America in the Intelligence Age

Originally published 05 Jan 2026; Essay on AI taking jobs, EAs vs Steve Bannon, Venezuela, and turning the Moon into a REIT...

In San Francisco, there’s an emerging consensus that AI will take jobs en masse. Perhaps the usual reassurance, that technology always creates new jobs, won’t hold this time. AI replaces cognition itself, is deploying faster than any previous technology, and our institutions can’t retrain workers at scale (and for what?). In Washington, politicians are terrified of how Americans will react. If the technology industry doesn’t acknowledge this disruption and offer a credible vision for the Intelligence Age, it will lose the trust of the American people. Alienating Americans risks triggering a Luddite revival, delivering left-populist victories in 2026 and 2028, and handing China the AI race.

The creation of AI is a scientific revolution on the order of the discovery of fire. We learned that we can make intelligence out of matter. Discovering new contours of physical reality often has economic yields. AI is already performing valuable work: software engineering, legal services, financial analysis, marketing, design, and more. Every white collar job is now seen as an AI startup opportunity. Walk into any startup pitch and the founder will tell you their market isn’t software, it’s labor. “The TAM is trillions in wages,” they say with glee. AI companies are committing trillions to data center developers, who are raising trillions more from private credit. As this infrastructure comes online, AI will get dramatically more capable. The firms investing expect to be repaid from the proceeds of cost savings from automating labor.

AI will massively disrupt the labor market in the short-to-medium term. Because AI is digital, and so much of the economy is digital, it can be deployed in months, not decades. Prior innovations supplemented physical labor or manual knowledge work. AI replaces intelligence itself. During the Industrial Revolution, displaced craftsmen didn’t capture productivity gains or reinvent themselves as knowledge workers. The political consequences will be severe. If the technology industry doesn’t offer a credible path forward, organized labor will fill the vacuum. This will fuel collectivism and populism, as it did during the Industrial Revolution. Cobblers replaced by assembly lines didn’t capture productivity gains, nor did they become Twitch streamers. Their outrage fueled the upheavals of the 20th century: Socialism, Communism, two World Wars. AI may be the final triumph of capital over labor. All the money previously earned by workers will accrue to the owners of the AI stack. This is the defining political question of the elections in 2026 and 2028. Whoever answers it credibly wins.

Two groups are trying. Populists like Steve Bannon call for AI moratoriums. “Why should ordinary Americans sacrifice their livelihoods so tech companies can get richer?” It’s a compelling argument to the little guy. But a moratorium is strategically impossible. AI is America’s only engine of economic growth, and the technology will advance globally regardless of what we do. Slowing down puts Western civilization in the hands of China and Russia.

The other response comes from the Effective Altruists—a movement of utilitarian technologists who have been wildly prescient about AI’s trajectory and now run many of the industry’s leading labs and investment funds. EAs generally want some flavor of UBI, which clashes deeply with Americans’ sensibilities -- we are sovereign individuals, we pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, etc. America’s economic system in the Intelligence Age must be integrated with our self-conception and a new sense of collective purpose.

Any vision for America in the Intelligence Age must answer two questions: what do we live for, and how do we pay for it? To take the second question first, as AI reduces labor income, we need to replace income with capital assets. The solution is territorial acquisition and resource development in places such as Greenland, Africa, and South America. These regions hold trillions in mineral wealth and have absorbed trillions in Western aid. This is how we fund the AI transition. Yesterday, the United States conducted airstrikes in Venezuela and captured President Maduro. President Trump announced that the U.S. will “run the country” until a transition can be arranged. Venezuela holds the world’s largest proven oil reserves—303 billion barrels, worth $17T—along with vast deposits of iron ore, bauxite, gold, nickel, and rare earth elements.

These assets go into an American Wealth Fund. The mechanism has precedent: Alaska’s Permanent Fund has distributed oil revenues directly to citizens since 1982, turning resource extraction into broad-based ownership. Every citizen becomes a shareholder in the resources we develop, receiving dividends from investment income. If labor income is obsolete, Americans need an ownership stake in the means of production. The income tax will also be abolished, if there is little income to tax.

Finally, we will conquer space, colonizing the Moon and Mars (taking them public as REITs, and distributing shares to the AWF), and new worlds beyond. America’s future is the frontier—as economic policy, and as spiritual destiny. What do we live for? The same thing our pioneer ancestors did: the pursuit of the transcendent, through heroic leaps into the unknown.