Five years from now, everyone uses AI. Machines run on APIs. Spreadsheets run on Claude. Kiosks are fully automated. Productivity? Who knows. People scroll Reels for eight hours a day. Everything feels easy, and everyone is arguing about nothing.

This essay started with “what happens to the economy?” and ended somewhere near “what happens to us?”

1. Deflation? No. An Asymmetric Economy.

When AI handles operations, customer service, and administration, marginal costs collapse. The cost of labor, inventory management, and order processing behind a single cup of coffee all plummet. Supply-side deflation pressure is real.

But the real question is: where does the surplus go?

If it accumulates as corporate profit, you get asset inflation (real estate, equities) alongside real-economy deflation — a dual structure. If it’s redistributed through wages or subsidies, prices might stay surprisingly stable. What’s most likely isn’t pure deflation but an asymmetric economy: prices for physical goods and services fall, prices for attention, emotion, and scarce experiences rise, and asset prices move on their own separate logic entirely.

When people pour their time into content consumption, attention becomes the ultimate scarce resource. The advertising-subscription-creator economy swells as a share of GDP. Meanwhile, felt consumption is “free content + cheap stuff,” and price indices face perpetual downward pressure.

2. Everyone Becomes a Telecom Company

When AI flattens the implementation layer, most businesses converge toward the same structure as telecom carriers. Infrastructure is identical. Technical differentiation is negligible. You compete on pricing plans, bundling, marketing, and distribution.

“Our tech is better” stops working. Your competitor asks the same AI to optimize, and gets the same result.

Engineering shrinks to skeleton crews — what took fifty people, two to five now handle through AI orchestration. The bottleneck shifts to sales and relationships. But unlike telecoms, there’s no physical infrastructure (cell towers, cables) acting as a barrier to entry. Instead of oligopoly, you get hyper-competition: thousands of companies with zero margin, scrambling over nothing.

It settles one of two ways. Either platform concentration — a handful of AI infrastructure owners become the carriers, everyone else becomes a reseller. Or brand-and-community competition — where technology is identical, “I use this because of who made it” becomes the only differentiator.

3. The Geeks Will Weep

The last twenty years were the golden age of “if you can code, you’re king.” Technical skill was scarce. AI equalizes implementation, and that scarcity evaporates.

It’s not just about jobs disappearing. It’s about the foundation of identity crumbling. “I’m someone who understands and builds complex things” — that’s the core of geek culture. When the market value of that ability collapses, what follows is an existential crisis, not a career pivot.

What makes it worse: the new rules of the game are precisely what geeks have spent their entire lives avoiding. Relationship-building. Small talk. Reading emotions. Sales. The world suddenly demands the one thing they were never wired for.

Smart people in crisis behave differently. They can analyze their own situation with painful precision — “I understand exactly why this happened, and I can’t change it.” Sophisticated grievance narratives emerge online. High-functioning depression spreads silently. Inside organizations, cynical sabotage becomes a quiet drag on progress.

Winning and losing start to split along temperament rather than ability. You could learn to code. But learning to smile comfortably in front of strangers is a matter of rewiring thirty years of personality. For those who believed in meritocracy, this feels like the world breaking its promise.

4. The Pissing Contests

The median response isn’t apathy. It’s noise.

When you can no longer prove your existence through what you’ve made, all that’s left is what you’ve said. Not what you produced, but what you argued, what you criticized, whose side you took. Your opinions become the only evidence that you exist.

AI has solved everything with a clear answer. So the only territory left for humans is arguing about things that have no answer. Is AI-brewed coffee real coffee? Is that kiosk UX humane? Is AI-written text real writing? Everything becomes a debate. Not because the questions matter, but because debating is the last activity that feels like being alive.

And people will deliberately avoid using AI in these arguments. If you ask Claude, it gives you an answer, and the fight ends. But the fight can’t end — the fight is the point. So people argue with emotion, with anecdote, with “trust me, I’ve been through it.” Not using AI becomes a badge of authenticity. “I don’t hide behind machines.”

