Then Death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. This is the second death.

The world is ending.

In the periphery enlightened Fukuyama acolytes readily worship the superstition that we've arrived at the fabled end of history—that immortal Zeitgeist, an eternal stasis. Online these committed worshipers believe that no more significant milestones in history will occur, the tapestry is woven. No more cloth is left to be added and if you can find a pair of scissors its edge is too dull to cut. They engage in a constant procession of scouring headlines for glimpses of evidence, of well…nothing happening, to proselytize that ostensible truth. They self-identify as "chuds", instead of being draped in robes they adorn a caricature of a bored unimpressed bespectacled teenager who behind his frown yearns for the promises of adventure from his childhood.

It's easy to be sympathetic to this view, to be so impressed by the incredible structure of Capitalism as it emanates and petrifies throughout our constant world at a scale beyond the human grasp or intention. In a way they are right, organizations at any scale are tautologically negentropic. In another way, we should hope so, entropy is largely precarious. But if you look closely, cracks in their idols grow, soon to be swallowed whole.

Who is this phantom iconoclast? It's neither a capricious United States administration nor an economic powder keg but instead the usual suspect in real violent paradigmatic shifts: technology. We are at the precipice of a revolution more violent than the Industrial Revolution. This revolution is not about the typical vulgar parochial anxieties on job security—although it is part of it—it's about a violent upheaval of the very socio-economic fabric in the way our world is organized.

Artificial Intelligence in the form of General Purpose Transformers since the 2017 seminal paper "Attention is All You Need" was well understood to only provide achievement in degree to the extent of the quantity of data that could be processed. Even with that, there are obvious limitations described by Amdahl's law, which states there is a logarithmic maximum potential improvement by increasing hardware provisions. To further discourage AI researchers OpenAI themselves released a paper on the logarithmic gain of performance with the increased count of parameters "Language Models are Few-Shot Learners," Brown et al 2020. Theoretically this inflection point was hit with ChatGPT-3.5+.

Yet despite their own publications, OpenAI continued to release new models albeit with the expected modest performance gains. However, recently a new class of models with unknown technical details from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google have indisputably resulted in a zero-to-one improvement. This may be a result solely by respecting Chinchilla law but regardless of the particular innovation, they're not slowing down.

Historically, a steady supply of automation studies provided fodder for AI skepticism. In 2003, Autor et al had determined that only 2 out of 200 tasks could be automated in jobs.

Our analysis suggests that only a small fraction of tasks within a typical job—on the order of 1 to 2 out of roughly 200 discrete tasks—can be fully automated by existing classification algorithms and rule-based computer systems. The vast majority of tasks require tacit knowledge, judgment, and flexibility that remain beyond the reach of current automation technologies.

The latest MIT CSAIL study maintains that tasks responsible for 23% of wages will be completely automated.

According to Thompson, only 23% of the wages paid to humans for performing vision tasks would be economically attractive to automate with AI. The study underscores that, even with rapid decreases in AI costs, it would take decades for computer vision tasks to become economically efficient for firms

A 2025 WEF study suggests 39% of tasks will be completely 'replaced or transformed'.

The current corpus encourages a rather provocative but treacly perspective on artificial intelligence. It's tempting to satiate the desire for consolation by wringing this data above the parched palate however all these studies were conducted before the release of these latest series of models and none account for any LLM technology. The latest innovations go far beyond logarithmic gains: there is now GPT-based software which replaces much of the work of CAD Designers, Illustrators, Video Editors, Electrical Engineers, Software Engineers, Financial Analysts, and Radiologists, to name a few. This radical automation exists without any sophisticated fine tuning or training. And yet these perinatal automatons are totally eviscerating all knowledge based work as the relaxation of the original hysterics arrives.

The consequences of such violence is not the conclusion congruent to the predictions of the commonly indulged hysterics. Instead we somehow find ourselves confronting an even more severe assault. That is to assert, the new world will not be the perennial structure of the world maintained and some people being on UBI. In this Hayekian way, we must review the nature of wages in a sort of heterodox but first principled manner to have any hope of clairvoyance.

The frequent naive view of the amount paid in a wage is that it's proportional to the difficulty of the job. If this were the case then certainly all wages will substantially be decreased with the advent of LLMs and that regular economic structure will be maintained. Instead, through the normal polemics we find that's not the case.

