Are We
Screwed?

If displaced workers simply lose their income, consumer spending collapses. Displaced workers cut nearly all their spending. Remove the wages, remove the customers. Companies automate their way to record efficiency — then watch their revenue crater because nobody can afford to buy anything.

This is the death spiral: fewer jobs → less spending → less revenue → more cuts → fewer jobs. Even the most profitable AI-powered company can't survive selling to an economy where 80% of purchasing power has evaporated.

The obvious answer is Universal Basic Income — government pays everyone a living wage. But UBI concentrates enormous financial power in whoever controls the government. Your income becomes a political lever.

When governments control income, the temptation to weaponize it follows. China's social credit system docks benefits for dissent. Canada froze bank accounts of trucker protest donors in 2022. Authoritarian regimes routinely cut pensions and benefits to political opponents. UBI at scale would hand that same lever to whoever holds power — your entire livelihood tied to one institution's continued goodwill.

There's a third option: if AI replaces your labor, own the AI. Not the technology itself, but the companies deploying it. When a corporation replaces workers with AI, its profits explode. Those profits flow to shareholders as dividends and rising share prices.

The investor model is simple: displaced workers shift from earning wages to earning returns on a portfolio of AI-powered companies. No government gatekeeper. No political litmus test. Your income comes from owning a piece of the economy, not from a bureaucrat's approval.

The critical question is: can you accumulate enough before displacement hits? This model calculates the full picture — labor displacement, AI costs, demand feedback loops, supply chain effects, and what it means for corporate profits and shareholder returns. Let's walk through it with Amazon as an example.