AI Is Ending A 150-Year Old Experiment

Everyone is panicking about AI taking jobs and I think they're missing the actual story.

In 1790, roughly 90% of Americans worked for themselves. By 1970, almost the same share worked for someone else. As of 2024, 84% of all U.S. businesses operate without employees, and the share of new startups launched by a single founder has climbed from 23.7% in 2019 to 36.3% by mid-2025, per Carry's founder data. The W-2 wage employee was the experiment, not the rule, and the experiment is ending in real time.

If money is stored energy, why do you need it in a world where the work is done by something that does not draw a paycheck? The answer depends on a definition of work that is only about 150 years old, and that definition is collapsing fast.

Money is stored energy. 

Buckminster Fuller saw this coming in 1969: "Wealth is the product of energy times intelligence: energy turned into artifacts that advantage human life." (R. Buckminster Fuller, Utopia or Oblivion: The Prospects for Humanity, 1969.) Money is not a thing. It is a claim on stored productive effort, your own or someone else's, denominated in a transferable unit.

Run the math with that definition. In a world where AI does the work, whose stored energy are you claiming? The energy of the systems you own equity in. The customers you serve directly. The assets you control. Capital, not labor. You still need money because somebody else owns something you want, and the exchange has to clear in a unit you both understand. The function of money does not change. The engine that generates it does.

Your job is not normal. It is a 150-year experiment.

The 30-year career, the W-2, the 401(k), the mortgage that qualifies on stable wages, the corporate ladder. These are artifacts of one specific economic era, roughly 1850 to today. Before that, most Americans were farmers, craftsmen, shopkeepers, traders, and small operators living inside what economic historians call the household economy.

Industrialization broke that. It needed concentrated labor, concentrated capital, and predictable wages. The corporation was the coordinating technology, and the employee was its input. Peter Drucker said the quiet part out loud back in 1977: "The corporation is the 'master', the employee is the 'servant'. Because the corporation owns the means of production without which the employee could not make a living, the employee needs the corporation more than vice versa." (Peter F. Drucker, People and Performance, 1977.)

That is the trade, not criticism. The employee gave up autonomy for predictability, the corporation gave up coordination cost for control, and it was the only way to run a steel mill at scale.

The corporation wins round one. The household economy wins round two.

Both sides of the bargain are unwinding, just not at the same speed. The corporation moves first, and it moves harder. Office workers get replaced with AI, factory and logistics workers with robots, and the productivity gain flows straight to capital rather than to the displaced worker.

However, I believe the corporation loses in round two. A single operator with capable AI agents now does what a six-person team did three years ago, and erodes the corporation's one real edge which was coordinating talent at scale. AI is handing that edge to anyone with capital. The employee anomaly does not end with workers winning. It ends with capital winning either way, and the household economy rebuilds around whoever owns the engine.

The solo operator surge is real. The Bureau of Labor Statistics counts 9.82 million self-employed professionals, MBO Partners puts the broader independent workforce at 72.9 million, and the Small Business Administration is logging 440,000 solopreneur applications per month, a 90% jump over pre-pandemic levels. The independents climbing are not, mostly, the same people getting laid off.

The "rise of entrepreneurs" is reversion.

The solopreneur surge is not a TikTok thing, a pandemic effect, or a generational quirk. It is mean reversion to the pre-industrial default. The general store, the craftsman's bench, the trader's stall, and the farmer's plot were the dominant forms of economic life for thousands of years. The 150-year window where most adults sold their hours to one big employer was the deviation, not the rule.

The 1820 shopkeeper had a ledger and a market town. The 2026 solo operator has Stripe, Shopify, an AI assistant that handles bookkeeping and email, and an addressable market the size of the internet. The form is old. The leverage is unprecedented.

Reversion looks like collapse when you are inside it

This is going to hurt. The wage system was the load-bearing beam of the American middle class. Health insurance, mortgages, retirement savings, and the assumption that adulthood means one primary employer were all bolted to the W-2. As the beam shifts, every fixture bolted to it has to shift too, and most have not been redesigned for a household economy. (Also read: When AI Breaks the 30-Year Mortgage)

To a 28-year-old whose first job got automated, this does not feel like a return to 1820. It feels like the floor giving way. And it is. The system has to rebuild portable benefits, capital access for solos, and ownership-based credit, and the rebuild will lag the disruption by years. The people celebrating the rise of the solopreneur and the people panicking about AI killing jobs are looking at the same phenomenon from opposite sides. Neither side is entirely right.

AI-driven GDP soars but who keeps it?

If corporations replace office workers with AI and labor workers with AI plus robots, output goes up. Way up. Total GDP rises faster than the labor force shrinks. That is not a paradox. It is the entire point. A small number of capital owners, using AI and robotic systems, produce more than the old economy could produce with hundreds of millions of wage earners.

