---
title: "Part V: The World to Come"
part_of: "The Commanding Heights"
part_of_url: https://commanding-heights.com/commanding-heights.md
authors: ["Will Manidis", "Joe Roberts"]
date: 2026-10-29
url: https://commanding-heights.com/#part-v
summary: "The diffusion of intelligence has begun in the rich world’s back office, turning work meant to develop poor countries into margins booked in New York. Citizenship and licensing will protect workers in rich AI-surplus countries, while many others will lose their jobs and emigratory escape paths. The K-shape will ever widen, and Main Street’s vibecession will continue as the riches of diffusion accrue to the Gulfstream backlog."
---

## Part V: The World to Come

> *The diffusion of intelligence has begun in the rich world’s back office, turning work meant to develop poor countries into margins booked in New York. Citizenship and licensing will protect workers in rich AI-surplus countries, while many others will lose their jobs and emigratory escape paths. The K-shape will ever widen, and Main Street’s vibecession will continue as the riches of diffusion accrue to the Gulfstream backlog.*

In the world to come, you will see that men are beasts. Those most forward thinkers believed that intelligence was all that separated us from the animals. In the near future, we will have more intelligence than we know what to do with and behave more than ever like animals. In this world there will be only sovereigns, exarchates, and the wretched.

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Two months after the riots began in Bangalore, Ravi was let go. He had worked from home for a few weeks, but when order was restored after the state government declared martial law, he returned to the office. One day, his keycard stopped working. That morning, he received a machine-drafted letter describing that his job had been moved to the *agentic services tier*. He received six months of severance, and the stock of the parent company opened higher on the New York Stock Exchange. The letter never explained that after months of approving and rejecting agent output, Ravi had effectively been training his replacement within a localized training environment. It turns out that monitoring agent reports for inconsequential tasks can be done well enough by machine intelligence. It’s perhaps for the best that the letter never explained any of this.

His is a common story, one unit or marginal accrual made multitude and bundled into higher valuations. The capability to replace him was financed and enabled by the Neo-Dollar and executed in the furtherance of the Global Delaware Regime. The stock price went up that morning. Ravi’s job disappeared to the benefit of a margin accrued in a country he had never stepped foot in. Now he never would. His income loss took several weeks to enter the official measure of economic health in India. His dwindling savings, for what? His government has been rendered impotent in the face of world-historical change. They will offer him reskilling, perhaps mechanical work, perhaps agricultural.

In the near future, markets may believe they have completed the repricing of the labor trade before indicators begin to capture its true enormity. It will be a mass scramble for a yield, a yield of any kind with a sufficiently positive cant, and this rush to bid up the price of productive assets will leave behind the one thing that cannot be bid up in such circumstances: the wage. The wage, which was already suppressed over the later twentieth century by the financialization and market exposure of household wealth, was similarly debased in the last two decades by what could be euphemistically called the fervent expansion of the labor force. That arrangement is coming to an end as the need for surplus workers dries up and the costs of each marginal addition to the census grow. They’re already paying $5M for an American passport.[^104] How generous we will be when that passport goes for $50M.

[^104]: À la “The Trump Gold Card,” accessed September 30, 2026.

Outside of America, that continental ark of stability, the great masses of workers, undifferentiated, soon to be displaced, already live under regimes that cannot afford comparable support, either in labor protection or affordance for the impacted. The waves of upheaval that will come crashing against the walls of the American stronghold will flood over the rest of the world.

### The Bottom K

We expect that the first large employment adjustment is likely to hit the least-protected forms of work in the least protective economies. They are the rich world’s back office. They are everything you do not see, do not think of, and they will be the first and easiest to replace with machine intelligence when the time comes due.

Clerical work in particular is likely to be an area of concentrated fallout.[^105] Scribes, still hunched puzzling over spreadsheets on Windows 7. These were supposed to be reliable jobs. They, too, had a script and a sequence to follow to something better than the economic perdition.

[^105]: Paweł Gmyrek, Mariana Viollaz, and Hernan Winkler, *Disruption without Dividend? How the Digital Divide and Task Differences Split GenAI’s Global Impact*, ILO Working Paper 166 (Geneva: International Labour Office, March 2026), 5–6.

![Line chart of TCS operating profit and headcount, indexed to FY2019 = 100, with Goldman Sachs forecasts to FY2030. Profit keeps rising while headcount falls behind, a gap of 41 to 68 index points.](https://commanding-heights.com/img/tcs-profit-headcount-chart-print.png)

*TCS operating profit and headcount, indexed to FY2019 = 100.*

Source: Tata Consultancy Services, *Integrated Annual Report 2025–26* (2026), 99. Ex. exceptionals. Headcount is at FYE. FY2027–30 forecasts per Goldman Sachs Global Investment Research (June 2026).

