I think Peter is doing great work, but he also may not really understand the depth of the problem. He gets a distorted sense of things because he meets so many successful entrepreneurs. However, 10 million white collar jobs are not going to be replaced by 10 million new AI-run small businesses.
For the majority of people, coming up with a business idea is the first hurdle. And it's especially hard to come up with a business idea that would require a work force of only 4 AI's, which is a reasonable starting point for most people.
There's no question that AI will enable thousands of new businesses to launch and thrive. That will do incredible things for overall productivity.
The problem will be on the demand side. If real unemployment drops to even 8%, that will lead to a tremendous reduction in demand. If it's 10 to 15% we're looking at depression type numbers. And this has the potential to be way beyond 15%.
I can't imagine the solution, and I've not seen any convincing plan....but I'm glad these guys are at least getting the conversation going on it!
While I understand all the points being made here and on Moonshots, I think you are still firmly stuck in the tech-based capitalist tradition. You are describing a zero-sum environment that is even more "Dog-Eat-Dog" because all the dogs are now just AI powered individuals and the most aggressive and ruthless will dominate. This is not HUMAN progress it is business progress and it is not sustainable.
When ASI arrives there will be no need for the human element in the systems you are describing. When AI is smarter and (I hope) wiser than any of us, why would it need a human at the helm of any size business? In a Dog-Eat-Dog world a superintelligent robot dog will slaughter all the others.
You have to change your frame of reference to consider what is best for all humans, not just those smart, ambitious and self-sufficiant enough to beat all the rest to the punch. You are describing a new version of a race to the bottom. I suggest you put your awareness and experience to work trying to figure out what humanity needs to go beyond the deep-seated tradition of zero-sum thinking. To live WELL in the world of abundance you are welcoming so passionatly.
The fear and uncertainty are real, but what Peter is saying is also real. The goal posts are shifting and the strategy to reach them is changing as well. Stop reading about it or watching other people do it. Right now, create something. The tools are here and right now is the best moment to learn to use them. Get involved and talk to the community here and on other platforms, not only can they help you, they want to. Fear is the lack of understanding, and this amazing technology has lowered the cost of getting involved. I truly wish you success and to know the happiness that I have. Unleash yourself.
Having posted below, I should add just one of the ways to look for alternatives to the situation that most of the comments here have alluded to:
I'm an artist and teacher and I'm in the process of creating a charitable foundation that will use my personal assets (Original Art in Educational Art Exhibitions, Teaching Pedagogy, Video Demonstrations and various other IP that I own) to work with existing arts organizations such as art museums, university galleries, art associations and municipal arts venues, to present educational creativity programs to the general public.
The main goal being to help people to re-discover their own creative potential and to act as a catalyst for their search for meaningful life options in the upcoming upheaval. People need to learn to do human things to define their sense of self worth in the world of Abundance that I do believe will be here... eventually.
Our educational and capitalist systems have pushed 98% of people to "un-learn" the creativity we are ALL born with. My foundation is tasked with bringing them back to an understanding of what their creative potential might be. This is how an entrepreneurial spirit might be kindled, regardless of the work each person might want to do.
Of course I'm doing this with Claude AI as my thinking partner and fully expect agentic AI to make this effort doable in the long run. After all I'M 74!... (and hoping Peter is right about longevity 😜.)
I don't understand the quid pro quo. All white collar workers will be replaced "imminently" and organizations will shrink to "20 percent of their size" and then startups will replace all the lost jobs. Who believes that? White collar workers making 50 or 100 dollars per hour are laid off and start their own companies where they will make...nothing? for the first year? or 10 dollars are an hour without benefits and then five years down the road....30 dollars an hour sans benefits? This is not good and I assume there is nothing to be done about it.
What isn't being said is that probably 80% of the people who work in corporations do so because they ARE NOT entrepreneurs. They are not risk takers. They desire stability and income continuity. They are mostly on the left to center of the IQ bell curve. They don't read SubStacks like this. They don't keep up with politics, current events, technology, etc. They go home, grab a drink or smoke, watch sports, play video games, rinse, repeat, day after day until old age.
