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All right, good morning. So let's get right back on the horse and talk about pretty much my most dangerous idea of all time. So this is of course labor zero, the idea that we should deliberately eradicate the need for human labor. Now to give myself a caveat, an escape hatch, is to say that I think that that's the direction it's going. Anyways. When you look at what human bodies offer the economy, strength, dexterity, cognition and, and empathy, we don't have any moats, right? Like people get most of their emotional support from chatbots already. At least the people who use chatbots. Obviously most, most people globally don't use them yet. But at 800 million weekly average users or weekly active users for chat GPT alone, that's a tenth of the human population. And that's after only a couple of years. So obviously this is coming. We're still very early here, you and me. But, but strength pretty much irrelevant. You know, tractors and robots and everything else, they're much stronger than dexterity. That's the next one that's going to fall. And if you've watched any of the robotic demonstrations, I mean there was, there was a robot, I think it was a Japanese robot that I saw threading in pencil, graphite for a mechanical pencil. Now if you've ever used a mechanical pencil, you know that that requires sub millimeter precision. And if, if robots can do that and then dancing and kung fu fighting and all kinds of stuff, then the dexterity mode is fast eroding. And then on the cognition front, that's what we're all talking about with, you know, with, with large language models and large language recursive model, or was it recursive language, rlms, recursive language models and everything else. So blah, blah, blah, intelligence is going to be solved. And then empathy, Empathy is something that, like there's all kinds of affective computing and theory of mind studies that have been shown like these, these machines are better at being human than some humans are. Right. And I don't mean that really hyperbolically, like just stop and take a second to realize like, oh yeah, this machine is better at using English language than I am. It's better at, you know, emotional intelligence. Sometimes, obviously, like, sometimes they are really bad at these things. But the, there's no physical law preventing them from being better than humans. Better, faster, cheaper and safer at humans than all four of the primary things that we offer. The economy, strength, dexterity, cognition and empathy. Now if you might be skeptical, like, surely humans offer more to the economy than that. And yes, there is like experience, authenticity, and some of those other things. But when you look at the human body, what is it that the human body offers? The economy? It's those four things. So, all right, so if we just accept, if we just stipulate that, yes, these machines are going to destroy the demand for human labor or at least they're going to replace the supply side. The demand side is a little bit different. The demand side is like, where would you prefer to have a human even if machine could do it better, faster, cheaper, safer? And that is the authenticity, meaning experience and that sort of thing. Basically, there's only one of me. So even if you can have an AI that's a direct clone, your brain is going to be like, that's not the real Dave. I want to hear what the real Dave has to say. Because then the AI is just a simulation. So human uniqueness, human authenticity, hopefully will mean that there's always going to be some unique demand for each of us. You know, I'm hoping and praying for myself as well, because otherwise I might be up the paddle without, without, up the creek without a paddle. There we go. That's, that's, that's the real idiom. So anyways, but for the sake of argument, let's, let's assume that machines are likely to destroy all labor. Now there's a lot of arguments to be made that we should preserve labor for one reason or another. You know, labor is a presently the best way that we have to coordinate distribution of wealth. So if you want to allocate wealth to a society, you, distribution a coordination mechanism. So rather than just giving out the, you know, the wealth, whether it's money or property or whatever you say. Okay, well, if you want it there, there has to be a transaction. There has to be an exchange. So sell me your time, sell me your labor, I'll give you some money, and then you can buy the stuff that you need. And that is the distribution and allocation mechanism. Now we have moralized this. It is, it is sinful to be lazy and it is righteous to be productive. And if you're a winner in the economy, it's because God favors you. That is literally Calvinism. Now, of course, we've secularized it, so, you know, Calvinism. And then the, the Protestant work ethic has just been kind of dissolved into the capitalist work ethic. So if you're not hustling, you're lazy. And if you're lazy, you're bad. So there's a, there's always a moral Component. It's not just the pragmatic. You know, you work, you contribute to society, and therefore you get something in exchange. It's a fair and equal exchange. But you have to earn your personhood, you have to earn the right to be alive in this society. Because that's one of the logical extensions. One, one of the things that I say is neoliberalism means you're as free as your wallet can go. And if you don't have any money, you're not a real person under neoliberalism. Now that's a big, big rant over there. So what I'm talking about is like more of a zeroth principle, which is that labor has been the bedrock of civic power for all of history. And so if we talk about whether we're deliberately eradicating labor or whether labor will be eradicated by the machines, either way it doesn't matter, at least in this context of civic equilibrium and the labor power that has been a stabilizing force in society. And