The question is what happens to the surplus. Two bookends frame the range.

On one end, capital captures all of it. The corporations that own the AI infrastructure and the robotic systems keep the productivity gain. Wages collapse because labor is no longer required to produce output. Without redistribution, most people end up with no income from work and no claim on what work used to buy. The corporate overlord scenario is the default if nothing else changes.

On the other end, society redistributes the surplus through some form of high universal basic income, funded by taxes on AI-driven productivity or capital returns. A high enough UBI should not be welfare and instead structured as citizenship dividend, a share of national output that does not depend on whether a human did the work that produced it. In a high-UBI world, the survival question is solved for most people.

That immediately raises a sharper one. If you do not need to work to live, what do you do with your time, and why? If the W-2 was not just a paycheck and was a structure that supplied identity, status, daily rhythm, and your reason to leave the house....then what do you do when the paycheck is stripped out?  There is solid agreement that the underlying need for purpose does not disappear. It just gets exposed. (Also read: Laid Off: How to Cut Expenses and Find Your Purpose)

Money is still stored energy. In one scenario, all of it stores to a small group of capital owners and the rest of the country starves. In the other, enough of it stores to everyone that the survival question dissolves and the human one takes its place. Most futures sit somewhere on that line, and which side they land closer to depends on choices that have not been made yet.

The economy can solve survival, but it can not solve your purpose.  My recommendation, start on finding your purpose outside of work ASAP.

Key Takeaways

• AI is not killing work. It is killing the wage employee, which is something different. The W-2 career is a roughly 150-year industrial artifact, not the natural state of human work, and the share is now reverting.
• Solo founders climbed from 23.7% of new startups in 2019 to 36.3% by mid-2025, and 84% of U.S. businesses already operate without employees. This is not a trend. It is mean reversion to the pre-industrial default.
• Corporations win round one by replacing office workers with AI and labor with AI plus robots, and the productivity gain flows to capital, not labor. The corporation's coordination moat erodes only in round two, when AI lets individuals do team work. Ownership, not employment, decides who wins either round.
• AI-driven GDP rises faster than the labor force shrinks, so the surplus is real and growing. The fight is over who keeps it: capital owners by default, or everyone through some form of high universal basic income funded by taxes on AI productivity. Most futures sit somewhere on that line.
• The W-2 was the load-bearing beam of the American middle class. Mortgages, health insurance, retirement, and credit were all bolted to it. The system has to redesign every one of those fixtures around the solo operator before the transition stops feeling like the floor giving way.
• A paycheck supplied more than money. It supplied identity, status, daily rhythm, and a reason to leave the house. A high enough UBI solves the survival question but exposes the purpose one. The economy can solve survival. It cannot solve why.

FAQ

What is the Employee Anomaly?

The Employee Anomaly is the observation that the wage-earning employee, working for a single large organization on a stable salary, is a roughly 150-year artifact of the industrial era rather than the historical default of human work. Before 1850, most Americans were self-employed farmers, craftsmen, traders, and small proprietors. After 1970, the self-employed share began climbing again. The W-2 era is the deviation, not the norm.

If AI does the work, why do people still need money?

Money is a claim on stored productive effort denominated in a transferable unit. In an AI-heavy economy, the productive effort being stored is generated by the systems you own equity in, the customers you serve directly, and the capital you control rather than by hours sold to an employer. The function of money does not change. The engine that generates the money changes from labor to ownership.

Why is the solo operator rising so quickly right now?

AI is collapsing the coordination cost that made the corporation necessary. A single operator with capable AI agents can now run functions that needed a team. Combined with platforms like Stripe and Shopify and a global addressable market through the internet, the leverage available to one person has jumped by an order of magnitude, while the cost of running a one-person business has dropped 95% over the last decade.

About the Author

Martin Goetzinger has spent his career in enterprise software sales, helping large organizations such as Apple, Microsoft, and Verizon connect data, insight, and action. His work focuses on transforming how businesses measure success and create customer value through technology.

Outside the enterprise world, he writes about the five forces he believes are reshaping everything: AI, blockchain, energy, personalized health, and robotics. Not from a purely technical lens, but from a human one as to how these technologies will redefine work, wealth, and well-being.

He is based in the U.S. and publishes at www.MartinGoetzinger.com.

Disclaimer

The views expressed in this article are the personal opinions of the author and are provided for informational and educational purposes only. Nothing in this article constitutes investment advice, financial advice, legal advice, or any other form of professional advice. Do not make investment or financial decisions based on the content of this article. Always consult a qualified professional before making decisions that affect your finances, business, or livelihood.