In India especially, back-office work for the wealthy world has become a major component of national economic growth and development. In fiscal 2026, the technology workforce was estimated at nearly 6M roles across firms small and large, such as Tata Consultancy Services. The developments to come across those firms will seem especially harsh in the coming years. Only sixteen net new jobs for every hundred graduates who expected better, more dignified lives than their parents.[^106] Now, perhaps, they should expect worse.

[^106]: Nasscom, *Technology Sector in India: Strategic Review 2026*, February 24, 2026. Government of India, Ministry of Education, *All India Survey on Higher Education 2023–24* (2026), 42 and table 36.

![Graphic comparing 135,000 net new technology jobs in India in FY2026 with 833,808 engineering and technology graduates: one net new job for every six graduates.](https://commanding-heights.com/img/india-graduates-jobs-chart-print.png)

*Engineering and technology graduates and net new technology jobs in India.*

Source: Nasscom, *Technology Sector in India: Strategic Review 2026*, February 24, 2026. Government of India, Ministry of Education, *All India Survey on Higher Education 2023–24* (2026), table 36, T-36. The chart rounds 833,808 graduates in 2023–24 to 830,000 and subtracts 135,000 estimated net job additions in FY2026, yielding 695,000.

Not only is the growth of that workforce slowing, but the shrinking number of new hires is directly in the interest of the owners of the companies in question. Historically, operating profit and headcount would rise together at large conglomerates. But in India, like everywhere else this technology will reach, those two indicators are coming unstuck. In fiscal 2026, TCS’s headcount fell by 23,460 while its adjusted operating profit rose 7.5%.[^107]

[^107]: Tata Consultancy Services, *Integrated Annual Report 2025–26* (2026), 88, 99.

It’s a very simple question. What happens when work dries up for the vast majority of the global aspirant class? These workers are literate, networked, and capable of organizing on WhatsApp and Discord. Political organization around these new concerns will occur quickly. The coming ructions will reach billions across dozens of countries, upending governments that had no jurisdiction over the firms and systems driving the displacement. The people were told that studying hard would result in an office job and the corresponding middle-class life. They’re headed back to subsistence labor in a single generation.

### Emigration No More

The solution to India’s surplus population, and especially its surplus of educated talent, was emigration. That, like the slow ascent up the developmental ladder, was the prescribed sequence for poor countries. That sequence is now in the final stages of falling apart. As destination countries restrict entry, much of that surplus will remain trapped in their home countries, becoming increasingly restless as a result of having their bright futures snatched away.

Few have noticed that the reality and rhetoric of the substitutive labor arrangement are increasingly disjointed. In January 2026, as if it were high 2015, the European Union and India signed a free-trade agreement and, beside it, a “mobility and migration partnership.” It was perhaps the most ambitious commitment to professional mobility, that free flow of substitutive human capital, that either side had ever made. Member states proposed to issue up to one hundred thousand multi-year work permits and at least thirty-five thousand graduate-track residence permits for Indian nationals, and in return, India would provide the surplus humanity in an arrangement that would benefit economic elites in both countries.

But the signature and photo op between exarchs may prove easier than ratification in the parliament of public opinion. In the next three years, Britain, France, and Germany will have general elections. In Britain and France, anti-surplus migration parties have a good chance of winning a governing share of the national legislature and political leadership. In Germany, victory for the AfD is even more likely. The case is the same in many other, smaller European countries. *The Financial Times* might decry the wave of xenophobic populism sweeping the continent, but what else would you expect? These electorates have been buffeted by waves of migration year after year. Increasingly perceived as misinvited, incompatible, and now labor that will be unnecessary, the costs of housing these strange military-aged males and their large families are becoming an increasingly untenable strain on the national checkbook, the votes could be understood to be behaving rationally.

It will be devastating for the global arbitrage of labor between the rich world and the poor remainder, which had been so transformative and profitable in such a short time. All strange little niches, an arrangement incomprehensible at any other point in history. The Philippines sends workers to the Gulf and into American health and care jobs; Nigeria to Britain, the United States, and the EU.[^108] Their bilateral labor agreements are now facing opposition from electorates in destination countries that are turning against migration.

[^108]: Second Congressional Commission on Education, *Turning Point: A Decade of Necessary Reform*, “Workforce Development Plan” (2026), 521–22, fig. 6.2. Samuel Okunade, “Nigeria Aims to Capitalize on Regional Integration amid Evolving Emigration Patterns,” Migration Policy Institute, April 8, 2026.

