This is the Cambrian age of the automated economy. This era has barely begun, and already the world is changing beyond recognition. of The old economic model of human life is becoming increasingly irrelevant even irrational. It just doesn’t apply anymore, especially for those under 24.
There is no point in pretending that you go to school, get your qualifications and automatically get a career and a family. The 20th century version of human life simply cannot be applied.
If the effects of automation on life paths at the macro scale are quite obvious, there is another big issue. The deepest and most likely long-term crisis is a total apparent lack of ideas for a sustainable way of life for people.
There is a lot of data on the labor market, but what to do with it?
of the actual daily scars of mass layoffs perhaps best visualized as “extinction events”. These jobs and the lives that went with them are not coming back. There is no template for this situation and no sign of coherent planning at any level to fit human realities into economic realities.
The realities of the automation of human life are very measurable and very indicative of future pressures to have a life. Anthropic made one The study in March of this year showed that the current overall impact of AI on labor markets is generating levels of exposure to job losses in direct proportion to its capabilities and AI capabilities are on the rise.
The Anthropic overview is bleak and vague. It’s worth keeping an eye on Anthropic’s current datasets to see how far and how fast automation is progressing. It’s not really an early warning system for employment, more of a weather report.
The basis of this study is Anthropic Economic Indexwhich is a global index of the adoption, integration and effects of AI as a big picture in progress. A quick look at Anthropogenic Economic Index Landing Page shows that the impact of automation is very broad based. It also shows how broad AI usage data can be. It includes a wide spread of job types ranging from telecommunications marketers to operational research analysts, fitness and wellness coordinators.
OK, so we have the data. How do we use it? Where do people fit into this world?
The new reality in practice: China faces “obsolete degrees” and a displaced generation
China is a leader in automation. The direct effects of automation on the rising generations are feeding directly into the economy and feeding back into training and education. It is a distinct division between the old and the new economy. Many chilling stories are emerging from the ruins as China’s youth struggle to navigate the new reality. One of the most obvious dichotomies is that people trained for graduate jobs are emerging with a choice between unemployment and much lower-level jobs.
China has already stopped layoffs due to automation, but the bigger problem of refocusing the workforce is yet to be decided. It is not an easy problem and there are no simple solutions.
CURRENT Chinese training solutions seem to be a hindrance. For example, Chinese trainers scrapped arts and humanities degrees between 2021 and 2025 and “replaced” them with roughly 10% fewer technology degrees.
This defines the human problem. The arts and humanities can never really be “outdated.” They are the main business for human beings and major factors in the economy. Technology is a much narrower field in human terms, excluding humans outside of its direct applications and effectively just following technologies around.
We’ve been here before, but never like this
Technologies have reconfigured human life since the invention of fire. Automation already looks very similar to the massive socio-economic disruption caused by The Industrial Revolutionwith the total rewriting of daily life but without work. The ghosts of the Industrial Revolution linger. Many economists refer to deindustrialization as a key factor in economic stagnation, but also use it as an implicit default model for economic revitalization.
The theory is based on a vague and largely false picture of the mid-20sth eternal prosperity. That was it Baby Boom Economicsthe height of the Industrial Revolution, when it finally brought about improvements in the quality of life around the world.
Mass production and cheaper availability redesigned human life from the ground up, not theoretical economics. The rapidly growing population increased capital and economic demands. The resulting supply chains provided jobs and livelihoods.
The world changed completely in a few decades. New technologies created new demands and, in many cases, entirely new markets for entirely new classes of goods and services. The economy came along for the ride.
Right now is when and where the whole analogy between the Industrial Revolution and the Automation Revolution completely breaks down. Analogies also have expiration dates.
The global economy is in shock. It is not “automation management”. It is being managed BY automation in the most random way possible, at the worst possible time. The cost of living has skyrocketed. Quality of life has gone way back as automation begins.
These very old precedents cannot and will not apply to current economic realities. Deprive generations of economic opportunity and your economy fails at all levels.
The automated economy must offer achievable aspirations and practical fixes for the dying economy’s wide range of chronic deficiencies. Automation is here, like it or not. It can provide unprecedented values, but not without human values.
