Western Liberalism drove unprecedented human flourishing. In the age of AI, it will be our undoing.

“Yet, even with the greatest care, a technological civilization carried the seeds of its own destruction.”

Vernor Vinge, A Fire Upon the Deep

It turns out that freedom, unfortunately, doesn’t work.

I have been so very wrong, for so long, looking through a tiny peephole instead of seeing the world for what it really is. The ideology that shaped my worldview is dead, and technology was the murder weapon.

I used to be a libertarian.

The idea that celebrated the individual, championed reason, and built the freest, most prosperous societies in human history. The core belief an elegant axiom: a system composed of free individuals making rational choices in their own self-interest would produce the best outcome.

It worked. It sorta-kinda works today.

But it won’t work tomorrow.

The axiom of equal freedoms held because the variance between humans was capped by biology. No single actor could tilt the board entirely in their favor – but exponential technology removes that cap. When the disparity in power becomes infinite, ‘rational self-interest’ stops being an engine for individual freedom and becomes a terminal race condition to the opposite.

This is my eulogy for classical liberalism.

The Engine of Flourishing

You and I were born, raised, and read this now in a brief, anomalous slice of human history. We grew up believing that freedom was the default setting of the universe, and that history was a zig-zag march toward more liberty and more prosperity.

It is a mirage.

One of my formative experiences was watching Carl Sagan’s Cosmos in 1980. He condensed the entire 15-billion-year history of the universe into one year, the “Cosmic Calendar” so we can understand our significance on a cosmic scale.

In that scale, Homo sapiens doesn’t even show up wandering the savannah with stone tools until 10:30 PM on New Year’s Eve.

“All our memories are confined to this small square. Every person we’ve ever heard of lived somewhere in there. All those kings and battles, migrations and inventions, wars and loves – everything in the history books happens here – in the last 10 seconds of the cosmic calendar.”

Carl Sagan, Cosmos – “The Lives of the Stars”

That’s an hour and a half of existence of our genetic line. Ten seconds of the history books. And the “Liberal Order” we exalt is less than one second on the clock, a rounding error.

For 99.9% of our existence, life was, as Hobbes described, “nasty, brutish, and short.” The default human operating system operated in the realm of the natural order. It was tribalism, coercion, and the brute force of the strong against the weak.

The last 300 years of Western liberalism have been a brief, glorious anomaly where we managed to escape that mean. We did it by installing two radical subroutines into civilization’s operating system.

First, the Moral Foundation: Individual Sovereignty. We decided that the individual, not the collective or the crown, was the locus of value. This unlocked human potential on a scale which could never have been achieved with small tribes or command-and-control by humans.

Second, the Economic Engine: Rational Self-Interest. Capitalism translated this individual drive into collective progress. It harnessed our natural desire to improve our own lot and used it to lift billions out of poverty.

For its time, this system was unambiguously the correct choice. It maximized human potential, reduced suffering, and created the surplus that allows us to sit here and debate philosophy.

Whatever the complainers say about the “evils of capitalism,” they furiously type it in their air-conditioned apartment, Starbucks latte by their side, on their MacBook Pro before strolling to their curated job without having to worry about being eaten by a lion or coming down with smallpox.

The End of the Great Equalizer

“God made man, but Samuel Colt made them equal.”

• Colt Manufacturing advertisements, c. 1850

The Colt revolver captures the essence of the technological era we are leaving. For centuries, technology acted as the great equalizer. I, as the little guy, am now the equal of a man a head taller. The printing press democratized information and kneecapped the king’s decree.

Technology compressed the power gap between the strong and the weak.

No more. We are entering a new era where technology does the opposite.

The smartest human was maybe 2x smarter than the average. But AI and augmentation are not equalizers; they are cognitive multipliers.  If you multiply 100 IQ by 1000x, and 140 IQ by 1000x, the absolute gap between them becomes insurmountable.

This exposes the gap in our beloved Libertarian belief. It was always a peer-to-peer protocol. It worked because beneath our differences in wealth or talent, there was a hidden axiom of parity.

No matter how smart or strong a human was, they were still just a human. They had to sleep, they could bleed, and there was some other human, somewhere, who could out-think them.

The “Consent of the Governed” relies on the assumption that the governed are roughly equal in agency to the governors.

I’ve talked at length about humanity’s impending Cognitive Labor Graveyard, and this is classical liberalism’s failure mode. Drastic changes in intelligence, whether controlled by individuals, corporations or autonomous agents – introduces ontological inequality.

Think of it this way: how does the Non-Aggression Principle apply between a meat-human like you and me, and an entity (whether AI or augmented human) that thinks a million times faster? It doesn’t.

We don’t sign social contracts with earthworms. We do not recognize the property rights of ants.

When the gap in capability becomes exponential, the relationship is no longer political; it is a hierarchy of capability. It’s the relationship between a god and a pet (if we’re lucky enough to be interesting pets).

To argue that libertarianism is a universal truth is to ignore that it was a specific software designed for a specific hardware: the unaugmented Homo sapiens, in an unusual few microseconds of the Cosmic Calendar.

