood how capitalism works better than he did. And we are living in a capitalist world.

So, let’s stand on the shoulders of Marx and predict how a post-AI world, where AI is no longer a competitive edge but merely baseline infrastructure, will look.

AI is Steam Machine on Steroids

I do not see the rise of AI as separate from industrialization. I see AI as an extension of the Industrial Revolution, only amplified a thousandfold.

The methods and emergent behaviors arising from relatively simple algorithms are new. But the effects on the labor market and the economy are not very different from those of the steam machine.

Therefore, what Marx observed about machines will also hold true for AI.

AI Will Drive Wages Down

Marx observed that labour power is just another commodity, much like machines. Since the advent of machinery, humans have been competing against machines.

But now, humans can’t compete. As AI labour power becomes cheaper and cheaper, once AI is able to automate a task, it is permanently hers. Humans won’t be able to take those jobs back.

The consequence is this: either human workers must sell their labour power as cheaply as AI, or they must migrate to other jobs.

Machinery produces the same effects, but upon a much larger scale. It supplants skilled labourers by unskilled, men by women, adults by children; where newly introduced, it throws workers upon the streets in great masses; and as it becomes more highly developed and more productive it discards them in additional though smaller numbers. ~ Karl Marx

As ever more human workers compete for the same jobs, competition intensifies. Human labour supply becomes far more abundant, while demand for human labour cannot keep up.

It is inevitable that human labourers will compete downward on wages, driving wages down. More and more people will only be able to secure minimum-wage jobs, enough only for subsistence and propagation.

Skill Deflation

Today, we categorize skill levels relative to other humans: by how hard a skill is to acquire and how much time and money must be invested to master it.

In a post-AI world, this is no longer relevant. A job is high-skill only if AI cannot do it. There is no room for any other definition. Caring for the elderly can be considered high-skill, while a radiologist can be considered low-skill.

Furthermore, to the same degree in which the division of labour increases, is the labour simplified. The special skill of the labourer becomes worthless... His work becomes accessible to all; therefore competitors press upon him from all sides... so much the lower must the wages sink – for, like the price of any other commodity, they are determined by the cost of production. ~ Karl Marx

Marx correctly observed that as machines become more capable, they reduce complex jobs to simple oversight or data-entry tasks. I cannot rule out a future in which a person with no medical knowledge, combined with AI, can produce work equivalent to that of an experienced radiologist today. Even that may be temporary. I also cannot rule out a future in which AI can do it alone.

A dichotomy will emerge: either you can do what AI cannot, or you are subordinate to AI and can contribute little value.

But it is unwise to assume that all jobs AI cannot do will pay handsomely. Once workers are displaced from AI-enabled jobs, they will flock to non-AI jobs with lower human-skill ceilings. As discussed earlier, supply will overwhelm demand, driving wages down.

The only jobs that will pay top dollar are those that both AI and most humans cannot do. Historically, predicting what these jobs will be has proven futile. 5 years ago, no one predicted that programmers would be among the first to be pushed out by AI.

Paradox of Abundance & Scale

Production will rely more and more on AI automation, which is cheaper than human labor power, which requires more expensive subsistence and propagation. This will make the production of almost everything easier and cheaper.

This is not to say that every commodity will be cheap. We will still produce very expensive things, because humans need ownership of such things as signals of social hierarchy.

But as most products become cheaper to produce, supply will skyrocket. We will have the ability to produce far more than we can ever consume. Basic economic laws dictate that this will drive prices down.

Wow, good news for workers and capitalists alike, right? Necessities will be cheap and we will live in a utopian world? Not so fast.

These future state-of-the-art AI systems, far more capable than today’s, will become the single most powerful mode of production. They will require enormous computational power and energy to operate.

They will not run on consumer-grade computers, or even on today’s enterprise-grade machines. They may only be operable on supercomputers that 99.999% of people will never be able to own.

Yet, these ultra-expensive machines will be able to produce such vast quantities of commodities that their output will more than pay for themselves and more.

AI super-machines will be concentrated in the hands of a few, further amplifying inequality.

There will be no small capitalists anymore. Either you own trillion-dollar AI infrastructure, or you fall into the same bucket as every other unskilled laborer.

These mega-corporations will produce everything, resulting in cheap prices and low profit margins. But this is not a problem for them! They operate at immense scale.

However, small capitalists, operating at low scale, can't survive with low profit margin. The only ones who can operate at scale are these gargantuan corporations with the ability to invest hundreds of billions of dollars into AI infrastructure.

Everyone ma be housed and fed, but as inequality increasing a millionfold, you will drift further and further away from happiness.

A house may be large or small; as long as the neighboring houses are likewise small, it satisfies all social requirement for a residence. But let there arise next to the little house a palace, and the little house shrinks to a hut. ~Karl Marx

This is the crux of the paradox. AI will bring abundance. But, the concentration of AI, the ultimate accumulated labor, into the hands of a "trillionaire class" effectively ends the era of the self-made entrepreneur, the middle class, and the upper class.

The post-AI world will have room only for a lower class and a hyper-elite class.

AI Will Dig The Grave of Capitalism

For Marx, capital is not a thing but a definite social relation of production.

Capital therefore presupposes wage-labour; wage-labour presupposes capital. They condition each other; each brings the other into existence. ~Karl Marx

Capital can multiply itself only by exchanging itself for labour-power, by calling wage-labour into life. The labour-power of the wage-labourer can exchange itself for capital only by increasing capital, by strengthening that very power whose slave it is. Increase of capital, therefore, is increase of the proletariat, i.e., of the working class. ~Karl Marx

With AI labour power being categorically different from human labour power, and with human labour power needed less and less, capital can no longer multiply itself.

Capital needs labour to create value. Automation removes labour from production. Either capitalism mutates, or it breaks.

A post-AI world can coexist with this reality. AI will destroy the mechanism that makes capitalism stable.

By the destruction of petty and domestic industries it destroys the last resorts of the 'redundant population', thereby removing what was previously a safety-valve for the whole social mechanism. By maturing the material conditions and the social combinations of the process of production, it matures the contradictions and antagonisms of the capitalist form of that process, and thereby ripens both the elements for forming a new society and the forces tending towards the overthrow of the old one. ~Karl Marx

Ultimately, if Marx’s insights hold true for the age of silicon, we are racing toward a final contradiction: a world of infinite supply with zero purchasing power. Abundance can be produced, but there is no point in producing it if no one can buy it.

A system built on the exchange of wages for commodities cannot survive when the "masses" have no labour power to offer and the "elites" have no customers to sell to.

Capitalism, whose goal is to become ever more efficient, will become too efficient to coexist with existing social contracts.

We will transition into another social and economic system, and I am not sure what it will be.