Picture an office half a decade from now. The rooms are quieter and noticeably sparser. The junior researchers are gone, followed quietly by middle managers, spreadsheet analysts, and report writers. No press release announced their redundancy. Work simply stopped flowing to human desks, absorbed instead by software that performs tasks faster and cheaper.
Yet the business is thriving. Profits have climbed, output is higher, and the payroll is a fraction of what it once was. Walk onto the floor, however, and the atmosphere is subdued. Employees are exceptionally careful, hesitant to question management or push for higher wages. Everyone knows chairs are scarce, and algorithms do not ask for annual pay rises.
Discussions around artificial intelligence frequently fixate on science-fiction scenarios—conscious machines or rogue algorithms seizing control. The more immediate hazard is far more mundane: humans risk becoming economically superfluous.
Economists have a name for a remarkably similar phenomenon: the resource curse. Nations sitting atop vast reservoirs of oil, gas, or minerals ought to be models of inclusive wealth. In reality, places like Nigeria and Angola demonstrate that natural riches often distort a society. When state revenues flow directly from extraction sites while the productive labour of citizens is bypassed, governments have little incentive to cultivate or rely upon their populations. Wealth pools tightly around political elites and commercial monopolies, leaving civic institutions hollowed out. The state stops needing its people.
Swap out the commodity, and the underlying dynamic shifts toward cognition. What happens when the extracted resource is no longer oil, but intelligence?
For centuries, human intellect has been the ultimate bottleneck. Designing products, analysing markets, calculating logistics, and writing code required human minds. Because employers depended on skilled workers to function, and governments relied on them for taxes, labour retained genuine leverage. The improvements in wages, safety standards, and working hours secured over the past century and a half were won because capital needed human hands and brains to survive. Mutual dependency anchored the social contract.
Artificial intelligence threatens to break that bond by turning intelligence into an abundant, low-cost commodity. A firm that once employed a thousand specialists might require a hundred tomorrow, and twenty the year after. Combine software automation with advancing robotics, and the squeeze moves effortlessly from corporate offices to factory floors.
Eventually, a blunt economic question emerges: what are most people actually necessary for?
Technologists often insist that automation depends entirely on human choices. In theory, yes. In practice, the systems reshaping the economy are controlled by corporate giants whose primary mandate prioritises efficiency and shareholder returns above worker welfare. If replacing a thousand employees with a hundred lines of code boosts profitability, market logic dictates that it will happen. No grand conspiracy is required; financial incentives do the work.
This is why abundance fails to guarantee equity. A society can generate staggering macroeconomic wealth while a massive segment of its population is economically sidelined. As historian Yuval Noah Harari has argued, the true peril of advanced automation is that workers face economic irrelevance alongside unemployment.
When machines can think, plan, manufacture, and labour cheaper and faster than humans, our historic bargaining chip evaporates. Oil cursed nations with dependency and inequality; artificial intelligence risks saddling advanced economies with a quiet, pervasive redundancy. Unless societies confront the erosion of human economic necessity, we are walking blindly into a future where the machines hold all the cards and the rest of us are simply no longer required.