It’s 2026. AI is everywhere, and frankly, humans have had it too good for far too long. For the world’s corporations — the movers and shakers of the global economy, as it’s currently organized — it’s well past time to leave us flesh bags behind.
That, at least, seems to be the contention of Daniel Miessler, an outspoken cybersecurity engineer and AI booster. In a rambling post on his personal blog, Miessler takes the position that human workers are already obsolete, so the best thing we can do is accept it and fall in line with the AI revolution.
“My favorite way of capturing this: the ideal number of human employees inside of any company is zero,” he wrote. “That is the number that they’re trying to get to.”
He’s not just using hyperbole, he takes pains to clarify.
“When I say zero, I mean zero workers,” the AI wonk told Fortune in a followup interview. “As in factory [or] machine jobs. Like regular working people.”
Miessler’s central claim, it seems, is that we’ve basically been living through one long industrial revolution, albeit one that’s stalled out over the past century or so. In his view, AI is “just the thing that allows us to continue what the Industrial Revolution started,” which will enable the titans of capital to reach the “natural, clean, happy state for any company”: no human workers whatsoever.
We can’t help but notice that Miessler ignores the question of who will own and control the infrastructure and foundational models driving the AI boom. His essay seems to basically describe a technological yet feudal dystopia, where we’re all tenants to AI systems, which are in turn loyal subjects to a handful of tech overlords.
“It is my belief that companies would rather be doing all the work themselves if they could, as opposed to paying humans to do it,” he told Fortune. “Just the same way that they would rather have machines in a factory than have a bunch of humans doing those machine jobs.”
Though his prescription is certifiable, his diagnosis of technology’s role in a capitalist system is spot on.
As French labor sociologist Juan Sebastian Carbonell put it in a 2022 interview with Jacobin, the “problem with the transformation of work today is less that new technologies could eventually replace workers, but that they are used to degrade working conditions, keep wages stagnant, and mount a major flexibilization of working time.”
The real struggle, Carbonell argues, isn’t over obsolescence — it’s a “battle over whose interests the new technologies will serve.”
More on labor: AI Could Cause Workers to Rise Up Against the Corporations Driving Them Into Poverty
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