Beyond displacing current workers, AI will lead to hiring "abatement," where companies proactively eliminate roles from their hiring plans altogether. This is a subtle but profound workforce shift, as entire job categories may vanish from the market before employees can be retrained.

The rare agreement between libertarian billionaire Elon Musk and socialist senator Bernie Sanders on AI's threat to jobs is a significant indicator. This consensus from the political fringe suggests the issue's gravity is being underestimated by mainstream policymakers and is a sign of a profound, undeniable shift.

New technologies perceived as job-destroying, like AI, face significant public and regulatory risk. A powerful defense is to make the general public owners of the technology. When people have a financial stake in a technology's success, they are far more likely to defend it than fight against it.

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell stated that after accounting for statistical anomalies, "job creation is pretty close to zero." He directly attributes this to CEOs confirming that AI allows them to operate with fewer people, marking a major official acknowledgment of AI's deflationary effect on the labor market.

Instead of trying to legally define and ban 'superintelligence,' a more practical approach is to prohibit specific, catastrophic outcomes like overthrowing the government. This shifts the burden of proof to AI developers, forcing them to demonstrate their systems cannot cause these predefined harms, sidestepping definitional debates.

For current AI valuations to be realized, AI must deliver unprecedented efficiency, likely causing mass job displacement. This would disrupt the consumer economy that supports these companies, creating a fundamental contradiction where the condition for success undermines the system itself.

Professor Russell argues that the dominant approach to AI, "imitation learning," is flawed for creating beneficial tools. By training models to replicate human verbal and written behavior as closely as possible, we are inherently building replacements for human jobs, not power tools to enhance human capabilities. This design choice sets up an inevitable economic conflict.

The enormous market caps of leading AI companies can only be justified by finding trillions of dollars in efficiencies. This translates directly into a required labor destruction of roughly 10 million jobs, or 12.5% of the vulnerable workforce, suggesting market turmoil or mass unemployment is inevitable.

Capitalism values scarcity. AI's core disruption is not just automating tasks, but making human-like intellectual labor so abundant that its market value approaches zero. This breaks the fundamental economic loop of trading scarce labor for wages.