the reason is because of that term that I used the other a couple videos ago, double bilateral dependence. So basically the state needed us and the firms needed us. So the elites and the aristocracy and the monarch and whoever, whoever was in power because that, you know, whatever power looks like at any given moment might change. But there's always elites. And if you want to, if you want a more formal definition of elites, one of the best ones that I've come across is a minority of people that have outsized agenda setting power. And I'm like, that is a really good definition of an elite, because an elite, that in that case could be a cultural elite, intellectual elite, financial, political, military elite. Like that basically says, okay, some, some, one person has a very concentrated ability or, or not just one person, but a small group of people have a concentrated ability to set agendas and set narratives. Okay, great. So elites will always happen in any society because humans are naturally hierarchical. Now I know that that'll be a slightly controversial assertion. In small groups, humans are not necessarily hierarchical, but anytime a group gets above 20 to 20, usually it's like by about 26 flat. Hierarchies no longer work. Hierarchies naturally form, and I think that they're kind of necessary. Anyways, this is an entirely different topic. Okay, so elites always happen. And, and the elites have always needed labor. And so the other component of double bilateral dependence is that you have, what do they need from us? They need service, which is in the form of physical labor and military service and that sort of thing. And then they need revenue. Well, if machines replace that altogether, then, well, we're up the creek without a paddle. I got it right this time. So then you say, okay, well, why, why has labor been powerful? Why is service powerful? What makes it unique and distinct? What are the first principles of labor that has made it non fungible with anything else? And I've got my handy dandy little list here. So, number one, it's inalienable. So labor being inalienable means you cannot separate it from the human body. You need a human body, a healthy, voluntary, or at least cooperative human body present to do labor. Okay, cool. That physical law, number one, that alone obviates most other things that say, like, okay, well, if you want labor, you need a, you need a cooperative, healthy human body there. Number two, however, it's refusable. This is the leverage power. So my wife and I are watching for all mankind. And on season four, I don't want to spoil it if you haven't seen it, but one of the themes of the, of season four is strikes. So there's a, there's a. All the workers on Mars strike because they realize, hey, what are you gonna do, fire us? And they're like, we actually have a lot of power, so if you wanna, if you wanna do things that are really valuable, you need to treat us fairly. So labor has always been refusable. You can always desert the army if you've been conscripted, or even if you didn't weren't conscripted, you can always strike. You can seize the docks, you can shut down the factories and that sort of thing. So that's what gives labor leverage. So it's inalienable and it's refusable. Another one is that it's mandatory. So that's the double bilateral dependent. So I don't need to reiterate that if you, if you're running a firm or a state, you need labor at least until the machines come to replace them. And then the last one is it's perishable. So this is one of the other keystones. And when, when I say that labor is perishable, you can't just store it in a grain silo, right? Like steel, copper, grain, you know, all kinds of other capital goods. They'll just sit in a, in a factory. Some things will perish, obviously. Like, you know, food will only last so long. But labor has no shelf life. It needs to be provisioned every single day. And every single day that it is not provisioned is lost productivity and lost wealth and Lost value add. So that's why human labor has given us so much power. And that's why I call it a codependent relationship between the proletariat and the elite, or between labor and capital. To use more modern terms, it means the same thing. If you say labor and capital, what you're talking about is the worker class versus the ownership class. If you say the proletariat versus the elite, then you're using Marxist terms. Same thing. All right, so if we get rid of that, if we get rid of labor, either through engineering or policy or both, then we lose all leverage. And this is what a lot of you have been talking about on my channel and comment sections for a long time, is that how do we avoid becoming a permanent, an underclass if we have no utility? And that is a really good question. So what we really have to do then is figure out how do we replace labor's leverage with something else? What do we replace it with? That has a few characteristics. Now, obviously we're not going to be able to replace labor one for one, because that's being substituted entirely by machines. In the long run, it might be five years, it might be 10 years, it might be 20 years, it might take a little bit longer. But keep in mind that, you know, Ray Kurzweil's date for singularity is like 2045 or sooner. So that means anything that humans could possibly ever do, machines will subsume that by 2045. So, you know, the clock is ticking. That's like, we've got 19 years or less until humans just have nothing to offer. Now, I would argue that the elites would also have nothing to offer in that, in that situation. So they're going to be equally useless as us. But that's, that's. I covered that in the last video. Okay, so when we're talking about what do we replace labor's power with, what is it that, you know, what is it that we need to do? So there's basically two things ultimately that labor has allowed us to do in terms of leverage. And so number one is, and this is the