Are We Headed Toward a Zero Jobs Economy?

In 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt took office with unemployment near 25% and thousands of banks failing across the country.

Within his first 100 days, he pushed through deposit insurance, emergency banking reforms and massive public works programs that put millions back to work.

Together, these policies became known as the New Deal.

They reset the relationship between government, labor and the economy. And they didn’t just stabilize the country in the moment. They set the foundation for how the U.S. economy would run for decades.

Today, a different kind of disruption is taking shape.

One with the potential to compress decades of economic change into just a few years.

And OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman recently laid out his own version of a New Deal for the age of artificial intelligence.

The Blueprint for an AI Economy

Altman’s proposal is laid out in a 13-page report titled “Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age.”

I’ve gone through it, and it reads like a blueprint for a modern-day New Deal.

The timing isn’t accidental either, as AI moves out of the lab and into the workplace.

In 2026, AI systems are writing code, running software and handling multi-step tasks on their own. As Altman puts it: “Frontier systems have advanced from supporting tasks that take people minutes… to tasks that take them hours… [and] projects that currently take people months.”

By 2029, AI is expected to manage 80% to 95% of text-based tasks at a sufficient quality level.

And Altman warns that “the transition to superintelligence is not a distant possibility — it’s already underway.”

We’re going to need to deal with the impact of AI sooner than later.

Because companies are already hiring fewer people for certain roles, especially in customer support, coding and basic analysis. At the same time, employees are using AI to handle parts of their work, which is changing how jobs get done.

Altman chalks this up to AI’s potential to “disrupt jobs and reshape entire industries at a speed and scale unlike any previous technological shift.”

It also helps explain why companies are spending so much to build the infrastructure needed to run AI systems at scale.

Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT), Alphabet (Nasdaq: GOOG), Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN) and Meta (Nasdaq: META) alone are on track to spend around $665 billion in 2026, much of it tied to AI infrastructure.

That’s because AI systems require a lot of physical capacity. They need massive data centers, advanced chips and large amounts of electricity.

In fact, a single large data center can consume as much power as a small city. Global data center electricity demand is projected to grow by more than 150% by the end of the decade.

So the limiting factor is no longer what these systems can do. It’s how quickly the underlying infrastructure can be built.

That’s the core of Altman’s proposal.

Altman explicitly draws a historical parallel, noting that past transitions led to policies like “the Progressive Era and the New Deal [which] helped modernize the social contract.”

He calls for expanding the country’s ability to produce and run AI at scale by increasing compute capacity, speeding up energy development and removing bottlenecks that slow deployment.

He also acknowledges that once AI becomes infrastructure, it stops being just a corporate priority.

It becomes a national priority.

Altman argues that leadership in AI will shape economic and geopolitical power, and that countries willing to build faster will have a clear advantage.

We’ve seen this pattern before with electricity, railroads and the internet. Each required large-scale investment before becoming foundational to the economy.

AI is entering that same phase now.

But the proposal doesn’t stop at building AI infrastructure. It also looks at what happens once AI starts producing a larger share of economic output.

If AI takes on more of the work, then less income comes from wages. That raises a basic question: who benefits from it?

Altman lays out a few ideas.

One is stronger safety nets. As he puts it, policymakers should “define a package of temporary, expanded safety nets… that activates automatically when [certain] metrics exceed pre-defined thresholds.”

Another is a national wealth fund, partly funded by AI companies, that would give people a direct stake in the gains.

He also suggests changing the tax system so it relies less on wages and more on profits and capital.

He notes that as productivity rises, the structure of work itself could change. If the same output can be produced with fewer hours, shorter workweeks should become possible without reducing pay.

And he argues that access to AI should be widely available, more like electricity than a premium service.

Like the original New Deal, these solutions aren’t perfect.

But they recognize that the rules of the economy have changed.

And that’s worth taking seriously.

Here’s My Take

In Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age, Sam Altman notes that: “we are entering a new phase of economic and social organization that will fundamentally reshape work, knowledge, and production.”

The document outlines two parallel efforts to deal with what comes next.

The first part of his plan focuses on building the foundation of AI with more data centers, more chips and more electricity. Without that, none of this scales.

But the second part is where this plan looks like a modern New Deal.

Because if AI starts doing a larger share of human labor, then the way money flows through the economy has to change too.

That’s why Altman is talking about new safety nets, new tax structures and even giving citizens a direct stake in the output of AI systems.

In other words, Altman’s “New Deal” doesn’t just describe where AI is going.

It lays out what the economy might need to look like when it gets there.

Regards,

Ian KingChief Strategist, Banyan Hill Publishing

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