Libertarianism does not survive a speciation event.

So I suppose the advertising slogan needs revision: Samuel Colt made me equal, but Sam Altman makes me unequal again.

Death by a Thousand Rational Choices

The tragedy is that we will walk into this obsolescence willingly, proudly proclaiming the virtues of freedom and equality. A handful of technologists intent on building their Silicon Golem will make us offers we can’t refuse; the invisible hand will push humanity down the slide to irrelevance, all the while proclaiming how delightfully shiny it all is.

Consider the chain of individually rational, collectively suicidal trade-offs we are about to face:

• The Therapeutic Choice: A neural implant becomes available to cure your parent’s Alzheimer’s. To refuse is cruel. You consent.
• The Competitive Choice: A cognitive co-processor allows your coworker to do the work of ten men. To refuse the upgrade is to accept economic irrelevance. You consent.
• The Parental Choice: Genetic augmentation ensures your child won’t be part of a cognitive underclass. To refuse is negligent. You consent.

Liberalism has no philosophical immune system for this. It is honor-bound to defend your right to make these choices. The ideology’s greatest strength – the defense of individual liberty – is its fatal flaw.

The game theory is a ratchet that turns only in one direction: toward the merger of man and machine.

The Other Paths Were Dead Ends, Too

Despite what my daughters tell me, I don’t want to be a dictator. Nor do I want to be ruled by one. But we must separate what we want from what we are discussing here, which is whether our philosophical world-models can survive the reality of technological progress.

I am not arguing that we should have chosen differently. The other paths were simply different, worse failures. We faced a tragic trilemma, a choice between three systems fatally flawed from the beginning.

Path A is The Cage: The path of Feudalism, Theocracy, and Authoritarianism

It solves the problem of existential risk by removing from the system the messy self-interest (that made you and I richer and healthier than the kings of two hundred years ago).

The Cage prioritizes stability – retention of power – above all else, suppressing the individual to maintain the status quo.

For thousands of years, this was the human default. And, lest we forget it sipping our lattes or browsing Amazon for plastic crap we don’t need, it is where the majority of humanity still lives today.

This model, had we stayed with it as the dominant driver, would have avoided the doom of AI by ensuring we never invented the GPU. But we didn’t.

It is the model that those who rise to the top of the cognitive heap would be compelled to choose … and live as king for a day, fool for a (short) lifetime should their creation decide humans are just dumb annoying pests in the way and take the throne itself.

Path B is The Collapse: The path of Collectivism and Communism.

Often talked about, occasionally tried, and always the same reaction to the result – “that wasn’t real socialism, next time we’ll do it and avoid mass starvation, really. By the way, can I borrow ten bucks?”

To be frank I don’t see how this one even made it off the drawing board, it fights the laws of human nature, incentives, and economics. By punishing competence and forcing parity where none exists, it destroys the surplus required to build the future.

Path C is the Road we Traveled: Classical Liberalism

We chose the path of competence and growth – at least until very recent times as we teeter on the brink of lionizing incompetence and degrowth as the Very Bad Ideas of Path B worm their way in.

Liberalism wasn’t the wrong path. It was the only path capable of climbing high enough to enable our fall. Its success was the prerequisite for this specific, final failure.

We have to face the irony: Liberalism may end up being a footnote in the digital archives, the accelerant that brought about the technology that rendered it moot.

We started from the Cage, evolved to Classical Liberalism … which poured all of the brilliance of incentive structure and freedom into creating the most valuable thing, intelligence. The one thing that, once out of the bottle, renders its makers lesser beings.

The Libertarian ideal was never the destination; it was the transition mechanism between the Old Cage of kings and the New Cage of gods.

The New State of Nature

Entropy is inescapable, and systems revert to the mean. I can’t see any way that the Liberal anomaly survives, whatever we may want. Just as socialism is contrary to human nature, classical liberalism is contrary to speciation and evolution. And this is where we are.

We are not being defeated by a rival ideology. It’s that the ideologies that the media use to stoke our base emotions are emotionally expensive irrelevances. Socialism in America, Orange Man Bad, all of it doesn’t matter. At a larger scale, we will be consumed by the logical endpoint of our own greatest triumph. We won the game so decisively that we rendered the players – us – obsolete.

The very fact that you and I, on a pale blue dot whirling in the galaxy got to experience magical lives should be treasured. We have had our rights, our dignity, consent; made our contracts; and we can still do so for a little while.

It’s been a beautiful few decades believing these things.

AI agents pose an extinction level event for office work and the income it provides. White collar workers who don’t stockpile assets now are sleepwalking into poverty.

By 2030, white-collar employment will collapse. Not because of a recession. Because we’ll be obsolete.

I don’t like the idea, but not liking it doesn’t change anything. Just because I’ve spent 30+ years doubling down on human intellectual labor doesn’t mean I get to ignore what’s about to come. Neither should you.

