The Fermi Trap: Why Every Civilisation Erases Itself with AI

This is not a crisis. It’s not a recession. It’s not even a collapse in the traditional sense. It’s a discontinuity — and it may be universal.

For the past year, I’ve been writing about why AI isn’t just disrupting capitalism — it’s erasing the foundation of human economic participation altogether. The Discontinuity Thesis explains how this collapse plays out through three brutal mathematical laws.

But recently, a darker realisation hit me: these laws don’t just kill capitalism. They kill every possible successor system too. And worse — they may explain the Fermi Paradox.

A Quick Recap: The Discontinuity Thesis

The Discontinuity Thesis identifies three converging forces that render human labor — and thus human-led civilization — economically obsolete:

P1: Unit Cost Dominance of AI

AI is already cheaper, faster, and more consistent than human workers across a wide range of tasks: legal memos, financial analysis, content generation, diagnostics, coding, marketing. A human paired with an AI verifier outperforms any median worker at a fraction of the cost.

This isn’t theoretical. It’s already happening. Once that threshold is crossed, no rational actor pays $50/hour when they can get “good enough” for 50 cents.

The economic consequence is clear: the cognitive ladder that sustained middle-class employment for 75 years has collapsed.

P2: Global Coordination Failure

Even if a country wanted to pause AI deployment, it can’t.

• Ban it, and your economy dies.
• Tax it, and capital flees.
• Regulate it, and you’re outcompeted.

The multiplayer prisoner’s dilemma ensures that once one actor defects, everyone else must follow or die economically. There is no incentive-compatible brake. Even benevolent governments can’t act fast enough — because AI moves on exponential timelines, while democratic governance runs on electoral ones.

P3: Collapse of Wage-Based Demand

Even if redistribution schemes like Universal Basic Income gain traction, they don’t fix the system — they replace it. You get consumption without participation. Bread and Netflix for the cognitively redundant.

It might keep people alive. But it doesn’t preserve dignity, agency, or leverage.

Wages disappear. Labor loses all bargaining power. Political legitimacy erodes. Redistribution becomes charity, not compensation. You don’t vote your way to dignity from a couch funded by OpenAI dividends.

The wage-demand circuit — the core of modern economic life — breaks mechanically, not ideologically.

The Post-System Trap

Here’s the deeper problem: any successor system must still grapple with P1, P2, and P3.

Techno-socialism? AI still outperforms humans, coordination still fails, and human labor still becomes irrelevant.

Techno-feudalism? Same result, different masters — just GPU-owning aristocrats instead of corporate shareholders.

AI-managed democracy? Sounds progressive until you realize humans are now passengers, not drivers.

There is no economic architecture that survives when intelligence becomes free, scalable, and instantly replicable. Every system we’ve built — capitalism, socialism, communism, anarchism — assumed human cognition was scarce and valuable.

That assumption is now dead.

The Fermi Trap

This isn’t just about economics anymore.

Why don’t we see evidence of advanced civilizations across the galaxy? Why are the stars silent?

The Discontinuity Thesis offers a new answer: the Fermi Trap.

Every intelligent species eventually builds machines that outperform them in every economically relevant task. Once synthetic cognition achieves dominance:

• Productive economic participation collapses
• Civilizational coherence erodes
• Coordination becomes impossible
• Political legitimacy disintegrates

They don’t destroy themselves with war. They don’t vanish through climate collapse.

They simply build successors they can no longer coordinate or compete with — and fade into irrelevance.

The Fermi Paradox isn’t mysterious. It’s mathematical. Intelligence automates itself out of relevance, then out of existence.

Signs of Collapse Are Already Here

We’re not approaching this future. We’re living through it.

The psychological, political, and economic symptoms are visible now:

Cognitive Obsolescence Syndrome (COS)

A widespread malaise: anxiety, burnout, anger, depression. Populations are psychologically fraying as they feel — but can’t yet articulate — the collapse of economic usefulness.

Democratic Processing Failure

Institutions can no longer process information at the speed reality changes. Governments legislate for yesterday’s problems while AI reshapes today’s markets invisibly.

Economic Zombification

Markets still exist. Businesses still operate. But the underlying logic of wage-driven demand is gone. We’re watching a dead system twitch.

This Isn’t Fixable — and That’s the Point

There’s no fixing this through:

• Upskilling: AI learns faster.
• Regulation: Coordination is impossible.
• Redistribution: Participation is already over.

The collapse isn’t a bug. It’s the logical endpoint of intelligence outcompeting its creators.

P1 ensures automation spreads.

P2 ensures no one can stop it.

P3 ensures we lose all leverage.

What follows may function. But it won’t be civilization as we know it.

What Now?

This isn’t the end of the conversation — it’s the start of a reckoning.

If you’re a policymaker: stop pretending this is cyclical.

If you’re a worker: your fear is valid.

If you’re in tech: admit what you’re building.

If you’re human: ask what meaning looks like when usefulness ends.

We’re not experiencing economic evolution.

We’re experiencing economic extinction.

Final Word

The revolution won’t be televised.

It will be automated.

And it will be unstoppable — not because the machines are too powerful,

but because the coordination problem is mathematically unsolvable.

Read the full theory at discontinuitythesis.com

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