How to Prepare for the Post-Scarcity Transition Today
Every Reddit thread about AI and jobs runs the same course. Someone posts the layoff chart, forty people argue about whether it’s real, and then one reply near the bottom asks the only useful question: fine, I believe you, so what do I actually do?
What follows is condensed from our full action guide. None of it needs a bunker or anyone’s permission.
The clock
Through September 2026, US employers blamed AI for 120,136 job cuts, per Challenger, Gray & Christmas. That is more than double the AI total for all of 2025, reached in nine months, and about 21% of every cut announced this year. AI’s streak as the single most-cited reason ended in August, and it still leads for the year. The technology sector alone announced 165,925 cuts, 29% of the national total and up 54% on the same stretch of 2025. The World Economic Forum’s 2025 Future of Jobs report found 41% of employers worldwide planning to shrink their workforce within five years in roles AI can do.
On the podcast: they are rehearsing the apology
You might assume someone upstream is handling this. The October 12 episode of Minds, Bodies & Terawatts explains why that is a bad bet: “AI Executives Privately Expect a Catastrophe Within a Year. They Are Not Rehearsing How to Stop It. They Are Rehearsing What to Say the Day After.”
The episode’s case is that the companies building AI privately call a catastrophe inevitable within a year, and the thing they are practicing is the aftermath. So the rules that govern AI will be written in the panic of the day after, and rules written in a panic are the ones that stay. One of the research notes the episode cites, on emergency powers, has the precedent in its title: France’s 12-day emergency lasted 719 days.
Treat that as a planning input. The people with the most money and the clearest view of what’s coming have looked at the problem and rehearsed their lines. If prevention isn’t being rehearsed in those rooms, assume nobody is rehearsing it for your street. The preparation still open to you fits inside a household and a block, and it doesn’t wait on a boardroom finding its nerve.
The math: 408 million hours
One person joining a tool library changes nothing about the economy. The guide’s arithmetic is about a small share of people doing it at once. If 1% of Americans, 3.4 million people, each gave ten hours a month to transition infrastructure, that would be 408 million hours a year. It equals 200,000 full-time workers: the entire Peace Corps many times over, deployed on the streets where those people already live.
You wouldn’t be starting from zero either. The US Federation of Worker Cooperatives estimates roughly 1,300 worker co-ops nationwide, employing about 15,000 people. Community land trusts now number 333 across 46 states and steward more than 44,000 permanently affordable units. The Free Zones the book describes grow out of thousands of small experiments like these.
This month: the five-minute radius
The guide files four moves under “Build Local Resilience.” All four happen within walking distance of your door.
- Join a tool library, or start one. Portland’s first began with two friends, a firehouse basement and a $12,000 grant. Nobody needs to own a circular saw. They need a board cut, and the saw can live down the street.
- Sign up for community solar. It works if you rent or can’t put panels on your roof, and it adds to the distributed energy supply the transition runs on.
- Learn one physical skill this season: repair, growing food, first aid, basic construction, sewing. When AI handles most knowledge work, making things with your hands gets more valuable.
- Meet the people within a five-minute walk of your home. It’s free, and most people can’t name three neighbors. You cannot coordinate at scale if you can’t coordinate at the block level.
This year: your work and your money
Entry-level white-collar work is already thinning. By one count, professional-services job openings in January 2025 were down about 20% in a year. By Epoch AI’s count, the compute needed for a given level of AI performance halves roughly every eight months.
The guide’s career advice follows from that. Build the skills AI complements: judgment, coordination, emotional intelligence, physical making. AI can generate the code, and it can’t decide what’s worth building or get the stakeholders to agree. Work where your contributions are visible and verifiable, on GitHub, Wikipedia or open research. When a machine can pass any test you can pass, people ask what you’ve built. Learn the AI tools well enough to know when to check them; the guide describes them as “an extremely capable but occasionally delusional intern.” And take the trades seriously: plumbing, electrical work, HVAC and carpentry are harder to automate or offshore than most office jobs. A robot can write your email, but it still can’t fix your toilet.
On money, the guide’s word is optionality. One income stream plus high fixed costs is the most exposed position there is, so add a stream and cut a cost. Look at cooperative ownership, from worker co-ops to community land trusts. And plan for several futures at once. “Hedge across possible worlds, not just asset classes.”
With ten neighbors
Some of this only works in a group. A time bank trades hours instead of money: one hour of tutoring equals one hour of plumbing equals one hour of eldercare. The Swiss city of St. Gallen has run one, Zeitvorsorge, since 2014. Residents over 50 help older neighbors with errands and company, each hour lands in an account the city guarantees, and around 100,000 hours have been banked.
A community emergency fund is the other place to start: pooled money that carries members through unemployment or illness, which the guide calls a micro-foundation.
The full roadmap: read the action guide
This post is the on-ramp. The full version is What to Do Before the Labor Cliff: Action Guide for 2025-2030, and it lays out the 2025-2030 roadmap for four audiences. Individuals get the rest of the list above, including open-source contribution and open standards. Communities and the builders in them get mesh networks, maker spaces, cooperative childcare and local food. Tech workers get what to build, what to refuse to build, and where to work. Teenagers get their own section, which starts from an awkward fact: if you’re 15 now, you’ll be 25 in 2035, right in the middle of the transition, and your career counselor is working from obsolete maps.
Go read the section with your name on it.
In the book: “It needs builders”
The guide opens with a line from the Epilogue of Unscarcity, “A Letter from the Future.” The letter is the book’s final scenario, invented and labeled as such: Maria Delgado, the Detroit house cleaner who runs through the whole book, writes from January 2075 to say how the transition went.
In the section called “The Builders,” Maria lists who did the work. “The leaders didn’t save us,” she writes. “They were too busy protecting what they had.” The people who did were a London nurse who pinned a one-page charter for a Care Commons to the staff notice board, an Ohio factory owner who took the EXIT deal instead of firing her workers, and Adewale, a self-taught coder in Lagos who lost his job to an AI agent and went on to coordinate the West African Solar Grid.
Maria and Adewale compare notes beside the Detroit River in 2047, and she writes down what he told her:
Heroes are a symptom of a failing system. Rome needed emperors when the Republic broke down. A healthy civilization doesn’t need heroes. It needs builders. Millions of them.
Of the two of them she says: “Neither of us had a grand plan. We just kept showing up.”
The book is the long answer to what all that building is for: the Foundation, the MOSAIC, the EXIT deal the factory owner took. Start with the Epilogue if you like to read endings first.
Start this week
Ten hours a month is about two and a half hours a week. Spend the first ones on the cheapest item above: three neighbors, by name, by Sunday. Then tell us what you’re building at unscarcity.ai/forum.
More questions like this one are collected on the blog page. Follow the series on Substack.
