Star Trek or Mad Max: we get to choose

AI is like when the engine replaced the horse. This time, we’re the horse.

Hey folks, this is my first time having a guest writer for America’s Undoing. The author, Zack Exley, is a good friend and long-time collaborator. Zack is the reason I was able to get involved in politics. He took a chance on me way back in 2015, giving me my first job on the Sanders presidential campaign.

Zack is one of the most brilliant strategists I know, and he’s been the quiet inspiration behind many of the progressive movements and victories you’ve heard of. I came away from this piece with more hope and determination than I’ve had in a while, and I hope it does the same for you. Please comment and reply we want to hear from you.

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This is the most terrifying and exciting time to be alive in human history. In the next decade or two, we could build the utopia that humanity has dreamed of for millennia, or we could have World War III and the AI apocalypse. I’ve been talking like this for decades, and this is the first time people aren’t automatically calling me crazy. The sci-fi future just became our present reality. It’s time to choose: Star Trek or Mad Max. I’m optimistic, but this is going to be a tough fight.

I run the think tank New Consensus. Years ago, we put out the Green New Deal. Most people don’t remember this, but the original ask was for a congressional committee to make a plan for a 10 year national mobilization to build a clean economy productive enough for all Americans to make a great living. The plan was intended for the president who would be elected in 2020, so they could hit the ground running and succeed. Wouldn’t that have been handy? But Speaker Pelosi said no.

We didn’t give up. We went to work on our own plan. We call it the Mission for America. It’s the plan for the president who will take office in 2029. Our “project 2025.” The Republican Project 2025 was just a long list of programs to cut. It’s easy to destroy. But we need to build. Planning for that is much more difficult, exactly why we need to do it now and not wait for the president to take office.

In the context of We’re systematically going through each sector of the economy and working out the detailed and comprehensive steps that a presidential administration will need to take, and the laws that congress will need to pass, to really turn things around for working Americans. We’re not talking about slowing the collapse of working class wages or slowing the closing of American industry. We’re talking about literally building a whole new economy, one in which all workers, for the first time in U.S. history, can live a truly prosperous life. In a time when we’re building the most productive technology the world has ever seen, that shouldn’t sound like an impossible task.

If you’re curious about how it actually works, check out this high level summary of the Mission for America. We’re hiring a director for this project, and researchers. If you know anyone with expertise who’d be interested in joining our team, please let them know!

But I have a much more urgent ask. Part of what has made Trump’s second term so destructive is that the MAGA movement recruited and vetted tens of thousands of true believers. Mostly young and inexperienced, these recruits have been succeeding in their mission (to destroy the government) thanks to their single minded devotion to that goal.

Again, it’s much more difficult for us. We want to build, improve, and strengthen our economy, institutions, and government. We’ll need plenty of young people just starting out, but we’ll also need people with serious experience across every area of our economy and society. But like MAGA, we need people who will be united in their determination to deliver prosperity, peace and freedom for all Americans.

We’re running a Personnel Project to recruit and start preparing builders to serve in 2029. You can sign up here. Or please forward this to someone you know who would be interested and able to serve.

Like I said, some new developments are making me more and more optimistic that this plan, or at least something inspired by it, will be used in 2029. First, are all the great new leaders who are going to Congress in 2026 to challenge the old, do-nothing, Democratic Party leadership. Our friend Saikat Chakrabarti is one, but several others with him will form a new block of fighters. Following their example, more will run in 2028. The new president we get in 2028 will be supported by a new congress with new leadership ready to go big.

The other thing that’s making me optimistic is AI. Not because of the good it will do, but because of the harm. I know AI is being hyped like crazy. But beyond the hype, something huge is happening that we ignore at our peril: After decades of science fiction imagining that someday machines would become truly intelligent, they finally are. This changes everything.

I know there’s a lot of skepticism about whether AI will ever be able to take over whole jobs. If that’s where you’re at, please bear with me for a minute, because this is important.

