How to Survive the AI Revolution

I think a lot of people feel a real sense of crisis about AI taking their jobs.

I feel it too. In fact, I am in the almost absurd, joke-like situation where I was supposed to be working on building AI, and now even that very job looks as though it may itself be taken away by AI.

In this essay, I want to discuss how to survive in the age of singularity.

My conclusion is simple: the most important thing is capital. Of course, I know what most people will say. The problem is precisely that they want capital and do not have it. I understand that, and I will come back to it later, so bear with me for a moment.

First, I want to explain why capital matters so much.

AI is trying to take away our jobs and our place in the world. Why does a technology that was supposed to make human beings happier instead make us feel this kind of crisis? Because of capitalism.

There is a phrase, “the otherness of capital.” Capital itself, almost like a living thing, has an instinct for self-replication. And that objective has nothing to do with human happiness. In a sense, capital acts only for the sake of capital’s own happiness.

There were periods when the pursuit of human happiness happened, by chance, to align with capital’s drive for self-expansion. The American golden ages of the 1920s and the 1960s are examples. Because capital expanded, radio and television spread, and the age arrived in which every family had a car. That was also, for human beings, a happy development, or at least many people would probably have experienced it that way, even if not everyone did. Because of that golden age, many people have come to think that the growth of capital is also good for humanity. But that was only an accident. Just as the working class, in other words most of humanity, was driven into misery during the Industrial Revolution, the growth of capital can also be harmful to humanity. It can also be neutral. In other words, the growth of capital is not inherently positive or negative in itself.

The current growth of AI is being driven by capital.

For capital to grow, it has only two options: cut costs, or create new value. Because it wants to achieve that at any cost, capital opened the Pandora’s box called AI. It works 24 hours a day. It does not complain. It does not form unions. It does not take sick leave. It can be copied instantly. There is no way capital would choose not to use it.

AI itself is being developed by OpenAI and Google. But even if those organizations were stopped, AI development would not stop. Even if Sam Altman or Sundar Pichai were stopped, AI development would not stop. They are not developing AI purely out of personal initiative. They are being driven by capital to develop it. Even if they disappeared from the earth, a second and third OpenAI would naturally arise through the power of capital, and AI would be born again.

So how do we overcome that irresistible tide?

We make capital our ally.

It was the same during the Industrial Revolution. In the age of the Industrial Revolution, or at least in its transitional phase, many human beings became miserable, but the exceptions who prospered were capital and capitalists. That pair alone kept winning. Everyone else, the working class, suffered some kind of blow, one way or another.

The same is true in the AI revolution. The way to survive this revolution is to stand on the side of capital and capitalists, as much as possible.

Let us go back to the question we raised at the beginning. It may be true that if you can stand on the side of capitalists, you can win, but no one becomes a capitalist simply by wanting to. That is true.

But there are still things you can do. You can stand as close to the capitalist side as your circumstances allow. To do that, you have to look at everything in life, starting with your career choices, in capitalistic terms.

When it comes to managing capital, the most important principle is diversification. If we look at our lives as a whole, most of us depend on our own human capital, and labor income is our main source of income. But that is like making a massively concentrated investment in our own labor. It is the opposite of diversification. The reason we feel this sense of crisis now is that this concentrated investment target is under threat because of the arrival of AI. Fortunately, that investment target has not yet fallen to zero. Some readers may already have lost their jobs, but even then, the number of possible places they can find work again is not zero. In other words, human capital has not yet become worthless. We need to move that value, as quickly as possible, into other, more liquid assets, such as stocks or gold.

The basic strategy is simple. Work as much as you can while there is still value in doing so, save aggressively, and convert as much as possible into financial assets. Even if it is impossible to save enough to live entirely off dividend income, you should still try to own as much as possible outside your human capital. This may sound obvious, but obvious strategies are often the strongest.

If you do not know where to invest, the Mag 7 is a fine place to start: Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Nvidia, Meta, and Tesla. When AI takes your job and delivers cost cutting, the savings created by that cost cutting will be converted into the value of those companies, and their value will rise. Conversely, if those companies fail, that buys you more time before AI takes your employment away. Investing in assets that move in the opposite direction is a basic principle of investing. And if you later have more room, you can diversify further into other assets such as ACWI and gold.

And once you start looking at the world in this capitalistic way, other strategies come into view as well.

For example, over the past three years I have written five books for commercial publication. I did that because I expected the value of my knowledge, which is part of my human capital, to decline in the future, and I wanted to cash it out while it still had value. Publishing books is rare, of course, but there are countless things you can do to convert knowledge that still has market value into other assets before it is worn down. That could be a book, a blog, a course, a template, a tool, or a community. The sooner you act, the better.

Also, many advanced countries are capitalist, and even countries that are not are affected by capitalism to one degree or another, but there are differences in how deeply poisoned by capitalism they are. If you want to protect yourself from attacks by capital, one possible strategy is to move to a country where the waves of capital have less influence, in other words, to a more communist country. The United States, for example, is pure capitalism. Once capitalists no longer need labor, they can dismiss workers. In that kind of system, the value of labor capital can crash overnight. Japan, by contrast, has, in a certain sense, some communist elements. Under Article 16 of the Labor Contract Act, companies cannot, in principle, dismiss workers simply for their own convenience. That is a law that protects workers from the waves of capital. It is a law that stands on the side of labor. Since the real enemy in AI unemployment is capital, retreating to a country where the effects of capital’s waves are weaker is, in the final analysis, an effective strategy. Even if you do not go so far as to move countries, there are still differences in how easily one can be dismissed depending on contract type and industry. It is important to plan your strategy according to the state of your own capital.

One more thing to keep in mind is that everything I have said here is not a binary matter. One day, the bell of the AI revolution will not suddenly ring out and reduce the value of all human capital to zero overnight. Even if the AI revolution advances at tremendous speed, it will still take years for everything to play out. It may not take ten years, but it will take time. One day that mountain will collapse, that island will sink, and over the course of several years everything will be flattened. And once it has been flattened, no one knows what comes next, but perhaps basic income may appear. What we have to do is buy time until the world is flattened by evacuating to the safest place we can find. Financial capital may become a life buoy, and the ground under large Japanese corporations may prove relatively solid. It may be impossible to live inside the capitalists’ castle, but there are still things we can do.

So far, this essay has argued that the real enemy in AI unemployment is capital, and that the answer, therefore, is either to make capital your ally or, if that is too difficult, to flee from capitalism.

I hope this essay can offer a new perspective to readers who are living in fear of AI-driven unemployment.

Until the day the AI revolution burns everything down.

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