These are the people that will be need to be taken care of by AI/society moving forward as their jobs disappear. They are not going to be running companies, theirs or anyone else's.
Failing to account for the needs of these people risks forcing them into embracing Luddism and ignores their potential for fomenting societal rebellion, which could lead to widespread attacks on technology, as has been written about in various SF novels.
The missing half of that picture Peter describes is: not everyone can become an orchestrator, and no economy remains healthy if mass purchasing power, early-career formation, and social legitimacy all weaken at once.
The comments of this article present a number of critical questions that, in my view, need to be urgently addressed. My question concerns what exactly the promised age of abundance will look like, when do you think it will happen and who will benefit from it globally? The inherent characteristic of capitalism is the consolidation of wealth to a very small percentage of the population, leading to social unrest. The barriers to entry of the large resource, manufacturing and technology industries will remain leaving entrepreneurs to compete for goods and services that, in many cases, will not be critical to the needs of people. Although the cost of goods may be much less, it does not mean they will cost less to the consumer. Will people on UBI be able to afford anything but the basic goods for their health and wellbeing? What will the age of abundance look like to the woman with 5 children facing famine in the midst of a civil war in Sudan?
Peter, I think many people are dismissing this too quickly because they are reacting to the rhetoric rather than the structural shift you are pointing to.
You are seeing something real. AI is lowering coordination costs, compressing organizational size, and making it possible for individuals and very small teams to operate with a kind of leverage that was previously unavailable. That is not fantasy. It is a real movement toward a new kind of abundance.
At the same time, I do not think the picture is as simple as “old jobs disappear, new AI businesses emerge, and everything works itself out.” The transition will be uneven. Some people will build. Some will be displaced. And many will discover that what looks like independence is still deeply dependent on infrastructures they do not control.
That is why I think this moment has to be understood in more than economic terms. It is not just about labor markets or startup formation. It is about agency, judgment, and the governance of intent itself. The more these systems move from executing commands to interpreting and shaping human intention, the more the central question becomes not just what abundance they create, but whose ends they are serving.
So I agree with the broad direction of your vision. I think abundance is real, and I think many critics are underestimating how profoundly organizational life is changing. But I also think abundance alone is not enough. The deeper challenge is making sure the systems that empower individuals do not quietly weaken the human person, hollow out responsibility, or centralize power behind the language of freedom.
The real task is not only to build faster. It is to build in a way that preserves human depth, moral agency, and meaningful sovereignty inside the world now emerging.
First, the Moonshots podcast is the one I drop everything for when a new episode lands. Optimistic, concrete, energizing. This comment comes from inside the fanbase.
Peter's urgency is the useful part. One year ago I would not have built what I am building today, because the cost, the time, or the skill gap made it unthinkable. That constraint is mostly gone. Anyone not paying attention is drifting.
My concern is with the transition phase. Peter's two classes, Orchestrators and Displaced, fit a world where AI is already capable across the board. We are not there yet, and in my view the next two to three years are where the trouble sits.
The bifurcation also assumes everyone would become an orchestrator if the tools made it easy. The tools do lower the threshold, that part is right. What does not change is what energizes different people. Frameworks like the Team Management System map stable preferences, with some individuals drawn to exploring and promoting, others to structured execution, others to deep analysis. AI lowers the threshold for the first group. From what I have seen across decades of project work, those preferences are stable, and AI amplifies rather than flattens them.
Long term I am optimistic. A world where every person has their own agents is worth building toward. The harder question is how we get there without leaving most of humanity behind. Across almost everything I read on this transition, that problem is widely acknowledged but rarely met with a concrete answer. To me, Emad Mostaque's framing comes closest to a serious attempt. Politics lags so far behind the curve that even grasping what is coming looks years away, let alone designing a response.