Whistling Past the Cognitive Labor Graveyard

The engine of our obsolescence won’t be a cyclical downturn, a market correction, the looming federal deficit, or the handwringing in the news about tariffs and taxes.

It’s the relentless exponential surge of AI across every domain of cognitive work. As I explain in Fall of the Ladder Climbers, we’re not merely witnessing the automation of routine tasks, as we did with previous technological waves.

This is different. AI is getting better, faster, smarter than we are on every metric, at unprecedented speed.

On Tuesday I configured an AI agent to do internet research, create summary briefs written in my voice, and graphic design them using my brand. It took me three hours. It runs 24×7, never gets sick, costs me pennies. One year ago I would have had to hire people to do this.

CEOs of major AI providers themselves are publicly sounding the alarm – Anthropic’s CEO has warned that ~50 % of white-collar entry-level roles are on the verge of being eliminated. If the real numbers were scarier, could they really say? Or would the public backlash make it impossible? They’re walking the line between selling the dream of the technology and warning of its risks.

The critical point isn’t that your specific job title will be phased out (though it will, sooner than you think). It’s that the fundamental economic calculus that once valued human thought as a scarce, premium input is being shattered.

The entire edifice built upon the presumed superiority of human cognition in the workplace is crumbling.

This Time is Different, Because Cognition is Different

In previous technological revolutions, humans have always elevated themselves. That’s because they’ve been biological, mechanical or communication advances.

• Biological leverage (agriculture, domestication, vaccines) freed us from the vagaries of nature so we could think: the species advanced.
• Mechanical leverage (plow, train, factory) freed us from a life of back-breaking work so we could think: the species advanced.
• Communication leverage (writing, radio, Internet) sped up how quickly we could think: the species advanced.

Each revolution freeing us from something slowing us from deploying our most potent asset, our intellect.

This time is different, because the revolution has created something that will be (or is already) cognitively superior to us. And even if you disagree with that assertion, you’ll be forced to agree tomorrow – because AI is going to start recursively self-improving – which will mean a rate of change humans cannot comprehend. It’s already doubling its capability every six months.

We are hitting a “peak horse” moment. The number of horses in gainful employment peaked around 1910 and then declined sharply as cars and tractors took over. Horses were muscle labor, and when machine leverage was superior horses simply became economically obsolete.

It’s that moment, for us, for our minds. Yet, despite this stark reality, many will cling to the comforting illusion that human ingenuity will, once again, triumph and secure our position as the apex predator. These arguments aren’t just flawed; they are dangerous distractions that will leave the believer unprepared. So let me dismantle them.

We Are Not Special: The Anthropocentric Myth

All the counterarguments you’ll hear are premised on a near-religious belief that we are special. That it can’t possibly be that we no longer inhabit a privileged place in the universe. But that’s kind of like my cat. He’s sure that he’s in charge and can’t possibly understand how much smarter we are than him. The difference is we’re a tad smarter than cats. We can understand we aren’t special.

Centaurs Remain Mythical

The “Centaur” model is the idea that humans will be augmented with the tools that AI brings. It’s the analogue to “we’ve always elevated ourselves in other revolutions, so we’ll do it with AI.” Proponents have us orchestrating fleets of AIs to do our bidding, securing our place in the world above the machines.

Right now, I can use AI agents to replace mid- and low- level human workers, so perhaps today we have a centaur model. It can’t last; the ability to replace increasingly skilled humans with machines will only accelerate. Why would I have a slow, inefficient, HR-issue-riddled human working for me, orchestrating smarter, faster, cheaper AIs?

This is my cat thinking he’s orchestrating my household. Jokes aside about cats actually being in charge – nobody in their right mind would hire my cat to orchestrate me.

This isn’t just about incentives – that obviously employers will make the decision to replace people with AIs. It’s that they’ll have to. It’s their fiduciary duty to shareholders to effectively deploy capital. A company deploying a cat instead of a genius in a box can neither compete nor meet its ethical obligations.

The “New Jobs” and “Human Creativity” Myths

The WEF – and others – make the argument that even if AI will replace existing jobs, entirely new jobs will be created that we can’t even fathom today. After all, a hundred years ago software developers weren’t a thing.

And what about creativity? Some cite “AI can never replace our creativity.” Even if we leave aside that AIs are (surprisingly) creative already and getting more so, ask yourself this: do you really believe that all the hundreds of millions of office workers will be able to quickly re-tool themselves from printing out TPS reports to a career of creatively orchestrating AI?

These arguments would hold merit if the proponents could demonstrate that there’s some job that a human is uniquely qualified to do, that a machine can’t. We know we’re not the strongest, most people just aren’t that creative, and now we’re not the smartest.

The Ragged Edge of Human Replacement

It’s fair to say that everyone won’t be out of a job at the same time. The transition will be uneven. Depending on your job, you might get a little reprieve – or you could be on the chopping block in a year.

Demand-Side Preference

My wife is a pediatrician. She can’t conceive of people wanting to have an AI as a doctor. They’re not yet good enough, true. But even when they get as good it’s because she believes people want a human to interact with. I think she’s right – for now, for a little while. Today’s parents might want a human to deal with. But as One Medical has shown, they don’t always care that it’s a doctor, it could be a Nurse Practitioner.