And what does this mean for the huddled masses following the promise of a better life, perhaps now forever huddling, queuing in long lines that lead anywhere but to their salvation?

Near-middle income back to subsistence farming is a hard fall for the standing alterity. Now a standing reserve of surplus labor, subaltern. Call the global surplus of labor now automated what you will; it won’t be going away. You’ll see them on your news feeds and on television screens. Whole hordes and swaying masses, climbing over desert vistas and picking through piles of detritus. They’re only eight hours away by plane. Two days by boat. Too close for distance to drown out their cries. Children of God, much like yourself.

What will the mad dash of capital from the third world to more suitable environs look like? It depends on the mercy and beneficence of dictators and aging figureheads. Not quite so many Kagames, fewer Lee Kuan Yews. Especially in low-trust undeveloped countries, governing elites form a comprador class. They have benefited handily from the substitutive labor trade of the last several decades. They will want to benefit from this final intelligence trade, and when the last dollar has been wrought, they’ll board the last flight out along with the multinationals. In the face of world-historic change, what else would they do? It’s sink or swim, and the leaders have bank accounts in Zurich. An apartment in Paris. The extended family is in social housing in London. They will happily flee the country with every marginal dollar of value that can be excreted. Done before and again and again.

Most of the productive capital might be gone, but the people and hardware and the experience to use it will remain. The hardware and low-skilled expertise that supported those jobs will be put to other use. The jobs have been transformed into margin, booked in Excel files made in New York. They won’t be able to be the back offices behind the back offices anymore, so they’ll turn those office parks into scam hovels, repurposed rows of Windows 7 computers beneath buzzing fluorescents yellowed with cigarette smoke.

The scam state is already a feature of the world. When accounting for a minimal amount of technical savvy held beyond the long reach of the civilized legal system, it’s surprising that such arrangements are not more common. Across the developing world, fraud and cybercrime might help fill the gap left by businesses pulling up their stakes. Southeast Asia is already an example of what this might look like. In Cambodia and Laos, 2023 cyberscam revenue was estimated at the equivalent of 30.2 percent and 68.5 percent of GDP, respectively. In neighboring Myanmar, where effective government control has splintered since the eruption of civil war in 2021, such enterprises were estimated to have produced $15.3B in revenue in 2023.[^109]

[^109]: The Guardian, “Cyberfraud Revenue in the Mekong Region,” graphic accompanying “Age of the ‘Scam State,’” December 2, 2025. Figures are estimates for 2023, calculated from estimated worker populations and daily revenue of $300–400 per worker. Underlying sources: USIP, UNODC, and World Bank.

The workers themselves might not notice. Imagine a man born and raised in Phnom Penh. He was educated to the eighth grade and developed a little proficiency with an old computer. He found remunerative employment doing back-office work for an international accounting conglomerate. One day, his key card stopped working. Like dozens of other workers milling about at the doors, he eventually receives the news that the owner made their jobs redundant. But in a month, the metal door has been pried back open, the previously dormant office park reopened under new management. The computers are back at work and the whole building is more alive than ever. The man is working ten hours a day, defrauding senior citizens out of their fixed-income annuities. But the work seems exactly the same as it was before. Pig butchering, when prosecuted via TeamViewer, will feel no different to his past life at the L1 helpdesk. An open-source model does most of the translation and texting. He liked sitting in a chair at his old job. Easier on his sore feet. He can sit in the same chair while doing different work.

Perhaps we have forgotten that the stationary bandit began life outside of the law.[^110] A lawless organization of human effort, in other words a cartel, is just an embryonic state. Neither affirmed nor superseded by any law. They can’t issue passports yet, but it has all the essential features.

[^110]: Mancur Olson, “Dictatorship, Democracy, and Development,” *American Political Science Review* 87, no. 3 (September 1993): 568–69.

Many of these organizations exist in Southeastern Asia because scams cannot meaningfully operate from within China. The Wa state in Myanmar is a pit of lawlessness that exists only for its proximity to the People’s Republic of China. Close, but not technically within their jurisdiction. The PRC is far too sophisticated to allow such cybercrime to exist within its bounds. America is similar, though to a lesser degree. There is a great enterprise at hand! A global geographic arbitrage. Dollars, digital or otherwise, to be had. When you wipe out their office jobs in normal fields, don’t be surprised when the offices remain occupied.

### Absorption

Amid all the upheaval, creation and economic capture will be distributed differently across countries.