Sartre’s “hell is other people” maps precisely onto this structure. It was never about bad people — it was about being trapped in a world where you can only define yourself through others’ eyes. When AI takes over doing, all that’s left is being seen. Every human interaction becomes a cry of “notice me.”

The real cost of the AI era won’t be subscription fees. It’ll be the friction cost of pissing contests. AI multiplies efficiency by ten; humans burn nine of those gains on micro-politics.

5. AI Is the Printing Press. So What’s the Religion?

Gutenberg’s printing press democratized information. Once anyone could read the Bible, interpretive authority fractured. The Reformation erupted. Hundreds of denominations splintered. They fought endless pissing contests over whose reading was correct, until the losers said, “Forget it, we’re leaving,” and boarded ships for the New World.

AI democratizes capability. The structure is identical.

AI isn’t the religion itself. It’s the mirror. The printing press reflected “the Word of God” to everyone; AI reflects “human ability” to everyone. The religion is the question that follows: “Then what are humans for?” In the sixteenth century, the central question was your relationship with God. In the twenty-first, it’s your relationship with the machine.

New denominations are already forming. Pure Humanism — “No AI, hands only, that’s what’s real.” An Amish revival for the twenty-first century. Full Integration — “Merging with AI is evolution.” Transhumanism. Pragmatic Moderates — “Use it as a tool, but protect your identity.” Most people claim to be here, but the boundary keeps blurring.

And between these factions: more pissing contests.

6. London Didn’t Fall. But This Time Is Different.

After the misfits sailed for the New World, London thrived. With the noisy dissenters gone, those who remained focused on commerce and built the British Empire.

But the analogy breaks down on closer inspection. London had India. Africa. China. An inexhaustible exterior to extract from. That external engine sustained the empire even as its soul hollowed out.

Future Earth has no exterior. AI has squeezed out every efficiency. Markets are saturated. Population growth has stalled. People scroll Reels and wage pissing contests. An empire with no colonies to exploit is just an expensive retirement home.

And critically, the ones leaving this time are the geeks. The Mayflower carried farmers and carpenters — people who could produce on arrival. The Mars ship carries the people who build systems, control environments, and orchestrate AI. It’s not misfits leaving. It’s the engine leaving.

This isn’t London. It’s Rome. London had extraction to sustain centuries of dominance. Rome collapsed into internal politics the moment expansion stopped. Bread and circuses. AI is the mercenary army. Reels is the Colosseum.

The more likely scenario is darker still: the spaceship seats are allocated by capital and power. The geeks aren’t passengers; they’re crew. Mars isn’t a New World — it’s a gated community at planetary scale. And the people left on Earth don’t even realize they’re living in a colony. They’re too busy with their pissing contests to notice.

7. What If Fusion Energy Changes Everything?

Here’s one more variable. If fusion energy matures and quantum computing gets serious resource allocation, energy costs approach zero.

Free energy changes everything. Every stage of production — extraction, transport, processing, manufacturing — runs on energy at its core. Desalination becomes free. Food production converges on free. Recycling becomes perfect. Material scarcity itself could vanish. AI plus unlimited energy plus quantum computing means “production” as a concept loses meaning.

But the pissing contests don’t stop. They intensify. When material scarcity disappears, only one scarcity remains: recognition, attention, status. You can’t manufacture that with a hundred fusion reactors.

History offers a parallel: aristocratic society. People with no survival concerns spent their days in court — competing over etiquette, jockeying for rank, fighting over who sits closer to the king. Versailles was a purpose-built arena for pissing contests. Louis XIV designed it that way deliberately, channeling the nobility’s rebellious energy into ceremonial one-upmanship.

All of humanity becomes aristocracy. Reels becomes Versailles.

The majority wage status wars in the palace. A minority, freed from material concern, pursue something genuinely deep. Even with infinite energy, human attention remains finite. What you spend that finite attention on becomes the defining choice of your life.

Epilogue

The final bottleneck of the AI era is not technology. Not compute. Not energy.

It’s human ego. And no model can optimize that.

Those who can step out of the pissing contests and protect their own attention — physically or mentally — are the ones who will reach the next New World.

The spaceship isn’t a rocket. It’s self-awareness.