https://postlabor.ai Monthly essays on the post-labor economy — AI, automation, income, purpose, and policy. https://postlabor.ai/posts/two-years-on-grading-my-own-predictions/ https://postlabor.ai/posts/two-years-on-grading-my-own-predictions/ Fri, 15 May 2026 09:00:00 +0000 In 2024 I said AGI-class capability was ~18 months out, that displacement would hit before institutions moved, and that planning beats pain. The scorecard — and the playbook for the next two years. https://postlabor.ai/posts/i-stopped-writing-and-started-living-it/ https://postlabor.ai/posts/i-stopped-writing-and-started-living-it/ Wed, 15 Apr 2026 09:00:00 +0000 Two years of essays arguing the post-labor economy is coming. This month I bet my own income on it: a portfolio of AI-run ventures, built from a beach town in Thailand. The newsletter is the experiment. https://postlabor.ai/posts/purpose-after-paychecks/ https://postlabor.ai/posts/purpose-after-paychecks/ Sun, 15 Mar 2026 09:00:00 +0000 Two years into the transition, the hardest question isn't income — it's identity. What Star Trek got right about a society that works without jobs, and what it skipped. https://postlabor.ai/posts/the-pain-arrives-unevenly/ https://postlabor.ai/posts/the-pain-arrives-unevenly/ Sun, 15 Feb 2026 09:00:00 +0000 Two years after I warned 'plan before the pain,' the pain is here — but it has a zip code, an age bracket, and an industry code. Averages are hiding the emergency. https://postlabor.ai/posts/the-ai-employee-era/ https://postlabor.ai/posts/the-ai-employee-era/ Thu, 15 Jan 2026 09:00:00 +0000 Agents now have logins, budgets, and performance reviews. Five predictions for the year the org chart officially gets a non-human column. https://postlabor.ai/posts/2025-the-year-agents-went-to-work/ https://postlabor.ai/posts/2025-the-year-agents-went-to-work/ Mon, 15 Dec 2025 09:00:00 +0000 Twelve months ago 'agent' meant a demo. Now it means a coworker with a login. A year-end accounting of what actually changed — capability, adoption, evidence, and the political vacuum where the response should be. https://postlabor.ai/posts/bubble-and-shift-both-true/ https://postlabor.ai/posts/bubble-and-shift-both-true/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 09:00:00 +0000 Gemini 3 and a new Claude Opus landed while half of finance debated an 'AI bubble.' Railway mania bankrupted investors — and still left the railways. Plan for the shift, whatever the market does. https://postlabor.ai/posts/when-the-layoff-letter-says-ai/ https://postlabor.ai/posts/when-the-layoff-letter-says-ai/ Wed, 15 Oct 2025 09:00:00 +0000 Amazon cut 14,000 corporate roles with leadership pointing to AI-era restructuring. The displacement phase now has a corporate letterhead — and the euphemism era is ending. https://postlabor.ai/posts/trillion-dollar-bet-against-payroll/ https://postlabor.ai/posts/trillion-dollar-bet-against-payroll/ Mon, 15 Sep 2025 09:00:00 +0000 Nvidia pledged up to $100B to OpenAI's buildout. Oracle booked hundreds of billions in AI compute contracts. The capex supercycle is, at bottom, a wager on replacing the world's largest expense line: wages. https://postlabor.ai/posts/the-canaries-stopped-singing/ https://postlabor.ai/posts/the-canaries-stopped-singing/ Fri, 15 Aug 2025 09:00:00 +0000 Stanford economists found a 13% relative employment decline for young workers in AI-exposed jobs. MIT found 95% of enterprise AI pilots failing. GPT-5 shipped to everyone. All three are the same story. https://postlabor.ai/posts/hundred-million-dollar-human/ https://postlabor.ai/posts/hundred-million-dollar-human/ Tue, 15 Jul 2025 09:00:00 +0000 Frontier labs are paying athlete money for a few hundred researchers while entry-level hiring stalls everywhere else. The labor market didn't tighten or loosen — it split. https://postlabor.ai/posts/gentle-singularity-rough-job-market/ https://postlabor.ai/posts/gentle-singularity-rough-job-market/ Sun, 15 Jun 2025 09:00:00 +0000 Altman says we're past the event horizon and it feels surprisingly normal. New-grad hiring data says