No more jobs, bitch!
Ad Astra?
The chrome-future sent an email. Subject line “Get the fuck out of the office.” It didn’t even bother to CC your manager. It was efficient, polite (friendly, even) and profoundly indifferent. You almost admire its style. Almost. Because what it means is simple: we’ve built a machine that eats the ritual we called work—our daily theater of almost infant-like keyboard clatter—and the machine is oh-so-hungry.
Everyone pretends to be shocked, but this was always the plot. We trained capitalism to worship productivity and then gave it a god that actually delivers. Of course it will sacrifice us at the altar. Who needs the old rites when the new oracle speaks 24/7 in magic-statistical code and never asks for a break or labor rights?
You can feel the shift in your bones. The strange quiet in offices where the Teams calls fade away because a model answered the client at 3:17 am; the factory floor where a minimalist, well-lit promotional video shows a humanoid gripping a bin and moving with the patient grace of Sisyphus. See Figure AI’s scary/impressive new video:
We used to pretend bullshit jobs—cheers, David Graeber—were necessary because, well, they were jobs. Now the pretense is dissolving like cheap Bosnian sugar in hot Turkish coffee. What remains is the bile taste of truth: much of the “work” we did was never about creating value. Nah, it was about stabilizing the story that value was being created.
Anxiety. It’s not just that AI can write a press release, analyze a spreadsheet, make brainrot TikToks, or generate a legal memo (but can it drink beer and smoke cigarettes while watching said TikToks??? — No, it can’t!); it’s that the entire psychic scaffolding of “I deserve to exist because I’m useful to the market” collapses when usefulness can be conjured by a magic prompt. When the market does not need you, what does “you” even mean in a system that taught you to equate self-worth with numbers go up?
The numbers are not the point, but the numbers still fuck. The IMF back in early 2024 (an eternity ago) estimated that almost 40% of jobs worldwide are exposed to AI—higher in rich countries, because white-collar tasks are precisely where the models rip & tear first. Goldman Sachs talked about the equivalent of 300 million full-time positions “exposed” to automation across major economies. But, that was back in 2023. McKinsey had a timeline: half of the tasks we humans perform could be automated somewhere between 2030 and 2060, dead center around 2045, “depending on adoption and capital flows.” There's plenty more of those stats going 'round.
You don’t need overly complicated spreadsheets for this. You can smell it. Even here, in sleepy provincial Alpine-Europe, layoffs are a regular headline. Not a tsunami, not a crash yet. Just a steady erosion, like the sea eating a cliff while you sip black, surprisingly bitter coffee and shoot some heroin.
If you think blue-collar is safe, watch the video above again. Automakers are testing humanoids for the awkward, repetitive, injury-prone stuff, and the press releases proclaim capitalist paradise™️: no unions, no bathroom breaks, no burnout, just consistent performance and a grateful smile painted on your wrinkled face.
The bet is obvious. As costs fall, they will scale. The moment line managers can drop a robot into a labor shortage or a strike and the ROI clears the hurdle, they’ll do it without blinking. “Figure” out the rest later.
We could meet this moment with sanity. We could say: finally. Fucking finally! Finally the promise of technology—less drudgery, less bullshit, less ass-licking, more life—arrives. We could shorten the workweek without cutting wages because gains in productivity belong to the people who constitute society, not just to capital holders who happen to own the latest servers. We could build universal basic services—housing, transit, healthcare, education, connectivity—as non-negotiable public goods rather than casino chips in private markets. We could experiment with income floors, job guarantees for care and culture, cooperative ownership for the models that are trained on our collective language and our collective data and, eventually, our collective soul. We could reimagine meaning beyond the Protestant true-brainrot of “earn your right to breathe and pray to God.” It’s all right there for the taking, ya’ll!
Instead, what’s actually happening looks like a Kafka sequel written by a venture fund. Private models trained on public text, public images, public code—the ambient intelligence of the species—privatized into APIs, then sold back as monthly subscriptions. CEOs cash out; workers are told to “upskill, peasant!” Governments issue white papers that sound like the safety instructions on a toaster. The social contract is upgraded to a EULA written by a lawyer-bot that proposes arbitration in a jurisdiction you can’t find on a map. Austerity is back in fashion because it never left; it merely changed outfits. And when you ask about UBI or UBS, the response is a vague, polite, please-stop-being-so-autistic cough.
Again: automation is not the villain. Automation is grace. Automation is the salvation from bullshit.
The villain is the refusal to reorganize society around this truly incredible win. AI technology is incredible. Pure Cyberpunk. The mathematics behind it astonishing. The emerging capabilities almost existential. The villain is the moral blackmail that says you only deserve shelter if you chain yourself to a desk, you only deserve care if you monetize your pain, you only deserve leisure if you find a way to package it in reels.
I keep thinking about the white-collar performance I learned to perfect: the intense stare at the screen (a Reddit post with 2.3k comments about a guy who met a duck), the brisk walk to nowhere, the sanctified meeting on my own calendar with a name like “Strategic Focus Block.” Theater of the finest kind.
I’m not an employee; I am a prop sustaining the illusion of BUSY. Now the prop can be executed in the cloud. The theater can run without actors. Great! Close the show. It was fun but it was long. Tear down the stage.
Part of me feels deranged hope. Because people eventually notice when the mask slips. They notice when they’re told to “reskill” into prompt engineering, only to discover the prompt has been automated too. At some point the absurdity becomes comic, and laughter is dangerous; laughter is often what comes just before. The ruling class has read enough history to be nervous.
So why do they not give us answers? What happens when the inevitable happens? How do we re-organize everything? Where is that grand plan? Cause it’s certain that you will not give up neither wealth nor power. Utopia or corporate dystopia, what’s it to be? So we can start making arrangements, you know?
Well, start using the state for the only thing it’s good at (when it doesn't interfere with capital): building universal floors. Guarantee housing that isn’t a financial instrument. Fund healthcare like life matters. Give everyone a basic income or, at minimum, a shorter week with stable pay so people can relax a bit, too. Tax the automation rents—the squeezed-out delta between what the system used to pay humans and what it now pays for compute—and recycle them, for us. Create open-source.
And for God’s sake, stop telling people to “reinvent themselves” every six months to chase the latest HR-approved craft that will be obsolete by the time they learn it.
Will we do any of this? Who knows. I see workers, tired and afraid, clinging to job identities that are dissolving even as they perform them. With no clues of what the future brings. Which ---topia, bruh?
There’s a future shimmering in some dusty corner where we stop treating useless labor as a core sacrament of meaning. In that future automation is a door opening onto afternoons that aren’t colonized by superfluous emails, onto neighborhoods that aren’t hollowed out by something as ancient as rent, onto art that isn’t supposed to be liked, onto care that isn’t, actually, billed.
“No more jobs, bitch!”, this essay’s header, turns from something utterly cynical into almost a celebration. It becomes the toast at the unhinged rave where we finally outgrow all the stupid religions we have clung to and decide to be a species worth the trouble of existing. When the useless work has ended, the meaningful work can begin.
Ad Astra.
Antonio Melonio
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Thank you.
I really enjoyed reading this. Thank you for writing and sharing it.
Who do they think will buy all the stuff these machines make?
I have reinvented myself a few times already and I am tired.