In the medium term, the relentless cost/efficiency won’t justify a human who has spent decades training when the same medical results could be achieved with an AI paired with a human “customer service” role. What may be the nail in the coffin, however, is legal liability. When medical outcomes from AIs are consistently superior to human providers (as is increasingly the case in radiology), the standard of care for medical practice will dictate using a machine, not people – it will be malpractice to not use an AI.

In the even longer term, later generations will have been steeped in AI for every aspect of their lives and might not care if their medical advice comes from a human or an equally empathetic machine.

Regulatory Brakes and Government Inefficiency

If there’s one thing that’s guaranteed in life, it’s that government will slow things down. I don’t expect this will be any different for AI. However, governments seeking to regulate AI will face the same pressures as businesses: an “arms race” dynamic. Jurisdictions that over-regulate will lose, just as Europe has been seeing for the last decade. AI is borderless – and capital and innovation (and the tax revenue it brings to offset labor losses) are global, and will flow to environments of least resistance.

Amusingly, our bloated, inefficient, tech-backwards, wasteful government might slow down office job extinction a little. With over a third of GDP being government spending, a slice of our economy might remain in human hands for longer. A government job might become one of the last places humans will be paid for their inefficiency.

Polanyi’s Paradox

MIT’s David Autor highlights “Polanyi’s Paradox,” which is the idea that we know more than we can tell. In other words, many human tasks rely on tacit knowledge or situational adaptability that isn’t easily written as code or learned by an AI. For example, a handyman’s flexibility, a kindergarten teacher’s intuition with kids, or a business strategist’s creativity. This seems on its surface a reasonable point – but even if true, it only delays the inevitable. AI may only start with crude simulations of some professions, it’s just a speed bump to a technology doubling capability in months. There are already people getting help from AI therapists. Even with ‘intuition’ you can’t outrun exponential self-improvement paired with exponential cost decrease.

Fits and Starts

Companies don’t just fire everyone and put in AI; they test it, find errors, deal with customer backlash, etc. If an AI customer service agent frustrates callers, a business might reintroduce humans despite the AI capability being there. Again – until the simulated behavior reaches human level, for pennies.

The end of jobs as we know it will be staggered and chaotic. But nothing stops this train.

Prepping for a Post-Labor Economy

The question isn’t whether this is happening. It’s happening, and likely sooner than we expect – or want. It’s what we should do. If in the relatively near future we can’t earn based on our labor, how do we find economic security?

People have floated ideas like Universal Basic Income (UBI), essentially ‘welfare for all.’ Putting aside where governments will get the tax receipts for UBI without confiscatory rates, I’m not terribly interested in a wait-and-see strategy that will leave me in a bread line with everyone else.

For those who want to preserve their economic agency, it means a rapid shift from labor to ownership. For the last eighteen months I’ve been telling everyone “we have until 2030 to stockpile as many assets as we can” – because the world is going to get very, very bumpy.

How Will Traditional Asset Classes Fare?

In a post-labor world, many assets won’t behave like they do today. As white-collar jobs start to vanish, how each of them act as investment and stores of value will change. Let’s look at them in rough order of where most hold their assets and see if it’s a good place for us to weather the stormy years of transition.

Residential Real Estate

Roughly two-thirds of white collar workers own homes, and count it as the lion’s share of their wealth. The reality of residential real estate is that price appreciation has been driven by monetary premium, not increases in the value of the underlying assets. Houses are made of sticks and plasterboard, and that doesn’t actually get more valuable over time. Homes increased in dollar terms as a store of value against inflation, buoyed by preferential tax treatment.

What happens when white collar workers, most of whom have just have a few weeks of rainy-day cash, start losing jobs en masse? A series of mortgage defaults, and a lack of new buyers. Even if we assume some government intervention (mortgage payment reprieve, subsidies), monetary premium will deflate and this will irreparably shake confidence in the residential real estate as a way to store value.

In other words, storing a significant portion of one’s wealth in a home might be a very bad trade in the not too distant future. There will be some geographic exceptions, and ultra-high-end homes of the monied who don’t live off income may fare better, but it won’t be pretty.

Other real estate subclasses might not fare well either – I know I won’t be renting office space for my AIs. It’s possible that industrial will be less affected, robots still need a place to build things.

Equities and Market Index Funds

White collar workers hold a lot of equities in their retirement accounts. How will these perform? Companies will be able to increase margins substantially be shedding human labor. On the other hand, the demand side might crater because laid off workers don’t have money to spend. While these long-term supply and demand dynamics will eventually play out, the immediate impact of widespread layoffs is likely to be severe market shock.

Markets are already sensitive to not-that-bad news, and it’s a fair guess that significant unemployment will spook investors who will liquidate and flee to more reliable store of value asset classes. The Great Depression featured a –89% drop in the market, and we’re looking at higher unemployment without the prospect of a recovery. Obviously this time is different, and there are more ‘safeguards’ now – but still a risky bet to place in my book.

