Future Forecast Report 1 - The Collapse of Capitalism
The world we live in is less absolute than we tend to think.
This is not an abstract philosophical problem. It concerns the social order we now take for granted.
For Generation Alpha, the digital is not a special technology. Like water for a fish, it is the environment into which they were born. For the generation immediately before them, however, the digital was always something “on its way.” However familiar it became, it remained less a wholly natural habitat than a condition to which they had to adapt. Just as whales live underwater but must eventually rise to the surface to breathe, they inhabit the digital world without ever becoming fully digital natives.
Capitalism is similar.
We were all born as natives of capitalism. Money therefore feels like the most fundamental principle that moves the world. Historically, however, the period in which money has served as society's organizing principle is not especially long. Earlier worlds were governed not by capital but by lineage, land, religion, military force, and royal authority. Money was a secondary instrument of power, rather than power itself.
The Industrial Revolution overturned this order. It changed how things were produced, and changes in production changed the structure of power. A new force emerged that could own and accumulate the means of production: the bourgeoisie. The age in which kings and aristocrats ruled the world collapsed, and the class that owned capital became the center of the new society. Capitalism thus became more than an economic system; it became the operating system that organized the modern world.
We must now ask:
What will the AI revolution bring down?
AI can no longer easily be regarded as a mere technological change. It is simultaneously transforming production, labor, knowledge, services, creative work, and decision-making. If the Industrial Revolution dramatically increased the productivity of physical labor, the AI revolution automates even intellectual labor and judgment. Once this change has progressed far enough, the central premises of capitalism will inevitably be shaken as well.
Capitalism operates on the premise of scarcity.
Goods are limited, services entail costs, labor must be exchanged, and productivity expands through the ownership of capital. But what happens if AI drastically reduces production costs, replaces a substantial portion of human labor, and expands the supply of knowledge and services to something approaching infinity? Money would still exist, but its power to mediate everything could weaken.
This is not only a question of material goods.
Intangible services such as legal advice, education, design, translation, accounting, planning, medical assistance, and content production are also likely to become available at progressively lower costs. Fields that once required purchasing a professional's time and expertise could increasingly take a form closer to public goods. The significant change here is not simply falling prices. It is the loosening of the structure in which people sell their time to earn money, then use that money to purchase services in turn.
Of course, this does not mean that money will immediately disappear.
Currency does not vanish easily. States collect taxes, companies pursue profits, and individuals still need a means of exchange to survive. But the continued existence of money is different from its continued role as society's central organizing principle. The coming change is likely to resemble the collapse of money's absolute authority more than its abolition.
What, then, will organize a society after capitalism?
From this point onward, the answers are not easy. There are many candidates: energy, data, access to technology, control over algorithms, platform ownership, political power, and influence within networks. One of these may become the new organizing principle, or several may combine into a more complex order. The important point is that we cannot yet name that order.
Historically, new systems have become clear through the emergence of new classes. The rise of capitalism was the rise of the bourgeoisie: a new force that grew through capital, rather than through existing royal or aristocratic power. Likewise, a system after AI will become clear only when a new ascendant force emerges. It might consist of capitalists, platform powers that command technological infrastructure, or an algorithmic class that controls data. It could also be an entirely different kind of group.
Here, too, lies a decisive difference between the Industrial Revolution and the AI revolution.
The Industrial Revolution enabled one person to do the work of one hundred. It reduced the amount of human labor required, but it did not push humans entirely outside society. Instead, it created new factories, new cities, new occupations, and new classes.
The issue at stake in the AI revolution, however, is not simply greater efficiency.
At its core lies “replacement.” Debate will continue over which fields can be replaced and which occupations can survive. But it is difficult to deny that the debate itself already centers on replacing human functions rather than assisting human labor.
Capitalism was a system organized around human labor, scarce resources, exchangeable value, and capital that could be accumulated. If AI changes the meaning of labor, unsettles the structure of scarcity, and reorganizes how knowledge and services are supplied, capitalism will also struggle to retain its present form.
The collapse of capitalism is unlikely to be a scene in which banks disappear and money goes up in flames one day.
It is much more likely to arrive quietly. Money still exists, but can no longer govern every decision in life. Labor still exists, but no longer has a monopoly on individual identity and survival. Markets still exist, but can no longer serve as the sole language through which society as a whole is explained.
We may be witnessing not the end of capitalism, but the collapse of its absolute authority.
And the real collapse of any system begins not when it disappears, but when people cease to believe that it is the only possible reality.