AI Will End Human Jobs: Emad Mostaque on the Future of Human Work

What happens to jobs, money, and meaning when intelligence becomes cheaper than labor and humans are no longer the smartest ones in the room?

On this episode of Digital Disruption, we’re joined by Emad Mostaque, founder of Stability AI and a leading voice in the global AI revolution.

Emad Mostaque is a businessman, mathematician, and former hedge fund manager. He is the co-founder and was CEO of Stability AI, the company behind the popular text-to-image generator Stable Diffusion. With a master’s degree in mathematics and computer science from Oxford, Emad Mostaque has significantly contributed to artificial intelligence. His vision for Stability AI was to “build the foundation to activate humanity’s potential” through open-source generative AI.

Emad sits down with Geoff to explore a future that may arrive far sooner than most people expect. He argues that within the next 1,000 days, artificial intelligence will fundamentally reshape the global economy, upending work, capitalism, enterprise software, and even how we define human value. Drawing from his book The Last Economy, Emad lays out a stark and deeply thought-provoking framework for understanding what comes next when cognitive labor becomes economically irrelevant. This conversation explores the inevitabilities of exponential AI progress, including why intelligence is becoming “too cheap to measure,” how AI agents will replace many jobs done behind a screen, and the coming shift from human-plus-AI teams to AI-only systems. Beyond the economics, Emad also tackles the human question: where meaning comes from in a world where AI outperforms us at most cognitive tasks. He argues that resilience in the AI age will depend less on job titles and more on community, networks, relationships, and how deeply individuals engage with the technology itself.

In this video:

00:00 Intro

04:30 What is “The Last Economy”?

08:45 Intelligence becomes too cheap to measure

13:30 The three possible AI futures

18:00 Are humans becoming the weakest link?

22:15 The rise of economic agents

27:00 Digital doubles and the end of white-collar work

31:45 Enterprises racing toward zero employees

36:30 Why AI is cheaper than human labor (by orders of magnitude)

41:15 Software, SaaS, and the collapse of enterprise moats

46:00 The internet after AI agents

50:15 Who controls the “AI next to you”?

54:30 Open-Source vs Big Tech AI

58:45 The first one-person billion-dollar company

1:03:30 What humans are still for

1:07:00 How to prepare for the AI economy now

Connect with Emad:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emad-mostaque-9840ba274/?originalSubdomain=uk

X: https://x.com/EMostaque

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mostaquee/

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