Living in Europe, I get to watch this from a safe distance. Our regulation guarantees we will not lead the transition, which means we can observe how other countries handle it and learn from whatever mistakes their politicians make first. (That last bit was sarcasm.) My honest expectation is that our politicians will not learn, even when things visibly break elsewhere.
It’s validating to read this as someone already building in this direction. It’s even more meaningful to see it being said out loud at scale.
For a while now, a small group of us have been operating in this gap where one person + AI can outperform traditional structures… but we’ve also been seeing the parts that don’t show up in the headline. How decisions are formed. Where judgment degrades. What actually separates an orchestrator from someone just moving faster with worse assumptions is something we’re starting to measure in practice.
That layer has been easy to ignore when the focus is purely on capability. It gets harder to ignore as the stakes increase.
Appreciate you putting language and momentum behind what’s happening. It makes it easier for the rest of us building here to be seen, and for the conversation to move forward.
I've been trying this stuff for weeks now. My conclusion (I'm a venture builder and investor):
A. Claude is amazing. It helps me save days of work on specific tasks (e.g. creating a shareholders agreement, reflection on a brain fart idea in the morning)
B. I tend to stay busy because I'm doing things I didn't do a year ago.
C. I want to give Claude to all my employees. Some are picking it up. And realize a and b too.
D. I do not see yet how 1 man with only agents works. A simple example is marketing and sales. How many messages in your (linkedin) inbox do you read since the advent of ai spam easily getting through? And how do we suppose someone (an agent?) sells his product then?
While the article is optimistic, it stops the trend line at 1. 200 to 20 to 1……to 0. Yes zero white collar jobs available. I am much more concerned with the opportunity for those just entering the workforce. Is the world to become a war for blue collar jobs? Where is the discussion of the physical world impact with the oncoming wave of robots such as figure and optimus?
I think Peter is doing great work, but he also may not really understand the depth of the problem. He gets a distorted sense of things because he meets so many successful entrepreneurs. However, 10 million white collar jobs are not going to be replaced by 10 million new AI-run small businesses.
For the majority of people, coming up with a business idea is the first hurdle. And it's especially hard to come up with a business idea that would require a work force of only 4 AI's, which is a reasonable starting point for most people.
There's no question that AI will enable thousands of new businesses to launch and thrive. That will do incredible things for overall productivity.
The problem will be on the demand side. If real unemployment drops to even 8%, that will lead to a tremendous reduction in demand. If it's 10 to 15% we're looking at depression type numbers. And this has the potential to be way beyond 15%.
I can't imagine the solution, and I've not seen any convincing plan....but I'm glad these guys are at least getting the conversation going on it!
These articles are getting more and more ridiculous, honestly. Not every white collar worker laid off has either:
What it takes....
The inclination...
The ability...
The skills...
The concepts/ideas for a service or product...
...required to be a successful entrepreneur. Not just in name only, but actually making a profit.
While I understand all the points being made here and on Moonshots, I think you are still firmly stuck in the tech-based capitalist tradition. You are describing a zero-sum environment that is even more "Dog-Eat-Dog" because all the dogs are now just AI powered individuals and the most aggressive and ruthless will dominate. This is not HUMAN progress it is business progress and it is not sustainable.
When ASI arrives there will be no need for the human element in the systems you are describing. When AI is smarter and (I hope) wiser than any of us, why would it need a human at the helm of any size business? In a Dog-Eat-Dog world a superintelligent robot dog will slaughter all the others.
You have to change your frame of reference to consider what is best for all humans, not just those smart, ambitious and self-sufficiant enough to beat all the rest to the punch. You are describing a new version of a race to the bottom. I suggest you put your awareness and experience to work trying to figure out what humanity needs to go beyond the deep-seated tradition of zero-sum thinking. To live WELL in the world of abundance you are welcoming so passionatly.