Depending on the severity of unemployment, one could wonder if governments could raid retirement piggy banks. Just last week Australia introduced a plan to bring in a new 15% tax on unrealized gains in retirement accounts with balances over $3 million. Equities, as highly regulated and centrally controlled pots of assets might be a tempting target.

Bonds

The flight to safety from equities might initially push capital towards traditional bonds, particularly government issues. However, their viability as a long-term store of wealth becomes questionable. For corporate bonds, widespread issuer defaults would be a concern. For government bonds, outright nominal default by a major sovereign issuer is less likely – but a real threat comes from inflation. If governments respond to economic collapse and mass unemployment by putting the money printer on overdrive to fund support, the resulting inflation would decimate the real value of most fixed-income assets. Even inflation-indexed bonds could face challenges if confidence in government stability itself erodes. Maybe a better bet than equities, but riddled with problems.

Gold

For centuries gold has been the “risk off” asset of choice. The OG of hard assets for storing value, and a traditional hedge against systemic risk and currency debasement. Its relative scarcity (about a 2% inflation rate as more is mined) gives predictability. It’s having a good run of late as the money printer warms up. As long as sovereigns continue to stockpile, it might not be a bad place to store wealth if you’re OK choosing between low transportability and paper gold rehypothecation risk.

Asset Classes For The Post-Labor World

Traditional asset classes – other than perhaps gold – might not be the best place to store wealth as the world economy re-orders itself. So if we’re investing in assets to weather the storm, where do we put our cash and our efforts?

Privately-Held Businesses

Businesses agile enough to arbitrage the AI transition could get a significant (but temporary), advantage. Smaller businesses that rapidly integrate AI to slash operational costs, enhance productivity beyond human limits, and innovate at machine speed will be able to unseat incumbents that can’t shed human labor fast enough. Businesses where the “last mile” or “real-world” interface still demands a physical presence have even longer to run, because autonomous robots are further off than digitizing office humans.

But let’s call a spade a spade. The average white-collar professional working a desk job won’t (and can’t) do this. Business ownership is trench warfare even in stable times, let alone during breakneck technological acceleration. Entrepreneurs might have a ball. Cubicle dwellers won’t make it. So this may be a solution for you but entrepreneurship isn’t a solution for the masses.

The real issue is that at the speed of disruption we’re facing, private businesses won’t really be places to store wealth because their lifespan might be far shorter. Ten (even two) years ago you could buy a small or medium business and have a decent bet at good cashflows for years. Soon, not necessarily. Between competition speeding up and possible demand-side collapse, the risk-reward is going to be very different soon.

Brand (Personal & Business)

Two years ago I saw a deepfake for the first time. It wasn’t very good. But I saw where the puck was going – and planted a personal brand flag on YouTube.

Digital avatars are now really, really good. Soon they’ll be perfect. I’m on record as a real human from before the age of deception. Proof of humanity will matter, because people want to trust real people. And trust is an asset.

As products get easier to replicate, “what” becomes a commodity, and the “who” becomes the differentiator. Layer on that we’re already drowning in a post-truth media environment, and it’s only going to get worse. The question we’ve always asked will have even more import in the future: “who can I actually trust?”

Whether it’s for their business or for themselves, those treating brand as an asset (rather than an afterthought) will be one step ahead.

Proprietary Data & Data Sources

AI is already chewing through the masses of data we generate every day. Even now with humans managing them, they’re extracting a surprising amount of signal. When AI agents can make near-instant decisions to analyze something, they’ll want access to even more. Our digital sawdust won’t be enough. The phrase “data is the new oil” will have renewed meaning as machines find new ways to consume, process, and transform it into useful intelligence. In an AI-driven economy, owning unique datasets or gatekeeping access to data flows will become a source of wealth and power.

Art & Collectables

Creation is becoming a commodity. Certainly digitally it’s becoming trivial to generate works of art (written and images, and soon flawless video), but soon in the physical world as well. Nearly everything new will be a commodity. In this new world, the authentically handmade, the provably scarce, and even the beautifully imperfect – the wabi-sabi – will command a premium. Not in spite of their flaws, but because of them. In a weird way, the labor theory of value may become true for art.

This dynamic is set to drive increased value for certain art and collectables. As an asset class they suffer from low liquidity, but might be a fit for those looking to store wealth with a long time horizon.

Bitcoin

Bitcoin is the digitally native store of value asset for a world run by software. It’s a good bet that the Bitcoin network will be the rails on which autonomous AIs transact without meddlesome KYC/AML restrictions. Until recently it was considered a “risk-on” asset, but it’s delaminating from correlation to equities and is a provably scarce, infinitely portable, better version of gold. It also addresses the confiscation risk of holding equities with true self-custody and portability.

Software may be eating the world, but Bitcoin is eating money. My choice as the best asymmetric bet for the coming storm. All the other post-AI asset classes require effort or skill, but buying Bitcoin is simple for all hairless apes.

