Imagine walking into your office five years from now. You still have your job, but the space is eerily quiet. The junior staff disappeared first, followed by the middle managers and the researchers who used to analyze spreadsheets. There were no dramatic layoff announcements; the work simply stopped being assigned to humans.

On paper, the company is thriving with record profits and unprecedented productivity. But look closer at the remaining human workers: they have become hyper-cautious, refusing to rock the boat or ask for a raise. They know there are fewer chairs available, and they know the machines sitting next to them never ask for more money.

This quiet surrender is the true danger of the artificial intelligence revolution. The ultimate threat isn’t a sci-fi scenario of conscious robots taking over; it is human beings becoming economically unnecessary.

The Resource Curse vs. The Intelligence Curse

To understand our future, we have to look at how economists view the “resource curse”. In theory, countries sitting on massive reserves of oil, gas, and minerals—like Nigeria or Angola—should be fabulously wealthy and inclusive societies. Instead, the wealth generated by these natural resources often concentrates in the hands of the state and political elites. The government becomes dependent on the oil field rather than the productive capacity of its citizens, rendering the population economically unnecessary.

Thinkers Luke Drago and Rudolph Lane argue that AI is about to trigger a similar phenomenon: the “Intelligence Curse”. AI threatens to do to human labor exactly what vast oil wealth does to a nation’s citizens—it makes people economically less necessary.

The End of Human Leverage

For most of human history, intelligence was a scarce and highly valued resource. If a business wanted something calculated, designed, or invented, it needed smart, skilled people. Governments needed those workers to pay taxes, and factories needed their labor.

This dynamic gave ordinary people immense bargaining power. The improvements working people have fought for and enjoyed over the last 150 years didn’t happen because employers were uniquely benevolent; they happened because of mutual dependency. The bosses needed what the workers had to offer.

AI threatens to completely break that mutual dependency by turning intelligence into a cheap, abundant commodity. A corporation that once required 1,000 skilled professionals might soon need only 100, and eventually just 20.

Abundance Without Equity

It is easy to be optimistic about AI-driven productivity, but we must look at who is building the most powerful AI systems: the largest, most profit-driven corporations on Earth. Their mandate is not to preserve human employment or dignity; it is to maximize profitability. If replacing human minds with machine algorithms makes a company more productive, the financial incentives guarantee it will happen.

AI will undoubtedly create extraordinary abundance, but abundance does not guarantee equitable distribution. A society can generate massive wealth while a large portion of its population grows poorer.

As historian Yuval Noah Harari has warned, we are risking the creation of a “useless class”. The danger is not merely unemployment, but irrelevance. If machines can think, design, and increasingly perform physical labor, humans lose the one thing that gave us leverage against the system: our necessity.

As we navigate this new frontier, championing digital humanism is more critical than ever. We must proactively build economic and social structures that keep human beings at the center of the equation, ensuring that as our machines grow smarter, humanity does not lose its voice.