For Silicon Valley, AI isn't just about replacing some jobs. It's about replacing all of them [View all]

I recently found myself at a dinner in an upstairs room at a restaurant in San Francisco hosted by a venture capital firm. The after-dinner speaker was a tech veteran who, having sold his AI company for hundreds of millions of dollars, has now turned his hand to investing. He had a simple message for the assembled startup founders: the money you can make in AI isn’t limited to the paltry market sizes of previous technology waves. You can replace the world’s workers – which means you can capture their salaries. All of them.

Replacing all human labour with AI sounds like the stuff of science fiction. But it is the explicit aim of a growing number of the tech elite – and these are people who lack neither drive nor resources, who have deep pockets and even deeper determination. If they say they want to automate all labour, we should take them at their word.

This is generally an aim that’s only admitted to behind closed doors, for obvious reasons. There’s little that will summon the pitchforks quicker than telling people you’re trying to take away their jobs. But a company called Mechanize last month bucked the trend and said the quiet part out loud. Their vision is “the full automation of the economy”, a vision they’ve convinced some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley to fund, including Google’s chief scientist, Jeff Dean, and popular podcaster Dwarkesh Patel.

Is automating all jobs really feasible? Elon Musk certainly thinks so. The rise of AI and robotics will mean “probably none of us will have a job”, he said last year. Bill Gates thinks humans soon won’t be needed for “most things”. Massive labour replacement has also been predicted by godfather of AI Geoffrey Hinton and billionaire investor Vinod Khosla. These are hardly fringe voices that have no idea what they’re talking about.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/may/12/for-silicon-valley-ai-isnt-just-about-replacing-some-jobs-its-about-replacing-all-of-them