#5 The Future Is Not For Profit
A Manifesto for the Age of AI
The Future Is Not For Profit
We are living through the final days in which human labor anchors the private economy. Within only a few years—and with sudden, rapid onset—hundreds of millions of jobs will vanish, swept away by artificial intelligence.
This is not an accident. It is the inevitable result of human intelligence compounding over ten thousand generations, each adding to the collective store of knowledge.
Like money growing at interest, enlightenment compounds. And at certain thresholds, the accumulated force of knowledge concentrates enough to trigger revolutions in the way societies operate.
From stone tools to farms—millions of years.
Farms to forges—several thousand years.
Steam to silicon—a few centuries.
What was once measured in millennia became centuries. Centuries collapsed into decades. Now, decades compress into years. And years into months.
And yet, the same force that carried us from stone to silicon—our relentless curiosity—has now brought us to a precipice. What propelled us upward may now cast us over the edge.
For the first time in history, the very engine of human progress—our intelligence—is being externalized. Automated. Replicated at scale.
Professions that once defined lifetimes collapse in months. Entire industries vanish. Millions wake to find their labor erased.
Some will say: Humans have always adapted. Every wave of technology created more jobs than it destroyed.
Or they’ll insist: AI won’t take your job—someone who knows how to use AI will.
But what happens when AI learns to adapt faster than we can? What happens when it no longer requires us at all?
Fire, the wheel, electricity—these were tools. They amplified effort, but never replaced the act of effort itself. AI does. Tools are not creative. They cannot decide. They cannot improve themselves. AI can.
And yet collapse will not announce itself with trumpets. It requires no consciousness, no intent. Only speed, scale, and time. Vast clusters devour the world as data, reducing professions to pixels, workflows to outputs—until no domain of human labor remains indispensable.
This technology is, at its core, a perceptual illusion. Even the simplest reply from a generative model requires trillions of probability calculations, executed in fractions of a second. What dazzles us as conversation is the ceaseless churn of mathematics—machines tuned to guess the next bit of data in a sequence.
Just as twenty-four frames per second tricked the eye into believing it had seen movement, trillions of operations per second trick the mind into believing it has witnessed thought. Behind the curtain, there is no intention—only velocity.
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
—Arthur C. Clarke
The danger lies in the speed. Compute grows faster, clusters multiply, datasets expand—each generation compounding the illusion. We remain flesh and blood, perceiving time in heartbeats and seasons. The faster the machinery becomes, the more magical it appears—not because it is intelligent, but because so much unintelligent calculation can be crammed into a single millisecond.
The end of profitable work will not come from GPT-8, or Claude-9, or Gemini-12, but from the quiet hum of millions of GPUs optimizing, iterating, generating—until whole categories of jobs dissolve seemingly overnight.
There is no stopping this momentum. Just as our ancestors could not extinguish fire or roll back the wheels of industry, we cannot contain intelligence once set loose in machines. Every revolution advanced not because it was permitted, but because it was inevitable. Agriculture spread despite famine. Industry surged despite dislocation. Each step unleashed consequences no one could predict or control—and once the paradigm fell, there was no going back.
So it is with artificial intelligence. The horizon we imagine is already behind us. The question is not whether this revolution will arrive—it already has. The question is whether we will build new foundations to survive it.
Declaration of Values
New foundations can only be set upon enduring values and bedrock beliefs. Before we are overtaken, let us affirm what we know:
Dignity is inherent. It is not earned by labor but by existence itself.
Purpose outranks productivity. Profit must serve purpose, never the reverse.
Wealth must flow. Like blood, when it clots, it kills.
Scarcity is not natural. In a world replete with abundance, scarcity is engineered.
Retraining is a mirage. When intelligence itself is automated, no bridge of skills will suffice.
This economy will collapse on its own design. Our task is not rejection but redirection.
We believe in systems that reward contribution to community, knowledge, and care—systems that honor the concept of enough, that balance local ecosystems with global supply chains, that put purpose before profit.