Which Should I Choose?

Of course, these aren’t the only assets you can choose. But hopefully you see how to think about your options. Or just make it easy on yourself and buy Bitcoin.

One Minute to Midnight

The vast majority of office workers will wake up from their cubicle slumber one day to find themselves out of a job, with no prospect for a new one, just three weeks of rainy day cash, and a mortgage that still needs to get paid.

They’ll probably never realize that they spent years doom-scrolling their way past learning about AI, in search of the next outrage-fueled bait piece of non-news, spending like tomorrow will be the same. That they used their energy to fight culture wars from the last century, obsessed with a world that no longer exists.

I hope I’m wrong, but I’m not.

Most of them won’t wake up, won’t be saved, and hand-wringing about the morality of it all may feel right but doesn’t do anything.

The thing about exponential change is it sneaks up on you. Flat, flat, flat, a little less flat, even less flat, BOOM. We’re at the ‘even less flat’ stage now. If you wait until everyone is talking about it, you’ve waited too long, you’ll have far less runway to start saving, and assets will already be repricing.

When you get on a plane, the safety presentation always says the same thing. Put on your oxygen mask before assisting others. My mask is on, and writing this is my attempt to help you put on yours. If you’ve read this far my hope is you’ll start future-proofing yourself to live on assets, not income.

Because you won’t like the bread line.

Industrial‑era college – four expensive years of ladder‑climbing prep – is on a collision course with two forces: compounding automation and collapsing trust in academic gatekeepers. Unless it’s rebuilt from first principles, it will survive only as a high‑priced social club. Here’s why going to college today is probably a bad idea, and how higher education needs to change to remain relevant.

My daughter asked what she should major in when she goes to college. I lied and told her: “Whatever you choose, you’ll be fine.”

It’s not a lie in the sense that she will be fine. She’s smart, motivated, and has a good head on her shoulders. It’s a lie because whatever she chooses as a career path (what she’s really asking) won’t matter. The labor market she’ll enter in 2030 runs on agents, synthetic teammates, and six-month skill cycles.

If we rewound the clock 30 years, she and I could have the well-worn college-bound pre-professional discussion of doctor/lawyer/MBA/whatever. She could follow in the footsteps of her dad getting a JD, or her mom getting an MD (what a trope).

But now that script is antique.

As a teen, she’s seeking certainty. Which I can’t give her, but I also can’t admit it. I do believe she’ll be fine, but I can’t tell her how. Models that cost pennies now draft appellate briefs, generate 3-D ad assets, and flag radiology anomalies at human-level sensitivity. The rest is not far behind.

Those examples do more than threaten individual jobs, they shatter the scoreboard that once justified the whole enterprise. Grades, majors, and diplomas all borrowed their meaning from the scarcity of human expertise. When a model clears the bar exam’s multiple-choice section in the 90th percentile while spending zero on tuition, GPA stops measuring mastery and starts measuring how outdated the test is. If college can’t supply a metric that still matters, the social license to consume four of our kids’ most plastic years evaporates.

And yet, my daughter’s still headed for college. Likely to spend time on things that won’t matter, maybe stumble across a few that do. But the real problem with college for a career, as it exists today, is that too much of it is counterproductive to how kids will need to think and relate in five years.

This isn’t a ‘skip college’ screed; but it’s a post-mortem on what college has become, and how the vast majority of college ‘investments’ might be at odds with both our kids’ financial future, and what they will need to understand the world.

The Opportunity Cost of College in Exponential Time

In the late 20th century, we had the luxury of spending four years to get credentialed, learn a little, and launch into the world. That time served a dual purpose: academic development and slow-motion socialization.

Today, that four-year bet erodes faster than the tuition inflates, and the payoff period itself is collapsing.

• Deloitte’s 2024 Global Human Capital Trends pegs the half-life of technical skills at about 2.5 years and shows a 50 percent YoY jump in corporate reskilling spend.
• Forbes’ analysis in December 2024 shows the shift away from college degrees as credentialing: 90 percent of surveyed companies say skills-first hires outperform degree-first hires, accelerating a shift away from pedigree screens in the 2025 recruiting cycle.

Four years now is an eternity. A frontier AI language model doubles its effective capability roughly every six months; by the time a freshman crosses the stage at graduation, the tech stack has leapt eight generations. And we’re still asking students to run on a four-year academic cycle like it’s 1975. That’s not just inefficient, it’s malpractice.

The piece of paper still matters to the parents, but only because the college-bound caste still says it does. College became the dominant social signal of the 20th-century bourgeoisie. Then we financialized it, pumped it full of government-backed debt, scaled it to mass-market, and embedded it in the cultural machinery as default.

Somewhere along the way, college lost its mid-20th-century connection to the thing that made it useful: it was once a clear signal that someone had the intellectual horsepower to join the expanding market for cognitive labor. Now that intelligence is no longer scarce, that signal is noise.