The fear and uncertainty are real, but what Peter is saying is also real. The goal posts are shifting and the strategy to reach them is changing as well. Stop reading about it or watching other people do it. Right now, create something. The tools are here and right now is the best moment to learn to use them. Get involved and talk to the community here and on other platforms, not only can they help you, they want to. Fear is the lack of understanding, and this amazing technology has lowered the cost of getting involved. I truly wish you success and to know the happiness that I have. Unleash yourself.
Thank you. I've been diving in and great help to read your comment.
Having posted below, I should add just one of the ways to look for alternatives to the situation that most of the comments here have alluded to:
I'm an artist and teacher and I'm in the process of creating a charitable foundation that will use my personal assets (Original Art in Educational Art Exhibitions, Teaching Pedagogy, Video Demonstrations and various other IP that I own) to work with existing arts organizations such as art museums, university galleries, art associations and municipal arts venues, to present educational creativity programs to the general public.
The main goal being to help people to re-discover their own creative potential and to act as a catalyst for their search for meaningful life options in the upcoming upheaval. People need to learn to do human things to define their sense of self worth in the world of Abundance that I do believe will be here... eventually.
Our educational and capitalist systems have pushed 98% of people to "un-learn" the creativity we are ALL born with. My foundation is tasked with bringing them back to an understanding of what their creative potential might be. This is how an entrepreneurial spirit might be kindled, regardless of the work each person might want to do.
Of course I'm doing this with Claude AI as my thinking partner and fully expect agentic AI to make this effort doable in the long run. After all I'M 74!... (and hoping Peter is right about longevity 😜.)
I don't understand the quid pro quo. All white collar workers will be replaced "imminently" and organizations will shrink to "20 percent of their size" and then startups will replace all the lost jobs. Who believes that? White collar workers making 50 or 100 dollars per hour are laid off and start their own companies where they will make...nothing? for the first year? or 10 dollars are an hour without benefits and then five years down the road....30 dollars an hour sans benefits? This is not good and I assume there is nothing to be done about it.
AI should not be used to make humanity smaller. It should be used to make
humanity wiser.
Very optimistic writing, as usual, Peter!
What isn't being said is that probably 80% of the people who work in corporations do so because they ARE NOT entrepreneurs. They are not risk takers. They desire stability and income continuity. They are mostly on the left to center of the IQ bell curve. They don't read SubStacks like this. They don't keep up with politics, current events, technology, etc. They go home, grab a drink or smoke, watch sports, play video games, rinse, repeat, day after day until old age.
These are the people that will be need to be taken care of by AI/society moving forward as their jobs disappear. They are not going to be running companies, theirs or anyone else's.
Failing to account for the needs of these people risks forcing them into embracing Luddism and ignores their potential for fomenting societal rebellion, which could lead to widespread attacks on technology, as has been written about in various SF novels.
The missing half of that picture Peter describes is: not everyone can become an orchestrator, and no economy remains healthy if mass purchasing power, early-career formation, and social legitimacy all weaken at once.
The comments of this article present a number of critical questions that, in my view, need to be urgently addressed. My question concerns what exactly the promised age of abundance will look like, when do you think it will happen and who will benefit from it globally? The inherent characteristic of capitalism is the consolidation of wealth to a very small percentage of the population, leading to social unrest. The barriers to entry of the large resource, manufacturing and technology industries will remain leaving entrepreneurs to compete for goods and services that, in many cases, will not be critical to the needs of people. Although the cost of goods may be much less, it does not mean they will cost less to the consumer. Will people on UBI be able to afford anything but the basic goods for their health and wellbeing? What will the age of abundance look like to the woman with 5 children facing famine in the midst of a civil war in Sudan?
Peter, I think many people are dismissing this too quickly because they are reacting to the rhetoric rather than the structural shift you are pointing to.
You are seeing something real. AI is lowering coordination costs, compressing organizational size, and making it possible for individuals and very small teams to operate with a kind of leverage that was previously unavailable. That is not fantasy. It is a real movement toward a new kind of abundance.
At the same time, I do not think the picture is as simple as “old jobs disappear, new AI businesses emerge, and everything works itself out.” The transition will be uneven. Some people will build. Some will be displaced. And many will discover that what looks like independence is still deeply dependent on infrastructures they do not control.
