Death, the Destroyer of Worlds
How AI Threatens to Erase Humanity’s Purpose
Just weeks before the official start of the holiday season, America’s second-largest employer, Amazon, announced it would lay off 14,000 corporate employees, citing the company’s desire to streamline operations while investing the anticipated savings into key “strategic areas.”
One of those areas of strategic areas is not the development of human employees, but rather the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Amazon’s memo to employees highlighted that AI is reshaping the business landscape, forcing the company to become “leaner” with “fewer layers,” which are euphemisms for “fewer people.”
Amazon’s layoffs are a glimpse into a future where AI and machines increasingly replace human labor and intellect, not only in factories, but throughout the corporate world.
As AI development accelerates with reckless abandon, we must confront a sobering question: What happens to those workers who get left behind, and our society, when human muscle and intelligence become obsolete?
“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
When Oppenheimer uttered those words in 1945 after witnessing the first atomic bomb detonation, humanity soon realized it had created a tool that could erase civilization itself.
We stand at a similar inflection point with AI today.
Back in 2023, Elon Musk warned that “one of the biggest risks to the future of civilization is AI.” More recently, he predicted that “AI and robots will replace all jobs. Working will be optional, like growing your own vegetables, instead of buying them from the store.”
Welcome to humanity’s next installment of Death, the Destroyer of Worlds.
The rise of AI is often described as the cornerstone of the “Fourth Industrial Revolution,” but this revolution carries with it the potential to be far more destructive than previous ones because it threatens to take humans permanently out of the labor equation.
For centuries, liberal economists have justified this kind of economic and cultural upheaval in the name of “creative destruction,” a term introduced by economist Joseph Schumpeter in his book Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy in 1942.
This concept describes the ongoing cycle of innovation and technological progress within a capitalist economy that both creates and eliminates jobs, companies, and even entire industries.
To adherents of this school of liberal economics, creative destruction is always a net positive and a key factor in driving economic growth and progress, as it enables the distribution of resources from less productive or outdated sectors to more efficient and innovative ones.
According to this philosophy, so long as a company’s stock price or a nation’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) continues to increase, the loss of jobs is chalked up as an acceptable form of collateral damage.
Unfortunately, nowhere in this economic system is a concern for the flourishing of human beings – the individuals and families that comprise the backbone of America’s middle class whose entire worlds get “creatively” destroyed.
Supporters of this destruction often cite Adam Smith’s concept of the “invisible hand” as a prerequisite for “free markets.” Smith believed that if individuals (both consumers and employers) are allowed to act freely and follow their own economic interests, the market will naturally allocate resources efficiently, ultimately benefiting society as a whole.
This is obviously not always true.
Many businesses frequently overlook potential long-term impacts on society, focusing on immediate gains from economic growth and prioritizing maximizing shareholder profits.
Take, for example, one of the effects of globalization: the hollowing out of American manufacturing through offshoring, which not only decimated America’s Rust Belt but also enriched America’s chief geopolitical rival: China.
Returning to Smith, what happens when the “invisible hand” is no longer a product of human decision-making but is instead controlled by an artificial “intelligence” that has no regard for human needs or the common good?
In truth, one cannot separate the invisible hand from the body politic. They are intrinsically linked, not by Large Language Models, but by authentic human bonds.
Amazon’s announcement is a foreboding step in AI’s cannibalization of traditionally “white-collar” jobs, as AI can now swiftly analyze vast datasets, automating tasks typically performed by researchers and data scientists.
Chatbots and virtual assistants will continue to proficiently address customer inquiries and provide support, potentially reducing the demand for human customer service representatives entirely.
AI’s ability to automate administrative tasks such as scheduling, email management, and document processing could reduce the workload of administrative assistants and office personnel.
Furthermore, AI’s ability to generate written content, spanning news articles, reports, and marketing materials, may impact content writing, editing, and copywriting jobs.
Ironically, the prospect of “learning code” as an alternative career path no longer seems so promising, as AI has already exhibited the capability to autonomously generate computer code.
But it’s not just white-collar jobs that are under threat; traditional blue-collar industries, such as trucking, are in AI’s crosshairs due to the development of autonomous, self-driving vehicles.
America’s trucking industry is one of the largest in the country, employing over 3 million drivers, yet only 7% hold a bachelor’s degree. In a world of worthless liberal arts college degrees, becoming a truck driver can not only be a financially rewarding career, especially for men, but also a career path that doesn’t require extensive education or student loan debt.
In fact, the cost of attending a truck driving school and obtaining a CDL is significantly less than pursuing a four-year degree. Yet a future of driverless trucks is also likely to be cheaper than training and paying human drivers.
A few years ago, Ben Shapiro asked Tucker Carlson whether he would favor restrictions on trucking companies’ ability to use AI to maintain the number of jobs available in the trucking industry.
Without hesitation, Tucker replied, “Are you joking? In a second. In. A. Second.”
Here, Tucker instinctively took a refreshingly America First (not libertarian) economic stance on preserving American jobs by not regurgitating traditional GOP “free market” principles but rather acting in the best interest of working-class Americans.
Of course, Shapiro pushed back on Tucker, reflecting his belief in economic liberalism while espousing his thorough embrace of creative destruction. For Shapiro, truckers who have lost their middle-class jobs will simply need to find new ones, perhaps in the “gig economy” driving for Uber...until Uber deploys its autonomous vehicles, that is.
Unfortunately, AI is not the only threat to this industry, as mass immigration from regions like India has already chipped away at the opportunities for native born Americans, putting the safety of all Americans at risk—but that is for another essay.
What will the social fabric of our nation look like when few Americans, regardless of class, are able to find work or when work itself becomes “optional,” due to the advancement of AI, as Elon stated?
Conservatives talk about the importance of building and preserving families and communities, but at every step, they have embraced economic policies that have either shipped jobs overseas, imported cheap labor from countries south of our border, or secured foreign-born workers on specialized H-1B visas, all for the sake of cheap labor, efficiency, and “progress.”
Just as globalization helped to destroy the American middle class, the embrace of AI stands to put the final nail in its coffin.
Technology is a tool that should serve humanity, not replace it. If the adoption of a new form of technology would drastically alter America’s social fabric, then there needs to be serious national discussions and policies that balance innovation with the common good.
In the 1993 film Jurassic Park, Dr. Ian Malcolm warned, “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”
The desire for “progress” always comes with this temptation, to mistake what we can do for what we ought to do. The danger of AI is not just that it will think for us, but that it will make us forget how to think, to build, and to create.
As with the advancement of nuclear energy that arose from Oppenheimer’s bomb, AI offers humanity both immense power as well as the potential for unfathomable destruction.
If AI development continues unabated, while sacrificing human worth at the altar of output and efficiency, we will one day awaken to find the economic “invisible” human hand replaced by an artificial one, utterly indifferent to human flourishing.
When that day comes, we will realize, too late, that it was not AI that became Death, the destroyer of worlds; it was us.