There are certain states that may be well-positioned to capitalize on the coming moment. For instance, Singapore may capture more AI value per person than China given its English-language proficiency and permissive regulatory environment, even without a frontier-model lab.[^111] Economic capture depends on broadband, mature digital government, English literacy, patenting intensity, and cloud penetration. The leaders are the usual suspects: Denmark, the Netherlands, South Korea, the UK, Switzerland, Sweden, Canada, and the UAE. The bottom quartile consists mostly of large labor-exporting economies that lack those buffers, leaving them exposed to service-sector job losses before domestic firms can absorb the workers. South America, for instance, will stand to benefit less from its capacity to utilize machine intelligence than from its proximity to the American economic boom occurring north of the Canal. To the extent that surplus workers remain necessary, they will be found in their countries of origin.

[^111]: Its fronting operations for the CCP and Chinese enterprise do not count. International Monetary Fund, “AI: Deployment and Disruption,” *Annual Report 2026*.

### Towers of Ivory, Houses of Gold

In the world to come, the wealth of the intelligence trade will bid up scarce physical inputs and the capacity-constrained goods consumed by its owners. Demand will concentrate in strange places, yet ones ultimately familiar. Wealthy owners will also compete for goods and institutions with fixed capacity: racehorse stables, tables at the Casino de Monte-Carlo, Grand Prix paddock passes, Gulfstream 900s, Aman villas, elite schools, and access to scarce investment managers. We anticipate that price increases will be steepest, and margins the largest, in several categories. There will be those goods for which supply cannot meaningfully expand, or can only do so slowly. Elite schools, those prior to university, only have so many seats. Their value will rise substantially, given the coordinating difficulty of creating new elite schools. And expanding beyond the traditional set of top colleges may be similarly challenging, despite the best efforts in Florida.[^112] Artisanal tailors might grow their client list, but discerningly and slowly. The same is true of Gulfstream and other jet producers. For the vast majority of luxury or desirable goods among the elite, we anticipate that demand, driven primarily by new wealth created in the intelligence economy, will rapidly outpace supply. And of course, there are those positional goods for which no adjustment of supply and demand will ever produce an equilibrium.

[^112]: “Ken Griffin Donates Record $3bn to Carnegie Mellon in Push for Miami Campus,” *Financial Times*, September 30, 2026.

### The Private Commons

Even as the elite accrue an ever-growing share of global wealth, the world at large will become less accommodating to those fortunate few. As costs are borne locally, the owners of capital and the narrow durable application layer will capture a disproportionate amount of the upside. Machine intelligence could drive as much transfer from labor to capital in the next decade as the previous wage-to-financial economy produced in forty years.

This will push wealth concentration in leading OECD economies beyond the inequality seen in Brazil and Mexico. This feature of Brazilification will prompt a new enclosure of what were once non-market goods. Obscurity and safety, for instance, only existed for many in the past because of a default state of illegibility. In the near future, privacy might only be available with a hefty subscription fee.

Such is the private market for new services. Wealthy households will buy third and fourth homes in jurisdictions with strong property rights and an ample supply of private security to guard properties that are no longer guarded by obscurity. There will be a retreat to the *gemeinschaft*, represented in the fees charged by concierge medicine and increasingly personalized forms of education led by at-home tutors. Asset prices have hardly begun to reflect this retreat, even as spending on executive protection rises[^113] and real estate demand concentrates in Wyoming and the Gulf residency zones.

[^113]: Aubrey Bout, Rebecca Friday, and Ben Futterman, “Executive Security and Protection Continues to Expand,” Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance, September 15, 2026.

Of course, coordination between persons will remain an essential element of life at the top of the K. Human arrangements, voluntary and involuntary, will sell overlapping forms of access to benefits and protection from the vicissitudes of the world. The forms of exclusive and self-protective associative societies will look unlike any that have come before. Protection previously afforded by the state will be assumed by private firms, charging memberships. Those private providers will control a growing share of public security, transportation, education, and social exchange, reviving patronage of a form in response to reducing state capacity.

### Measurement

It is not yet clear how these tectonic shifts in wealth will be understood as they come to pass, but we can say with certainty that the traditional metrics and indicators will prove insufficient for tracking the movement that is at hand. A measurement of gross domestic product was designed to account for paid transactions, green bills handed over a counter, and was well-adapted to the old wage economy. But we are well past that. Transactions financed by asset wealth, which we expect to represent a growing share of transactions and a growing share of national wealth, only enter that traditional series when they become consumption or investment. Until then, they are illegible. Similarly, free or near-free AI output has no traditional market price and is as such invisible to those looking through the GDP lens.

The true watchlist that will tell of the vicissitudes of the decade to come will be composed of indicators from strange places, measuring disparate activities. Look to the quarterly disclosures that contain a few numbers about offshore-vendor headcount reduction and the resultant gains to the parent company. Watch on TV as the labor ministers of various foreign countries report the rising under-25 unemployment in those exposed occupations. Watch that labor take to the streets.