That is why I think this moment has to be understood in more than economic terms. It is not just about labor markets or startup formation. It is about agency, judgment, and the governance of intent itself. The more these systems move from executing commands to interpreting and shaping human intention, the more the central question becomes not just what abundance they create, but whose ends they are serving.
So I agree with the broad direction of your vision. I think abundance is real, and I think many critics are underestimating how profoundly organizational life is changing. But I also think abundance alone is not enough. The deeper challenge is making sure the systems that empower individuals do not quietly weaken the human person, hollow out responsibility, or centralize power behind the language of freedom.
The real task is not only to build faster. It is to build in a way that preserves human depth, moral agency, and meaningful sovereignty inside the world now emerging.
First, the Moonshots podcast is the one I drop everything for when a new episode lands. Optimistic, concrete, energizing. This comment comes from inside the fanbase.
Peter's urgency is the useful part. One year ago I would not have built what I am building today, because the cost, the time, or the skill gap made it unthinkable. That constraint is mostly gone. Anyone not paying attention is drifting.
My concern is with the transition phase. Peter's two classes, Orchestrators and Displaced, fit a world where AI is already capable across the board. We are not there yet, and in my view the next two to three years are where the trouble sits.
The bifurcation also assumes everyone would become an orchestrator if the tools made it easy. The tools do lower the threshold, that part is right. What does not change is what energizes different people. Frameworks like the Team Management System map stable preferences, with some individuals drawn to exploring and promoting, others to structured execution, others to deep analysis. AI lowers the threshold for the first group. From what I have seen across decades of project work, those preferences are stable, and AI amplifies rather than flattens them.
Long term I am optimistic. A world where every person has their own agents is worth building toward. The harder question is how we get there without leaving most of humanity behind. Across almost everything I read on this transition, that problem is widely acknowledged but rarely met with a concrete answer. To me, Emad Mostaque's framing comes closest to a serious attempt. Politics lags so far behind the curve that even grasping what is coming looks years away, let alone designing a response.
Living in Europe, I get to watch this from a safe distance. Our regulation guarantees we will not lead the transition, which means we can observe how other countries handle it and learn from whatever mistakes their politicians make first. (That last bit was sarcasm.) My honest expectation is that our politicians will not learn, even when things visibly break elsewhere.
It’s validating to read this as someone already building in this direction. It’s even more meaningful to see it being said out loud at scale.
For a while now, a small group of us have been operating in this gap where one person + AI can outperform traditional structures… but we’ve also been seeing the parts that don’t show up in the headline. How decisions are formed. Where judgment degrades. What actually separates an orchestrator from someone just moving faster with worse assumptions is something we’re starting to measure in practice.
That layer has been easy to ignore when the focus is purely on capability. It gets harder to ignore as the stakes increase.
Appreciate you putting language and momentum behind what’s happening. It makes it easier for the rest of us building here to be seen, and for the conversation to move forward.
I've been trying this stuff for weeks now. My conclusion (I'm a venture builder and investor):
A. Claude is amazing. It helps me save days of work on specific tasks (e.g. creating a shareholders agreement, reflection on a brain fart idea in the morning)
B. I tend to stay busy because I'm doing things I didn't do a year ago.
C. I want to give Claude to all my employees. Some are picking it up. And realize a and b too.
D. I do not see yet how 1 man with only agents works. A simple example is marketing and sales. How many messages in your (linkedin) inbox do you read since the advent of ai spam easily getting through? And how do we suppose someone (an agent?) sells his product then?
While the article is optimistic, it stops the trend line at 1. 200 to 20 to 1……to 0. Yes zero white collar jobs available. I am much more concerned with the opportunity for those just entering the workforce. Is the world to become a war for blue collar jobs? Where is the discussion of the physical world impact with the oncoming wave of robots such as figure and optimus?
https://nukez.xyz/blog/the-frontier-converges