oldest one is coercive extraction of concessions. Now, that's a mouthful. Coercive extraction of concessions. So coercion basically means I'm going to use force, I'm going to use manipulation or bullying to get what I want. That is, that is coercive extraction of a concessions. And so a concession is like, I want more money or I want better working conditions, or I want health care or whatever else. So that is like one of the primary things that we have used. So all those, all those characteristics of, you know, was inalienable, mandatory, refusable, perishable. When you have that leverage, what do you ask for? You cur, you coercively extract concessions. And then the other thing that you do with it is that, hold on, I had a brain fart is that, is that you have credible threats. So credible threat is basically in if you, if you don't actually have to, to, to pull the plug on a thing. Right, It's a credible threat. And so even just the threat of withholding labor is often enough to get those, those, those concessions. But threat of a coercive extraction of concession, you lose all leverage. So what do you, what do you replace that with? And that's where we have to rebuild new institutions and new levers to say, okay, if we're not getting what we want, we still need some kind of veto. Because that's fundamentally what it comes down to is no matter what the state wanted to do, no matter what the capitalists wanted to do, no matter what the robber barons wanted to do, ultimately dock workers and co workers and rail workers and whoever else had veto power, they said, we can, we can get production down to a, we can, we can halt all production, whether that's military advancement, whether that's industrial advancement and that sort of thing. Now, however, through the 20th century, unions all over the world really, I don't want to say abused this power, but they really used it to great effect and it harmed their reputation more. So a big example was all the coal strikes that happened all over the uk. Now, they didn't have. It wasn't just the uk, it was elsewhere. But the UK was able, or the coal unions were able to bring the uk, the entire country to a grinding halt, including impairing the ability to like deliver health care and that sort of stuff. And so the British people turned against the coal union, saying, no, my desire to keep living and have the lights on and have my house heated supersedes your ability to extract more concessions in terms of higher wages and better working conditions. So it's like the unions kind of became self defeating. And then neoliberalism took over with Reagan and Thatcher in 1980 and the rest is history. So union saturation is down to like 10% in America. I don't know what it is in other nations, but it was 30%. So at the peak, 30% of all American workers were members of unions. And today it's only 10%. And most of those are public servants like Police unions and that sort of thing. So when we look at like what do we replace it with? It is not an easy task. And I talk about blockchain often and a lot of people are like very skeptical. Like blockchain is an unproven technology, but it's not actually unproven. And so if you look at nations like Georgia, nations like Estonia, all over the European Union, they're using more and more. Some of it's not even blockchain, some of it's older than that. But blockchain can help. But the point is, is that technology can create things like open land regist, self sovereign identification, open payment rails, those sorts of things that put the power back into the hands of the people. So discretionary power, which is the ability to see things. So radical transparency in the, in the, in the case of what is the government doing? The number one example of radical transparency in the whole world is Ukraine's Projoro. It's a, it's a bidding platform, basically. It's a, it's a, it's what they, it's the, it's the government platform that they use for like purchasing and acquisitions. Fully transparent. The tagline, the motto for it is everyone sees everything. And guess what? That has dramatically reduced corruption and it puts power back in the hands of the people. India's upi, so unified payment infrastructure and Brazil's picks puts transaction power back in the hands of the people. So those principles like radical transparency, freedom to transact self sovereign identity and putting records on blockchain, that's the beginning of it. Now the, the end of it is direct democracy. And I don't mean direct democracy like Athenian style where everyone votes on every single little thing. But what I mean is that you don't go through the intermediaries of, of politicians as much. So participatory budgeting is one of those things. And so control over the purse, control over money is control like that, that just sight unseen, that is a form of control, that is a form of leverage. Now obviously, wherever it has been implemented from New York City to Paris, it's usually less than 5% of the budget. It's often around like 1 to 2% of the budget, if that. So we would need to expand that kind of thing. But the principle has been set, the example has been said that if you give people direct power, they can use it. And then of course there's, there's more platforms like V. Taiwan, which doesn't use social media in the way that you would think to surface consensus. It uses it, it algorithmically finds agree. So rather than having like flame threads, it's like okay, what principles do we all agree on? How do you cluster and aggregate consensus in that respect? So that's another example. Now of course you might say well that's all that sounds great, but that's not really to the full point of like coercive extraction of concessions. What you really need to be able to do is embargo where like here, here's an example of what I mean by that is like let's say the, the people want to take collective action against a particular company. And what you'd need to do