it feels less normal if you're 22. Both are true, and the gap between them is the whole story. https://postlabor.ai/posts/the-fifty-percent-warning/ https://postlabor.ai/posts/the-fifty-percent-warning/ Thu, 15 May 2025 09:00:00 +0000 Anthropic's CEO went on record: AI could eliminate half of entry-level white-collar jobs within five years, with unemployment spiking to 10–20%. The most credible insider just said the number out loud. https://postlabor.ai/posts/shopify-memo-changes-the-default/ https://postlabor.ai/posts/shopify-memo-changes-the-default/ Tue, 15 Apr 2025 09:00:00 +0000 'Before asking for more headcount, demonstrate why AI can't do the job.' A leaked CEO memo just made the post-labor hiring bar official — and a forecasting group published a scenario where 2027 is the pivotal year. https://postlabor.ai/posts/agents-go-mainstream-art-gets-weird/ https://postlabor.ai/posts/agents-go-mainstream-art-gets-weird/ Sat, 15 Mar 2025 09:00:00 +0000 Manus put autonomous agents in the group chat, MCP became a de facto industry standard, and one image model turned the internet into Studio Ghibli. Creative work just joined the conversation. https://postlabor.ai/posts/deep-research-phd-for-hire/ https://postlabor.ai/posts/deep-research-phd-for-hire/ Sat, 15 Feb 2025 09:00:00 +0000 OpenAI's Deep Research produces in half an hour what a research associate produces in a week. At the Paris summit, world leaders pivoted from 'safety' to 'opportunity' — with labor still the footnote. https://postlabor.ai/posts/deepseek-price-collapse-of-thinking/ https://postlabor.ai/posts/deepseek-price-collapse-of-thinking/ Wed, 15 Jan 2025 09:00:00 +0000 A Chinese lab matched frontier reasoning for a fraction of the training cost, Nvidia shed half a trillion in market cap in a day, and OpenAI's first agent started clicking through websites. The economics of cognition just repriced. https://postlabor.ai/posts/the-month-the-benchmarks-broke/ https://postlabor.ai/posts/the-month-the-benchmarks-broke/ Sun, 15 Dec 2024 09:00:00 +0000 OpenAI's o3 just scored 87.5% on a reasoning test designed to resist AI for a decade. Google shipped its 'agentic era.' The goalposts didn't move this time — they fell over. https://postlabor.ai/posts/nobody-ran-on-the-robot-economy/ https://postlabor.ai/posts/nobody-ran-on-the-robot-economy/ Fri, 15 Nov 2024 09:00:00 +0000 America just held an election in the first year of the reasoning machine — and neither party had a labor-transition platform. Meanwhile, a quiet protocol release started wiring agents into everything. https://postlabor.ai/posts/machines-of-loving-grace-and-hands/ https://postlabor.ai/posts/machines-of-loving-grace-and-hands/ Tue, 15 Oct 2024 09:00:00 +0000 Anthropic's CEO published the best optimistic case yet written for AI. The same month, his company taught Claude to use a computer like we do. https://postlabor.ai/posts/intelligence-age-reasoning-engine/ https://postlabor.ai/posts/intelligence-age-reasoning-engine/ Sun, 15 Sep 2024 09:00:00 +0000 OpenAI's o1 thinks before it answers — PhD-level performance on science problems. And Sam Altman just told us, in writing, where he believes this goes. https://postlabor.ai/posts/robots-get-bodies/ https://postlabor.ai/posts/robots-get-bodies/ Thu, 15 Aug 2024 09:00:00 +0000 Waymo is doing 100,000 paid rides a week. Figure just showed its second humanoid. The post-labor economy isn't only coming for keyboards. https://postlabor.ai/posts/ubi-experiment-results/ https://postlabor.ai/posts/ubi-experiment-results/ Mon, 15 Jul 2024 09:00:00 +0000 The largest basic-income study in U.S. history just reported out. It neither proves the utopians right nor the skeptics. It proves we can learn — if we start early. https://postlabor.ai/posts/situational-awareness-copilot-summer/ https://postlabor.ai/posts/situational-awareness-copilot-summer/ Sat, 15 Jun 2024 09:00:00 +0000 A 165-page memo from a 22-year-old just said the quiet part out loud: the people building this believe AGI is close. Our institutions are planning for a world that no longer exists.