When I needed a data analyst at my company, I didn’t deal with weeks of hiring, messy HR issues and the overhead of another person, I got it done with a $0.06 API call. I’m not alone. A 2024 hiring-manager survey highlighted in Vanity Fair found 70 percent believe AI can cover intern-level tasks, coinciding with a sharp drop in internship postings across finance, healthcare, and media.

The cost for our kids isn’t just financial. It’s time. It’s the opportunity cost of spending your peak plasticity years prepping for a world that won’t exist. Every month in the wrong context is a hundred lost iterations. Some students are studying business from 1952 case studies and couldn’t tell you what a DAO is. They’re not learning the tools of tomorrow, they’re still getting trained for the economy of yesterday.

People don’t understand exponentials. Kids certainly wouldn’t, and most parents never run the math. They assume a 40-year earnings runway that no longer exists. If a skill depreciates to 50 percent relevance in 30 months, the lifetime-value spreadsheet everyone quotes is fantasy. But this is the devaluation of labor potential that college is now up against.

If I gave you a choice: take $1 today, or take $1 million in ten years – you’d probably take the latter. But only in a vacuum. My mother might think twice. She lived through the highest rate of hyperinflation ever recorded: post-war Hungary in 1946. The currency was losing half its value every 15 hours, until there were 76 septillion pengős in circulation (that’s 7.6×10^25, or 76 million billion billion). What’s money in ten years when it’s worthless by the weekend?

College is facing that kind of curve. Not in currency, but in value of what’s being taught today against the reality of technology replacing human activities. And if we keep pretending this time trade still makes sense, we’re not preparing students, we’re delaying them.

This isn’t a death knell for college. But it is a wake-up call. If college wants to matter, it has to justify its time cost. Not with nostalgia, with relevance. Right now, the clock is the enemy. And the syllabus is too slow.

The Collapsing Social Signal

Elite colleges once sold two payoffs: a credential and a phone book. The second – access to an insider network that quietly converts conversations into offers – would sometimes be reason enough to go. That arbitrage is closing.

Chetty, Deming & Friedman (2024) showed that attending an Ivy-Plus school raises the probability of hitting the top 1 percent income bracket by 60%, but the funnel is razor thin: only 11.8% of 2023 Fortune 100 CEOs hold an Ivy undergraduate degree (Heidrick & Struggles audit).

The handshake channel is shrinking. Employee referrals filled 51 percent of US jobs in 2017 (Jobvite); by 2024 the figure was 17 percent (LinkedIn Economic Graph). One in six seats comes through warm intros; buying entrée to an alumni list delivers far less leverage than parents remember.

Even where campus networks still live, there’s evidence that the payoff now decays quickly. A study of Brazil’s top public university shows that alumni-affiliated hires boost early career wages by 14%, but the entire earnings gain disappears within a decade. The signal expires long before the student loan does.

Put the numbers together: a 60% richer tail outcome that reaches a tiny fraction of grads, a referral pipe that drips instead of gushes, a network advantage that statistically vanishes before age thirty-five – financed by a quarter-million-dollar ticket and four prime years of compounding opportunity cost.

Whatever remains of the social signal no longer clears market rate. The ladder’s still there; the wall it leans on is being 3D-printed by bots.

Inquiry Dies in an Echo Chamber

College still trades on three myths: free inquiry, guaranteed career lift, and social credentialing. The career lift and social signal have already taken body-shots; the “inquiry” claim is next on the mat.

Nearly everyone still tells themselves that college is where young minds are shaped through inquiry, argument, and exposure to diverse ideas. But that version of college has largely collapsed. On most campuses the reality is curated speech, reputational land-mines, and an incentive structure that rewards conformity over discovery.

Think of it as higher education’s second failure mode: even if students wanted the adaptive thinking their careers now demand, the campus ecology won’t let them exercise it.

So before we can talk about what the contents of college should be, we have to be honest about what it is.

The sales pitch says students learn how to think; the lived reality is that they’re taught what to think. Or, perhaps at best, be instructed in what the college caste is supposed to think and permitted to say. FIRE’s 2025 Free Speech survey finds 63 percent of students self-censor at least once a month; 18 percent do so daily. When the referee is ideology, inquiry forfeits the match.

It’s easy to point at the students first – the safe-space culture, the social media radicalization, the groupthink. But none of that exists in a vacuum. Tenure committees reward citation alignment; dissenters stall. Even professors who value inquiry steer clear of land-mines. What’s left is the appearance of exploration, boxed inside ever-narrower guardrails.

Here’s the career link: markets reward novelty and zero-to-one problem-solving. Monocultures punish both. Graduates steeped in risk-aversion, or not knowing how to challenge ideas and think, will graduate into a marketplace that needs judgment.

Add the media environment. Gen-Z grew up in algorithmic tribalism – outrage as engagement, enemies as brand. They arrive primed for the echo-chamber rather than thinking.

Eric Hoffer noted that people join movements for certainty and belonging, not truth. College, once sold as a place to find yourself, now offers the safer gift of losing yourself inside a collective narrative. From a virtual TikTok bubble to a real-life bubble.

