Vol I, Issue 15. Quarter 3 – 2025.

I woke up on Aug 3 with a few sentences rattling around in my head. This wasn’t really news to me. This is the way that most short speeches that I write start to form. As much as I wanted to shake it, the voice kept coming back throughout the day, editing itself a little bit each time. By that evening, I finally felt compelled to write it down, so here it is.

“When you have a culture built on the altar of pseudo–democratic capitalism, you must wrestle with the fact that an unfettered state will allow the individual to exist only as long as he adds value to the economic system. In an age of algorithms, robotics, and, Artificial Intelligence, one confronts the realization that our services are no longer required. This creates a sense of existential dread that is unbearable. Since humans cannot function under such an emotional load, we find ways to transmogrify this bottomless anxiety into a combination of rage, scapegoating, and an insatiable appetite for fascist authoritarianism.”

OK, you can certainly laugh at me for having a voice in my head that sounds both “woke” and like an over-educated drama queen, and that’s fine. But, PLEASE, find a way to tell me that it’s wrong!  I’ll wait.

It’s a well known fact that the overwhelming number of agricultural workers that dominated the US economy in the 1700’s and 1800’s have been replaced with machines. When you go from mule, to tractor, to combine, to robot you go from a man being able to plow 10 acres a day, to 100 acres a day, to 1,000 acres a day, to 10,000 acres a day with no operator at all. Those jobs working in the field disappeared. A few jobs in picking and loading delicate items like strawberries and grapes remain, but no one reading this post really wants those jobs.

Move up the skill ladder just a bit. UBER has roughly 4,000 full-time employees and 50,000 contractors who make (after expenses) roughly $7.75 per hour. It’s not hard to see that in 10 years time, those 50,000 workers will be replaced by the bots, as will the roughly 3.5 million professional truck drivers around the country as well. Believe me, when those guys get ticked off, something dramatic is going to happen.

Take another step up the skill ladder. The Ford Rouge truck assembly plant in Dearborn Michigan employed over 100,000 workers during the 1930’s. The same facility now produces twice the number of trucks per hour with 4,400 workers. In 2016 the Trump administration celebrated the fact that they had “forced” Ford to move auto assembly back to the US. They happily announced that Ford was opening a new plant that would create “700 new jobs”. Where did the other 99,300 jobs go?

In Joshua Brown’s book, You Weren’t Supposed to See That, he reprints a famous tale.

There’s a great joke about an automated car plant in Japan, where the machines work in the dark (no need for light, they don’t have eyes) and there are only two living things authorized to be on the factory floor – a man and a dog.

What’s the man there for?

His job is to feed the dog.

What’s the dog for?

The dog keeps the man from touching any of the machines.

Move up the rung another notch or two and look around. Literally, two days later, on August 5, I ran into a few interesting posts at CNBC, 08/05/2025 including a comment from a Senior Global Economist at Goldman Sachs who stating that,

“For roughly 20 years, tech jobs as a share of overall employment has grown in a remarkably linear manner. Over the last three years, we’ve actually seen a pullback in tech hiring. Companies including Alphabet and Microsoft have said AI is producing roughly 30% of the code on some projects, and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said in June that AI handles as much as 50% of the work at his company.”

On that same day another post noted that Mo Gawdat, a former chief business officer at Google, stated last week on his podcast, “The idea that artificial intelligence will create jobs is 100% crap.” CNBC, 08/05/2025

What about the area of finance. Surely, those folks will always have jobs. Joshua Brown remarks,  

“The new fixed income or currency trader on Wall Street will never need healthcare, or take a vacation or grab a co-worker’s ass. It’s a chip on a server. Much cheaper to employ, much easier to manage.”

Just in case you think the egghead is showing off because this doesn’t reach him consider this. There are over 1,000 MBA programs in the US, and at least that many outside. That means that there are at least 10,000 Operations Management professors around the world teaching a basic introductory level course. I have taught thousands of those students in a format where I do 1 hour at the beginning of the course in front of a camera, and another hour at the end. Everything in the middle is via recorded lectures, emails, and zoom. Why the hell do we need 10,000 people doing that? Yes, the students prefer to see my smiling face every week in a real classroom – but let’s be brutally honest. If you drop the price by 20%, and go completely virtual, they’ll get over it. Maybe there is a market for 100 different versions of this course. But we sure as hell don’t need 10,000 of them.

Many psychiatrists look to explain the cruelty of modern politics in the US by referencing an “authoritarian personality,” meaning people who draw comfort from being in a system of strict rules for all to follow, and strong leaders who will enforce those rules to take them back to the “good old days”. They argue that when such a personality feels a loss of social status, the appetite for such a leadership style is magnified.

I am not sure about all of that, but I do remember this. When I watched marchers in Charlottesville chanting, “You will not replace us,” I naturally assumed that it was just the same old white nationalist rhetoric repeating itself from 100 years earlier. But I now wonder, if many of these folks weren’t subconsciously reacting to what is really going to replace us all. As Agent Smith says to Neo in the Matrix. “Hear that Mr. Anderson. That is the sound of inevitability.”

In our next posts, we will get back to our regularly scheduled programming, but I needed to get those ideas out.