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Could this be one of the last Labor Days as we know it? Not because jobs vanish next year. They won’t. Not because AI and robots replace everyone. They won’t. But the capability to replace a meaningful share of labor is emerging. Once a capability exists, we tend to use it. For most of history: Human → Labor → Output We may be moving toward: Human → Intention → AI + Robotic Labor → Output The human does not disappear. The role changes. We become the source of the idea, the judgment, the direction, the taste, and the intention. Execution increasingly sits with systems around us. That is bigger than “which jobs get replaced.” It may change what labor means. Today an idea still needs a team: researchers, programmers, designers, lawyers, marketers, sales, manufacturing, logistics, capital. Over time, more of that stack may run through AI and robotics. Not perfectly. Not for everyone. Not immediately. But increasingly. One person may command what once took 50 people, 500 people, or a corporation. That does not make everyone a successful founder. Ideas, capital, trust, distribution, regulation, and judgment still matter. It does mean the distance between having an idea and testing it could shrink. More people may become founders. In a literal sense, more people may also become capitalists: they direct productive capital that performs labor. So the question is not only whether AI replaces workers. It is what happens when more of us can command workers that are not human. History is full of essential skills that later stopped mattering. Most of us cannot hunt a mammoth or navigate by stars. That did not make us lesser. Civilization changed which capabilities were valuable. AI will do the same thing, faster. Execution may become less scarce. Judgment more scarce. Answers cheap. Good questions expensive. Taste. Curiosity. Responsibility. Knowing when not to use the machine. Knowing yourself. “What do you do?” has always been a question about economic function. Doctor. Lawyer. Engineer. Teacher. Founder. Those are not complete descriptions of a person. If machines take more of that function, labor does not vanish. It moves — from the outside world toward ourselves and what we choose to create. That is still labor. It is a different kind. Not a world without ambition. A world with more forms of it. This is one reason I have been working on FlairScore. I keep coming back to the gap between the capabilities a person possesses and the ones they can actually access and activate. People already carry enormous dormant capability that economic necessity never asked for. If AI gives some of that attention back, the question becomes: what should I do with myself? That may be one of the central questions of the AI age. AI should help us see possibilities, challenge us, and help us execute. It should not decide who we become. The human must remain the source of intention. None of this is guaranteed to be fair. Who owns the AI, the robots, the compute, the energy? If only a few can command artificial labor, power concentrates. If access is broad, millions get leverage that used to belong only to large organizations. Human labor used to be the scarce resource. Artificial labor may become capital. Human intention may be what directs it. This is not literally the last Labor Day. There will be jobs next year, and workers for decades. There is an enormous difference between working because we choose to and laboring because survival requires it. Perhaps future Labor Days will mark that shift: from physical labor, to cognitive labor, to artificial labor — and then to the work of becoming the person who decides what the technology is for. The greatest accomplishment of human labor may be a world that requires much less of the labor we once had to perform. The next task is not keeping humans busy. It is helping humans become more fully themselves.

Just published in @thehill: "This isn’t a trade war - it’s tough love to prepare for a future reshaped by automation and AI." Read the full piece here: thehill.com/opinion/finance/… #TradePolicy #AI #Economy