For signs of the abundance to come, look not to a revival of Main Street and a swelling of the common prosperity but to the Gulfstream backlog and the price of certain plots of land. You have seen nothing of the decadence yet to come at the top of the K-shape.

Do not believe the myth of the efficient market, or its bastardization that information now or in the future will be disseminated freely and known universally. We anticipate that as intelligence swallows the world, certain kinds of information illegible to the standard and soon-to-be standard forms of observation will grow tremendously in value. Yes, the intelligence economy will grow productivity by flattening many barriers to the flow of information and its usage, but this only makes those disjoints between public and private information and the resultant disjoints between widely accepted and contrarian beliefs all the more valuable. These distances will grow as the pace of human activity speeds up, accelerating well beyond the ability of institutions to meaningfully measure it. All is fungible, at hazard or to be seized by a few. Rejoice.

### The Guild

We anticipate that exposure to the coming labor upheaval will be determined by more than the capability of machine intelligence at any given point in time or the work in question that it seeks to substitute. The regulatory environment for labor, including especially its formal and informal protections, will play a large role in determining which workers remain employed and which train their digital substitutes before dismissal. For several reasons, the same workers who would be replaced in any other country will be protected in America. In practice, Ravi did much of the same work as a staff accountant in Phoenix who made five times as much as he did and will stay on well after he is laid off. She benefits, as do millions more, from licensing regimes and labor protections that offer decisive protection against the upheaval.

After our own labor troubles in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, American workers have ensconced themselves behind a wall of regulation and protections, firmed up all the more by hard-to-overturn court precedent. The knowledge workers form a labor aristocracy, protected by lobbies and professional-class wings in both parties.

There is a simple formulation to explain why American workers, even if they accrue little of the tremendous benefits of the machine intelligence economy, will not suffer its worst deprivations. America has stronger labor protections than anywhere with a freer market and is more dynamic than anywhere with stronger labor protections. As America captures a highly disproportionate share of the margins of machine intelligence, its regulatory environment for worker protection will pose a diminishing cost of a rapidly growing whole.

Additionally, there will be new utility to the licensed and liable worker. When intelligence is abundant, licensing will retain value for its implied certainty. An official surety or an audit signature. For any service or routine that does not require a stamp of approval that licensure can provide, customers can employ automated substitutes. All else, even if a slower-growing sector of transactions and services, will find continued need for credentialed employees at firms. They will even remain on the company payroll after models absorb much of their work, like Ravi, because a liable human must remain responsible for the output.[^114] Unlike Ravi, they cannot be fully replaced while human licensing retains value. In this way, their salary is simply the cost of the new way of doing business.

[^114]: Arizona Revised Statutes § 32-731(B). George R. Botic, “Smaller Audit Engagements, Significant Impact: Audit Quality, Investor Protection, and the Future of the Profession,” PCAOB, September 22, 2026, under “Expanding Use of Technology in Audits.”

Such licensing will not be equally beneficial across age groups, however. Credentialism and certainty especially favor incumbents and those with intangible credibility—typically the old—and harm inexperienced entrants early in their careers. For instance, a Stanford study of certain payroll records covering millions of American workers found that by mid-2026, employment of 22- to 25-year-olds in AI-exposed occupations stood 19 percent below where it would have been had it kept pace with their less-exposed peers. In the same conditions, experienced workers in the same occupations, more firmly ensconced in both the formal and informal licensing systems, showed no meaningful gap. The shortfall came mainly from firms hiring fewer young workers rather than firing them, and the dynamic was especially pronounced within software development roles and other verifiable-task domains.[^115]

[^115]: Erik Brynjolfsson, Bharat Chandar, and Ruyu Chen, “Canaries in the Coal Mine? Six Facts about the Recent Employment Effects of Artificial Intelligence,” working paper, Stanford Digital Economy Lab, revised August 12, 2026.

Balaji Srinivasan calls this apparatus of self-protection for the laptop class the “paper belt,”[^116] and it will protect many American workers through the troubles to come. This is why, for whatever unrest comes in the US in the coming years, we do not anticipate reprises of mass upheaval seen in the rest of the world. Even if that protective belt is breached, the beneficiaries of this new era understand the compact they have made with American labor.

[^116]: Balaji Srinivasan, *The Network State* (2022), “People of God, People of the State, People of the Network.”

The near future is a mirror. You’ll see the estate of the sons of men in its fullness. God’s hand at work so that you might see yourselves made prosperous beyond measure, yet still beasts.