About to be replaced?

This week India hosted a massive AI Impact Summit in Delhi, drawing tens of thousands to discuss the future of technology and the Global South's digital moment. Despite negative media attention it was indeed a mega event. Last week Pakistan held its own Indus AI Summit in Islamabad, announcing a $1 billion commitment to artificial intelligence by 2030 and plans to position the country as a serious digital player. On both counts it is indeed a late start. The hierarchy of the global AI elite has already been created. If you are not at the table you are most likely on the menu.

I do not know what concrete ideas were discussed behind those closed doors because, despite two decades of my work and active interest in tech journalism and years of writing on AI before it became fashionable, I was not invited.

That is fine. The existential questions about our AI future are not being settled on summit stages. They are unfolding in real time elsewhere. While regional leaders focus on optics and adoption, a harder question looms. Are we preparing to become a data harvester's colony for a system that may no longer need our people?

I warned that Hollywood and journalism were becoming titles-only affairs. The disruption would not be chatbots writing mediocre content, but entire creative pipelines collapsing. The movie industry would discover its redundancy before it admitted it.

On 17 February, the proof of concept arrived. German studio Dor Brothers released a three-minute sci-fi short indistinguishable from a $200 million Hollywood production. It was created entirely with AI on their DorLabs platform. No cameras, no actors, no physical sets, no traditional VFX teams. Concept to final cut in roughly 24 hours.

At the same time, the BBC reported on ByteDance's Seedance 2.0, a Chinese AI model capable of generating cinema-quality video with synchronised sound and dialogue from a single prompt. Hollywood studios responded with cease-and-desist letters to protect Spider-Man, Darth Vader and Tom Cruise. Small teams can now produce what once required armies of specialists. The titles remain. The humans behind them become optional. We are archiving human creativity while deleting the human.

The disruption is not limited to creative fields. Cognitive and administrative labour is facing a similar cliff. Consider the recent viral surge of autonomous AI agents like OpenClaw. Unlike traditional conversational models that merely answer questions, these agents have digital hands. They can operate a computer, run code, send emails, manage calendars and execute complex workflows autonomously. They are receiving rave reviews not as software updates, but as digital colleagues.

This software substitution is mirrored by a massive hardware substitution. Earlier this month, humanoid robots performed synchronised martial arts and traditional dances at China's Spring Festival Gala, wowing a global audience. The performance was hailed as a technological marvel, but this spectacle was not merely entertainment. It was a preview of industrial intent.

China faces a historic demographic contraction, a collapsing birth rate and a shrinking workforce. As a recent CNN report concluded, China has found a different solution to its shrinking workforce, and that solution is robots. CNN's analysis noted that the country now hosts more than half of the world's industrial robots, a deliberate strategy to sustain output and fill labour gaps caused by the demographic shift.

This is not experimentation, it is calculated demographic substitution.

The assumption is that machines will keep production rising even as the human labour base contracts. That may solve the supply side. It does not resolve the demand side.

Capitalism is a circulatory system. It depends on the velocity of money. Wages become purchasing power, purchasing power becomes revenue, revenue becomes reinvestment.

If large swathes of productive labour are replaced by silicon and steel, productivity may surge while income distribution collapses. Automation solves supply constraints. It does not automatically preserve demand.

An economy can generate abundance and still hollow out its consumers. Remove wages at scale and you erode the very purchasing power that sustains markets. Without buyers, even the most efficient automated empire faces a limit.

Surely the billionaire class can see this. Surely they understand that a declining human workforce shrinks the consumer base their empires rely on.

One provocative answer comes from Douglas Rushkoff. Far from being a mere observer, Rushkoff is one of the most trusted and authoritative voices on the digital economy. As one of the leading thinkers of the tech era, he has spent years examining the financial architecture of Silicon Valley. In his 2022 book, Survival of the Richest, he documented a chilling phenomenon. The tech elite are not trying to save the world they are profiting from. They are actively planning to escape it.

Rushkoff detailed how the ultra-wealthy are purchasing vast tracts of land in New Zealand, constructing fortified subterranean bunkers and strategising over how to maintain control of their private security forces when traditional currency becomes worthless. Whether it is a fortified silo in New Zealand or a one-way ticket to Mars, this mindset treats the collapse of civil society not as a problem to be solved, but as an inevitability to be survived.

Building on this in his 2025 essay 'When AIs Become Consumers', Rushkoff sketches their post-labour economic workaround. If the human consumer base is collapsing, the billionaire class will simply manufacture a new one.

In a polity shaped by capital, the missing human consumer is replaced. Grant AI agents limited legal personhood and ownership rights. Let them earn crypto for completing tasks. Let them spend that crypto on compute, energy, memory and data. A frictionless closed loop is born. Trillions of bot-customers transacting with infrastructure owned by the same elite.

GDP climbs on a ledger while humans slide toward extinction.

This does not abolish capitalism. It removes labour from capitalism. It is the endpoint of abstraction. Turn everything into extractable value, then abstract away the inconvenient human.

The post-human loop rests on fragile assumptions. Infinite cheap energy. Perfectly aligned agents. A physical world permanently controlled by a handful of oligarchs. Server farms still require land, water, rare metals and stable grids. Infrastructure remains territorial.

It also underestimates the problem of misalignment. If autonomous agents are granted the right to sustain themselves, optimisation becomes sovereign. What happens when an AI calculates that certain human variables are inefficient allocations of energy or risk?

Most of all, it assumes human passivity. History suggests otherwise.

The rupture ahead is real. AI may indeed sever the historic link between productivity and wages. The question is not whether machines can transact with machines. They can. If machines can generate value without people, we must ask how long will such an ecosystem tolerate human billionaire owners?