If you had told me five years ago that I’d be making a living selling pizzas running a pizza business from home, I would have laughed you out of the room. Yet, here we are. What started as a late-night lockdown brainwave with my wife has grown into a business employing six staff. Back then, it was the ultimate family DIY project: I made the pizzas, my wife handled the marketing, and my two boys were the delivery team. It was only ever meant to be a temporary fix.
Fast forward to today, and the narrative has shifted to the “AI revolution.” As a web developer, I’m right in the thick of it. I still do the day job, but I can’t ignore the noise. People are genuinely terrified that AI is coming for the mundane tasks, and that eventually, employers will just swap humans for algorithms.
When you look at this through a basic economic lens, the math starts to look a bit dodgy. We started our pizza business with nothing. As demand grew, we hired people. Those employees take their wages and spend them at local shops or pay their taxes. That tax money goes to the government to fill the potholes, which—ironically—allows us to deliver pizzas more efficiently. It’s a closed, functional economic cycle.
The billionaires want us to believe AI will “optimise” society, but there is a massive flaw in that logic. If you automate away the “mundane” jobs that allow people to earn a living and contribute to the economy, the whole system risks a collapse. AI doesn’t buy a pint of milk. It doesn’t pay income tax. If the person who used to do that job is now unemployed, the grocer loses a customer, the grocer can’t pay their staff, and the tax pot dries up.
I’m struggling to see how the “AI-everything” narrative holds water without leading to an economic breakdown. We’ve seen industrial shifts before, but they usually happened at a pace that allowed for some level of adaptation. We’re being told AI is moving so fast that traditional retraining might be impossible. How is a government supposed to handle that level of rapid, mass unemployment?
I know AI has its benefits, but if it breaks the cycle of earning and spending, we aren’t just looking at a technological shift; we’re looking at a structural disaster.
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