We believe nonprofits, cooperatives, and purpose-driven institutions are not relics but technologies—humanity’s most advanced operating systems for organizing effort without depending on profit.
We believe in a three-pillar economy:
the private sector as lungs drawing in wealth,
the public sector as heart and vessels circulating it,
the purpose sector as tissue and organs sustaining life.
A body cannot survive if its lungs hoard oxygen, if its tissues starve, or if its heart beats only for a few organs. So too with an economy. Only when lungs, heart, and tissues work together does society remain alive.
The Coming Shock
What happens when one billion people lose their jobs to automation in a single year?
One billion jobs. Gone. Streets swelling with anger. Screens glowing with despair. Conspiracies metastasizing into violence.
Not just the chaos of protest—the quiet devastation of mundane horror: millions sitting at home, stripped of purpose, numbed by tasteless food and endless screens, their survival rationed in digital credits by a distant state.
Is this the abundance we were promised?
The world is unprepared. Policymakers grope for answers. UBI may be necessary—but it is not sufficient. What of the loss of dignity and purpose?
Meanwhile, corporations that cast off workers—or armed them with tools that rendered them disposable—will reach heights of profit never before imagined. Within the same year, the first trillionaires will rise. They know how obscene this will look against mass despair. That is why they build bunkers—not to help, but to hide.
This collapse will not be a single crisis but a convergence: the unemployment of the Great Depression, the contagion of the Great Recession, the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic. Each was survivable alone. Together, they may unmake nations.
A Different Way Forward
Nonprofits are not afterthoughts or safety nets. They are humanity’s most advanced organizing technology: institutions designed to coordinate effort around purpose. If AI is our most advanced technology for thinking, nonprofits are our most advanced technology for organizing meaning. Paired together, they can sustain a world where abundance is real and widely shared.
This is how collapse can be absorbed. When profitability no longer sustains mass employment, businesses must have a path to convert into purpose-driven firms: asset-locked, employment-intensive, mission-accountable. With temporary support, they steady payrolls, commit to transparency, and evolve into the backbone of a new economy.
Alongside conversions, we must seed new enterprises designed for purpose from the start. Not unicorns chasing valuations, but rooted, sustainable ventures: childcare centers, tutoring networks, local energy co-ops, elder care, clinics, farms, arts. These are not luxuries—they are the essentials of life together. Built for resilience rather than surplus extraction, they can employ at scale without collapsing under profit’s demands.
Call to Action
This world will not build itself. We must act before collapse overtakes us.
Elevate purpose, temper profit. Capitalism must evolve. The tax code already shields nonprofits. Extend that shield to every human-led business that prioritizes employment and purpose over extraction.
Enable mass conversion. Section 501(c)(3) and similar laws must become the feature, not the bug. Make conversion fast and simple so small and medium businesses can survive the collapse of profitability.
Unleash entrepreneurship. Displacement from corporate roles must not mean idleness—it must mean the rebirth of enterprise. But that requires access to capital. Grants, fellowships, and community funds must seed millions of purpose-driven ventures. Nonprofits already deploy a trillion dollars annually in the U.S., creating measurable, essential value. Imagine if millions of new founders could access that model.
Tax AI labor differently. Machines are not augmenting labor; they are replacing it. Their productivity must be taxed at scale, recycling surplus into human-protective enterprises.
Claim the narrative. Refuse the illusion that our choices are mass joblessness or dependence on monopolies. Tell the story of a third pillar: the purpose economy. It already exists, it already works, and it can grow.
The Choice Before Us
We stand at a fork in history. One road leads to collapse: wealth pooled at the top, mass unemployment below, and the slow withering of human dignity. The other leads to renewal: millions of new enterprises, created not to maximize profit but to maximize purpose, sustained by the very wealth that AI unlocks.
This is not a dream. The laws, the infrastructure, the organizational models already exist. What is missing is the will to scale them.
We can let automation strip us of meaning.
Or we can seize this moment to re-found our economies on purpose, community, and human flourishing.
The future is not for profit. The future is for us.