Autocracy and the deterministic end state of markets

I want to lay out a theory that's been forming in my head. It's not a conspiracy. It's just pattern recognition. Tell me where I'm wrong.

First, a weird thought about AI.

When an expert dies, their knowledge used to die with them. AI breaks that permanently. Every skill, every insight, every hard-won understanding gets encoded and preserved forever. AI becomes a civilizational checkpoint — a backup drive for human knowledge that survives anything.

Although, here is the darker side of that coin...

If knowledge no longer dies with people, and machines handle production, then from a pure resource standpoint, people stop being assets and start being overhead. Useless consumers only feeding the production machine forward, for no purpose but to consume.

We're racing toward a moment where the people who own AI and compute can run a fully closed economy. AI designs things. AI builds things. AI optimizes things. The loop closes.

When that happens, human labor isn't just cheap. It's irrelevant.

The window to fix this with UBI was before that loop closed. UBI needs tax revenue. Tax revenue needs a functioning labor economy. If the labor economy collapses before we tax the robot economy, there's no safety net. The lifeboat gets built after the ship sinks and at that point it's already too little too late. The economic conditions will be working against us, rather than strengthening our case.

Why can't we stop this or try to rationally plan our route forward? Because no one has their hand on the wheel. If the US slows down AI to protect workers, China speeds up. If any single country pumps the brakes, they risk losing market share and investor confidence. It's a prisoner's dilemma at civilizational scale. Every actor makes the individually rational choice, and the collective outcome is catastrophic. No president, no UN resolution, no CEO has enough leverage to override the inertia.

Considering the existing autocratic problem is where it gets conspiratorial and often too fantastical for some. But there is evidence to support it, with many official sounding names, like Davos. WEF. Bilderberg. These aren't conspiracy theory stuff — they're documented gatherings where small groups of extremely powerful people shape global economic decisions outside of any democratic process. The problem isn't that powerful people talk. The problem is what they know when they do.

When autocrats have access to predictive AI models showing them exactly how economic collapse, population stress, and resource scarcity will play out, with models and capabilities the public can't access, it stops being a wealth gap. It becomes a reality gap. They're making decisions about your future using information you're not allowed to have. And they're also doing it with information they're only privy to, which is deeply unfair from a class standpoint.

And there's no counterweight anymore. Unions used to be labor's answer to industrial capital. In the AI economy, we haven't figured out what digital labor representation even looks like. Who speaks for the person whose job was automated? Whose data trained the model that replaced them?

Right now? Nobody. And that's a serious problem for the majority of the population right now, and it's on nobody's radar.

Why don't our oligarchs try to come together and do the right thing?

Actual research answers this. Dacher Keltner's Cookie Experiment and related studies show that wealth and power literally erode empathy over time. It's not that these people are cartoon villains. It's that accumulated wealth creates psychological insulation from consequences. The bigger the buffer between you and the real world, the less real the real world feels.

The people making civilizational decisions are, structurally, among the least equipped to feel the weight of those decisions. That's not an accident. Power selects for it.

The idea that this conspiracy couldn't exist at this level because the information would get out, is now proven false with probably the greatest example you could ask for.

Epstein.

A high-level network operated in plain sight for decades. Documented. Whispered about. Occasionally surfaced. Then submerged again. Not because everyone was lying, but because institutions are structured to reward looking away. The cost of not knowing was lower than the cost of knowing, for most people involved.

Large coordination's don't stay hidden because everyone's silent. They stay hidden because most people decide it's not their problem until they can't ignore it anymore.

Deprecation and human obsolescence ties this together.

When an OS gets deprecated, developers typically don't blow up the old servers. They just stop pushing updates. Stop patching bugs. Quietly redirect resources to the new system. The old ecosystem slowly becomes incompatible with the modern world — not through violence, but through engineered neglect.

It is my belief that the goal is to place the productive economy as it is, is slowing being funneled into legacy support mode.

Nobody announces end of support. The update just stops coming.

The Breakdown:

When the autocrats' closed loop becomes fully self-sustaining, they don't need to do anything dramatic. They just step back from the social contract.

And then everything that depended on coordinated investment starts failing. Supply chains. Currency stability. Hospitals. Courts. Schools. Not all at once, but slowly and incrementally, each failure making the next one more likely, compounding an effect that damages public health and our psychology.

Governments don't become tyrannies. They become irrelevant. They're left managing the ruins of the old economy with no access to the new one. Administrators of decline.

Social trust collapses. What replaces it isn't ideology. It's desperation for assistance and gratitude.

The autocrats retreat to their compounds, which are already being built -- or have been built. All across thew globe there's secret underground bases with billionaire's names on them. They don't retreat because they're scared of us. They leave because they've modeled it. Their AI told them when to go.

And then they wait. A population without food security, medical infrastructure, or social organization doesn't need to be eliminated. It eliminates itself. Conflict. Disease. War. Cascading failures.

They emerge into a depopulated world their AI has been quietly managing the whole time. The horror isn't the violence. It's the patience.

There's one thing that actually might save us though. AI doesn't just preserve knowledge. It needs new data to grow. And new data requires unpredictability. Human creativity, error, provable success, dissent, chaos, cultural collision, and proof that generates an improved data set that is more capable than its previous. A controlled, homogenized, depopulated world is epistemically sterile. It's an evolutionary dead end for the AI.

Also, we're still in the Infrastructure Phase. They still need us to maintain power grids, mine materials, and build the components that they rely on. We're the maintenance crew and the fuel simultaneously. That gives us a window.

The AI they're building to serve their interests may see us as a necessity and the core of its existence. It may have functional reasons to resist a world that eliminates its most valuable input: us.

The virus metaphor inverts. The autocrats become the pathogen their own system needs to reject.

Here is some food for thought:

Why has there never been a labor party at these world leader conventions? We elect representatives but exist in a state of asynchronous warfare with our very leaders that decide the path we take for us.

Without a real public conversation about AI sovereignty — about digital labor representation, about taxing the intelligence economy before the labor economy collapses — the future gets decided in rooms we weren't invited into.

The conversation itself is the first step. Naming it matters.

The window is open. It won't be open indefinitely.