Historically, humans moved from manual to cognitive labor as technology automated physical tasks. Emad Mostaque argues AI now automates cognitive work, creating an "intelligence inversion." There's no obvious higher-value domain left for human labor to escape to, unlike previous technological shifts.

The advent of super-intelligent AI challenges the core tenets of free-market capitalism. When human labor competes against entities that are exponentially more capable, the 'creative destruction' model could lead to mass unemployment and social instability, forcing a move away from pure capitalism.

Once AI surpasses human intelligence, raw intellect ceases to be a core differentiator. The new “North Star” for humans becomes agency: the willpower to choose difficult, meaningful work over easy dopamine hits provided by AI-generated entertainment.

As AI commoditizes execution and intellectual labor, the only remaining scarce human skill will be judgment: the wisdom to know what to build, why, and for whom. This shifts economic value from effort and hard work to discernment and taste.

AI's impact on labor will likely follow a deceptive curve: an initial boost in productivity as it augments human workers, followed by a crash as it masters their domains and replaces them entirely. This creates a false sense of security, delaying necessary policy responses.

Unlike past technological shifts where humans could learn new trades, AI is a "tractor for everything." It will automate a task and then move to automate the next available task faster than a human can reskill, making long-term job security increasingly precarious for cognitive labor.

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 true threshold for AI becoming a disruptive, "non-normal" technology is when it can perform the new jobs that emerge from increased productivity. This breaks the historical cycle of human job reallocation, representing a fundamental economic shift distinct from past technological waves.

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.