is you need to be able to coordinated way of saying shut that company down until they behave or at least harm that company. Twist their arm until they behave. And we can do that with boycotts. One of the most successful recent boycotts was Target. So if you're not familiar with this, Target is a, you know, American chain. I don't know if it's American. Anyways, they're big here in America. And so it's you know, general grocery store, you know, you get your clothes there, some of them have groceries, general house goods. It's like, it's like a nice, slightly nicer Walmart part. But the CEO was very problematic. What did he, he donated to something? I think it was like anti trans or something. And a lot of, a lot of people that go to Target are yuppies. Like you know, my mom was a yuppie and she loved Target and so what do yuppies do? They listen to NPR and they're like, you know, anti trans people are bad. So let's stop going there. I stopped going to Target because their clothes had really deteriorated in quality. So it's like, well instead of getting my, my cheap clothes at Walmart I'm just gonna, or at Target I'm gon get my slightly nicer clothes that last 10 times as long from somewhere else. And so that's why you see me wearing stuff like Patagonia is because it's like, it's twice as expensive but it lasts ten times as long. So let me just do that instead. So lots of people stopped going to Target and guess what? The CEO has been fired. So that is an example of coercion, extraction of concessions and it was a fully decentralized, sentiment based kind of thing. However, relying on organic organization is not necessarily the best way to, to really conduct civil society. Obviously spontaneous organization and, and, and coordination. It's great that we can do that. And with stuff like the Internet, whether it's Reddit or Facebook groups or Twitter or whatever, you can't stop the signal, right? If a bunch of people just kind of independently. So that's, that's an example of a shelling point. A shelling point is where you basically have a standalone complex where people spontaneously agree to do a thing. And the coordination point is an idea or an ideal or something that is not, not specifically concrete. It's not like one person saying, everyone boycott target. It was more of a sentiment. But if we can operationalize that with technology such as quadratic voting and other ways to express preferences now, it might be that we don't even need to do that. I don't know. I don't know how the future is going to turn out. But that is an example of how decentralized, distributed, coercive extraction of concessions modify the behavior of a company. Now you might say, okay, great, that didn't really force a major change, but I mean, forcing a CEO out is no small thing. And let me check the time. Where are we at? Oh, we're only at 20 minutes. I might be running out of steam for this video, so we may call it that, but you get the idea. So as a quick recap, this is my most dangerous idea by far is because if you remove labor power, you remove all leverage over the system. And so then the real big question is how do we put leverage back? And so we put the leverage back with things like control over money, control over information. We. Instead of, instead of trying to replace labor's power, one for one, what we need to do is we need to use the technology, the new technology that we have, to create new levers of power, new ways of getting those, those concessions, new ways of having credible threats. So those are. Those are some key ideas that I want everyone to know. If you're in the camp of Labor Zero, then you need to understand what a credible threat is and what coercive extraction of concessions are. Are. So with that being said, I think I've got it all nailed down. If you like what you see, like, subscribe, etc. Etc. Also consider supporting me here on Patreon, on YouTube, on X, on Substack. You can sign up pretty much anywhere. Every little bit helps. And on the topic of the book, the Labor Zero book, I just had the first meeting with the team yesterday. So what we're doing is we're getting together a budget, a timeline, a release date. I don't want to make any promises right yet, but the release date is looking like it's April, May, or maybe June at the latest. So stay tuned for that. And we're going to do a Kickstarter, so stay tuned for that to make sure that, you know, because what I want to do is I want to get it actually professionally done, professional narrator, professional audio engineering. And I do want it. The the plan is to have audiobook, paperback, hardback and ebook all released at the same time. So that's going to be if you're, if you're in the camp of labor 0 the book is going to be the big thing. And the reason I say that is because we all need to be equipped. We need to be literally and figuratively on the same page. And I've got some really good news. And I meant to mention this earlier, but of all the people to give me a shout out, the Heritage foundation, of all people, started referencing my work. Now, if you're not familiar, the Heritage foundation, they're responsible for the Project 2025 paper, which, you know, highly, highly controversial. But my work has started getting into the biggest, most conservative think tank in America. And they're coming around to the fact that maybe labor is going to go away. So what do we do now? They agree that property is the, is the way to go forward. They don't want ubi, which is fine. But we are already building momentum and we're already getting some institutional traction on top of all the professors and stuff that I, that I interact with and network with. By the way, if you are a professor or an academic who's in this space, please connect with me either on Twitter or LinkedIn because I, I'm building a coalition. So. All right, I'm done rambling. Have a good one. Good morning. Good. Good afternoon and cheers. I'll talk to you later.