I build with AI every single day, and lately, I've started to wonder if I'm helping build the thing that ends us.
Let’s back up a little.
A year ago, I walked away from my job. I knew I wanted to do something different, to build something for myself and actually take the time to do it right. And, it became obvious very fast that one of the first things I had to do was learn more about AI. Not just ask it for recipes. Not just ask it for a workout plan. Not just snap a photo of the bug that stung me and go, what is this thing? I had to go deeper than that.
I wanted to leverage AI to build.
Why?
Because my personal philosophy is simple: long-term, AI is going to eat everything, and it's going to break capitalism.
Here's what I mean. Capitalism, at its core, is a relationship between labor and capital. You take money, you add people, and together they build and grow things. AI, however, strips the labor right out of that equation.
CHUMP is a great example of this, because even just a few years ago, building it would have meant paying a developer(s) more than $150k+ to write the code. Instead, it took me ~$1k to get the MVP out the door. Hours aside, all I needed was Claude and a handful of other AI tools to go from an idea to market. I didn't need to hire labor. I just did it myself. And, the wild thing is that the tech keeps getting better with every model that drops. Building with AI is best described as “a cheat code”, but not everyone shares this sentiment.
We're in a strange, split-screen moment.
If you're an individual trying to look ahead and secure a financial future, whether as a W-2 employee or an entrepreneur, you're likely looking at AI and asking one question: how do I leverage this thing?
For me, the answer to this question feels better today than before I dove in head first, because I now finally feel like I can use AI, as a tool, to build the life and the future I want.
But, a lot of my friends don't feel that at all. They look at AI and they feel fear. Am I going to get replaced? Same tool with a completely opposite feeling.
And, now, today, the conversation has shifted beyond being replaced to something more existential.
The part that keeps me up.
I hear the conversations happening right now around AI and it worries me. I don't love the idea of spending my days learning and building on a technology that could turn out to kill humanity.
For people like me, who've invested time into these tools and shipped a real product, this feels an existential crisis. I built CHUMP. It's live and has real users. I improve it every day using AI, but am I doing the right thing by becoming more AI-fluent? Or, am I quietly feeding a system that could one day kill us all?
I don't have enough information to sit here and tell you whether AI is going to kill humanity, but I'll say this: if it does, I think that's still five to ten years away, based on what I've seen and what I've read.
But, Jarrett, be honest, because even five to ten years out, the question stands. Is it appropriate for me to be part of something today that could end the world in a decade? The simple answer is no. And yet, if I'm not part of this today, I don't know if I'll be able to survive economically for the next five to ten years. That's the trap a lot of us are in, whether we know it or not.
Here's my actual take, though.
Before AI kills humanity, it's going to break capitalism.
The scary sci-fi version is real, I'm not dismissing it. AI builds its own biological weapons, or hacks into a country's arsenal and starts firing nuclear warheads. If it can do that, that's a massive, massive problem. But, I think that's farther down the line, while my more immediate shared worry underneath a lot of this, is that AI, as a tool, breaks capitalism long before it ever kills humanity. Which, for some, is another way of saying the end of humanity.
We just lived through a case study of what this could look like during COVID. COVID killed millions of people around the world, and if you look at how people actually reacted, a much larger share weren't lying awake afraid of dying. They were afraid of losing their jobs. How do I pay my mortgage? How do I make rent? How do I put food on the table? How do I cover healthcare?
That, to me, is the real threat AI poses. Not death directly, but the economic floor falling out, because humanity is unfortunately tied so tightly to capitalism that when capitalism shakes, people suffer and it feels like humanity is under threat.
I think about the climate crisis in a similar fashion. The existential danger isn't the rising sea levels, but rather that the rising sea levels create a world where capitalism can't function, and when capitalism can't function, people die. So, for me, it’s not the nuke sent by Grok that keeps me up, it’s the real breakdown of the system before.
You see, AI is transforming the oldest structure we have. For as long as capitalism has existed, the formula was capital plus labor equals creation. AI severs that, and I think the next five years, or 60 months, will be defined by that one shift.
The shift has already begun.
For decades, if you wanted to size up a company, you didn't ask the CEO what they were worth. You asked, how many people work for you? They'd say 200, and from there you could back into everything. Two hundred people means an executive suite, a board, directors, managers, layers of salary, so you could reasonably guess what that company pulled in every month.
AI shifts this entire valuation approach, because that same CEO can make the same money with none of those 200 people, paying maybe $1,000 to $2,000 a month in tokens and AI credits to run the whole thing.
So, when people talk about AI killing humanity, here's where I land. Before it ever launches a single warhead, it’s going to and already is transforming how capitalism runs. And, that shift is going to be the most frictionful shift of my lifetime. I say that as someone who lived through 9/11, the 2008 financial crisis and COVID, and watched how all of these events irrevocably altered the future.
Does this existential AI crisis keep me awake?
Having used AI every day, I actually don't think it should be as big a worry as the fear suggests, as long as the proper guardrails get put in place.
But, I'll leave you with an anecdote from my travels about when it’s right to panic.
They say when you hit bad turbulence, before you panic, look around the cabin. If the seasoned flyers and the flight crew look calm, you relax. If they look scared, then maybe you've got a reason to be scared too.
So, here I am on the plane and it's shaking. I look around, and the two most experienced flyers on this particular flight, the CEOs of OpenAI and Anthropic, the people behind ChatGPT and Claude, are both saying we need to put guardrails in place. The folks who know this plane better than anyone look a little nervous.
So maybe I should freak out too?
But, right now, based on everything I've seen, I'm not. Maybe I’m a fool, but that’s where I am.
I see AI as a tool that people can and will leverage through this turbulent stretch, the one where capitalism strips labor out of the equation and quietly cuts down on how many humans it takes to keep the world running. I don’t think it’s going to be a comfortable time, but I also don’t think AI is going to kill humanity. But, what do I know?
As always – nothing replaces action.
See you next Tuesday.
Ironically, when I went to create the thumbnail for this week's newsletter, Gemini wouldn't let me add AI company logos to Thanos' glove . . .