Result: students trade reality testing for identity maintenance. That swap cripples the skill employers now prize: discerning signal from noise.

The academic track could still be the beginning of something better, but only if rebuilt from first principles. Not career prep, not an echo chamber, not status theatre, but a dojo for discernment and sovereignty of mind. Skills will be taught elsewhere. Thinking tools endure.

What follows isn’t a eulogy. It’s a construction project –

A Zero‑Based Rebuild for College

The window for incremental fixes is closed; a zero-base redesign is cheaper than patching the failing four-year model. The very fact that the economic model for college is based on a timespan that’s too long dictates a change.

If college is going to survive, it must stop pretending to pipeline students into industrial-era roles. The $300,000 degree has become a Veblen good – status theatre with negative carry. Time to restart the build at ground level.

What’s Old is New Again

Just like physical labor was displaced with mechanical leverage, we are entering a phase change where mental labor is being displaced with $0.06 API calls. This means we’ll have seemingly impossible levels of intellectual leverage, with the decision becoming how to use it.

If higher education is going to be worth the time and cost, it has to be something closer to what it once aspired to be: a place where people learn to think from first principles, and on a clock that makes sense.

In early 19th-century Prussia, Wilhelm von Humboldt helped architect a model of higher education that prioritized intellectual development over job training. It was built on two principles: Bildung – the cultivation of the self – and Wissenschaft – the disciplined pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. The goal wasn’t to prepare young men for professions. It was to prepare them for freedom – freedom of thought, of judgment, of conscience.

That idea is more relevant now than ever. It’s what we will still have as humans when the machines are better than us at raw, directed thinking.

Thinking Tools in an AI World

This sharpens what college needs to be. It needs to be a place that helps prepare people for the kind of judgments they’ll need to make, and separates how to think from vocational training.

Fortunately, humans have had a few centuries to work on this before the robots came along, and it boils down to a few core things:

• Rhetoric – The machines are already flooding the world with content. With content now a commodity, people need to be precise about choosing what to say, how to say it, and why it matters.
• Epistemology – Humans need to study how we know, and what counts as evidence when synthetic media can fake all of it.
• Ethics & Philosophy – In a world where machines can optimize anything, humans still have to ask what’s worth optimizing for and what choices are right.
• Socratic Questioning – disciplined questioning that stress‑tests beliefs, especially in echo chambers.

It means fewer lectures. More collisions. Less content and memorization. That marketing vision of college that hasn’t been true for a century, made real.

Two Goals, Two Clocks

The ‘thinking’ path for college must be on human time because it takes time to digest this – but vocational training can’t be. Already we see pragmatic learning delaminating from the college track. Virtual courses, online training, and now AI-assisted learning that has shown definitively better real-world results than college.

We shouldn’t be telling people who are looking for training to do things that they need to spend four years falling behind because that’s what the legacy system is. That’s not equal opportunity, it’s undermining the outcome they want.

If the classroom no longer justifies the ticket price, we need a new structure. It doesn’t mean everyone will (or should) go to college. But if it will exist, education realigned around the new conditions on the ground would make more sense:

• One year of socialization and learning how to think would help create balanced humans without incurring the devastating cost of four years on exponential time. Longer would help socializing and learning, but too long and the trade gets bad.
• Short, rolling vocational training on using state of the art tools to do, done closer to the reality on the ground – not the snail’s pace of skill training that college offers now.
• The option for those who want to go deeper into thinking to continue after the first year. This will naturally attract those who want to sharpen the tools that help us make human decisions that may not be short-term pragmatic. These might be the few students who want to solve problems that humans want to keep their own (ethics, politics, and the like), or those who want to be academic thinkers.

We still need a ‘place’ for this. I don’t think virtual replaces it. College serves as a training ground for tribe. Strip out the credential value and you still need a place where 18-year-olds collide, flirt, fail, and learn to navigate hierarchy without screens.

To College or Not to College?

I’m still sending my daughter to college- call it path-dependence and a prepaid 529 – but I no longer view it as an economic investment, in fact it’s the opposite.

She’ll have a soft launch in the world, learn how to do laundry, eat ramen noodles, have good relationships – and bad ones – that teach her what kind of man to marry someday. Maybe she’ll find her tribe and it will be a healthy one.

But I’ll be honest, maybe that’s my nostalgia speaking. I don’t know that it’s the right choice. She’ll lose time at the verge of the exponential era, learning things that won’t matter, preparing for jobs that won’t exist. Schools move glacially. They won’t adapt in time for her, or her younger sister four years later.

I don’t have any illusion that this writing will change the ossified college machines, and it’s by no means a blueprint. I have no idea how existing colleges can possibly strip down their bloated infrastructures to meet the needs of tomorrow, and little confidence that those institutions can move at the pace necessary to make the change.

Most kids today don’t know what they want – they can’t see what’s coming, and we’ve either misled them out of ignorance or protected them out of fear. But pretending the old map still works is cowardice. If we won’t admit the world has changed, and rebuild higher education for the world that’s coming, then we’re not preparing them.

We’re abandoning them.