Wage is instead best viewed from the perspective of the profit maximizing economic agent, as in what motivates such an agent to accept a wage from another party at all. If such an agent were able to endeavor alone and capture all of the value from its enterprise it would do so. However, we must accept there is some expected value (EV) of profit from a solo enterprise given risks and costs. Thus, the agent must determine if an offered wage is greater than the expected value of its solo enterprise. We then find that wage must be greater than the expected value of the opportunity cost of the uncaptured labor value incurred due to employment. For much knowledge based work, this is acute since with the same skills needed for employment one can make a competing enterprise to their employer and capture all the value. Other professions require you to have large capital to do so, so the opportunity cost is either non-existent if you cannot access that capital or further discounted by the financing cost and the risk.

That is, the end wage ends up being the value you would otherwise be able to capture discounted to the expected value w.r.t your risk. Companies exist at all because they can profit on employment by having a lower risk in enterprising, thus a better EV than the wage they pay out, than their individual employees in the same enterprise for a given number of reasons—brand, preexisting customer base, proprietary market analytics, etc.

Left out of that non-exhaustive list is the most crucial, a team which provides the agent with a remarkable velocity of enterprise through the delegation of tasks. Generally aligning a team on a common product requires expensive payments to each member to provide contributions. Indeed, the early-stage venture capital industry relies on this fact.

The latest LLMs make such a provision completely redundant. The proprietor of today can supervise and delegate tasks required to build a product to the latest GPTs in virtually any knowledge field. The single proprietor now has the efficacy of maybe a team of 6-10 conservatively and further is able to produce even higher quality work.

This has a few significant effects. Sure, the corporation can downscale dramatically if they desire to maintain the same velocity and the Pareto Principle applies onto itself. They keep the top 20% employees and wages distribute again accordingly within that new distribution. We can expect such an outcome since the corporation's product velocity is likely to be constant as if it were capable of a higher velocity it would have simply hired more employees even before the introduction of AI. The limitation of velocity is thereby from other factors such as market feedback and issues with management scale.

The second effect, is that the economic agent now has a much higher expected value to the extent it rationally must commit to the solo-enterprise. It can trial launching twenty products in a year instead of one with little additional cost. Thus, the corporation cannot lower wages as the employee supply shrinks proportionally to the employee demand reduction as more economic agents pursue their own companies, no longer dependent on these large corporations for income.

One may demur and claim there simply won't be enough knowledge-based services in demand, however we instead find a Jevon's paradox, where demand for these services increases. The reduction in costs of producing the same services will make them more ubiquitous and bespoke at even a per individual basis.

This new mode of existence is unmistakably familiar to the radical dream of Lysander Spooner. Spooner believed that much of poverty and other societal ailments were consequence of exactly the wage. He envisioned the transformation of the world of wage workers to one of self-employment where workers have such full agency that they can earn what they want and how they want to.

He neatly lends credence to the third effect, where the quantity of problems and quality of solutions increases dramatically. Meritocracy prevails as the failures of corporations internally or in their external products are met with the swift competition from the endeavoring self-employed. Corporations whose products have no moat by economic scale or network will be forced into specializing their products as they surrender market share to the sea of companies. In the Deleuzian fashion, proprietors can build almost as quickly as they can imagine, as predicted, rattling the foundations of the economic order itself.

It turns out the economy is inextricably linked to our social order, indeed, Wittgenstein had remarked on our species, in a weird way we are homo economicus. The social order must change drastically to a future where institutions are no longer designed to feed corporations future employees, they merely won't harbor that demand. Many existing knowledge based workers will largely have no choice but to engage in enterprise. Educational systems must adapt and accommodate this new entrepreneurial exigency for labor in the new economic order. Workers of the future must be emboldened to eschew wages in favor of dropping into the abyss in order to have any meaningful income. We can expect, through bijective reasoning, an order of magnitude increase in the amount of companies to exist. These new companies, due to the increased expected value of the income of agents, will instead be structured as limited partnerships.

The death of the regular wage, will have the death of early-stage venture capital as we know it closely follow. Funding rounds will need to be much bigger as more and more companies raise to accelerate their business only after achieving product market fit as the costs to startup approach zero.

Although we cannot enumerate an exhaustive list of effects, if we believe such an analysis, we can endeavor with such an understanding for the desired future placement in the impending reticulated economic order.

The world is ending. Welcome to the Spooner Revolution.