AI is already replacing humans in certain fields such as software and customer service. And it’s accelerating. There were more AI layoffs in Q1 of 2026 than in all of 2025. Soon, it will be wiping out hundreds of millions of jobs around the world: a huge share of jobs that are done on computers plus many others.

But this isn’t like past waves of automation that got people off the farm and into factories, or out of factories and into offices. This is like when the engine replaced the horse. This time, we’re the horse. This is because while AI will create new kinds of work, that work will be done by AI, not humans.

Soon, AI coworkers and managers will appear at your company on Zoom and in Slack. They will present as fully capable humans — just 10,000 times faster, and able to work with thousands of people and tasks simultaneously.

For software developers and a few other kinds of workers, this is already a reality. I used to work in software, managing big teams of developers. Now I’m building systems with one AI agent in days that would have taken a whole team of humans months and millions of dollars.

Once AI is better than us at knowledge and management tasks in general, then, just like horses in the last century, there will be no new roles for us. We will be valuable as humans still, but not as workers. Many writers and thinkers have been anticipating the “end of work” for centuries. It’s here.

The irony is that, for decades to come, there will still be physical labor for humans to do. Yes, we can already theoretically make robots to replace people in every job once the AI is capable of controlling them. But unlike inviting AI to your Slack and Zoom, building physical robots, and rearranging factories and farms to suit them, is not free or instant. Automation will make physical labor gradually more and more scarce for people too, but it will take some time, and we can choose to save whatever kind of physical work we want for people.

Why does all this make me optimistic? This is a huge and complex topic, but let me try to spell it out clearly and concisely. (If you want the full treatment, please check out the <series I recently published on the New Consensus blog>.)

Building a new, clean economy that can provide prosperity for everyone is a gargantuan task. The biggest knock on the Green New Deal was that there aren’t workers available. Everyone is too busy making or marketing things that no one asked for, or driving the top 20% around in Ubers and delivering their DoorDash orders. Economists said there wasn’t the slack in our labor market to allow us to upgrade our homes and buildings or build new clean power generation, let alone build an entirely new economy from the ground up.

The bottom line is that as long as the stock market is on the rise and the incomes of the top 20% are skyrocketing (which they are), things aren’t going to change.

I’m not one of those people who wishes for collapse so that we can have the revolution. But the collapse is coming. The question is, what will we do with it? We know what the current Democratic leadership would do: Nothing. Paralysis. They’ll be frantically looking for corporations to bail out, but it’s not going to be that kind of crisis. It’s going to be so much deeper than a few banks and AI companies going bankrupt. Most of our population will be sitting at home permanently without or income. Without customers, virtually every industry will face insolvency, not just banks. Everything will grind to a halt.

That’s where the Mission for America comes in. It’s a plan for getting America to work. Not repaving roads, but building all the industries and infrastructure and institutions that we have been needing to build (or build back) for decades.

All the technology we’ve been developing for the past decades, centuries and millennia has now evolved to the point where, if we choose to, we can build a world economy that truly provides prosperity, security and freedom for everyone on earth. The Mission for America is the plan for America to do its part toward that end. We need to build an economy that can provide prosperity for our own people, but we also have a responsibility and an interest in sharing the technology and capital that the rest of the world will need to build prosperity too.

The reason I’m excited to be writing to Corbin’s readers about all this is that I know you’ve been engaged in working to support a new generation of candidates for Congress. In another year, we’re going to be looking at a busload of presidential candidates vying to succeed Trump. These upcoming elections will be the most important in American history up till now, and the most important for the rest of our lifetimes.

But even if we send the absolute best people in America for these jobs, they won’t be able to succeed unless we also send them with the playbook to guide them. There won’t be time once they’re serving. We learned that with Biden. And with Obama. Trump learned that in his first term, and he came back the next time with a plan. It was a plan for destruction, and they’ve been destroying everything in sight.

Please check out Mission for America at New Consensus. And please let Corbin know if you’d like to learn more about it in future emails, and if you’d like to hear more about what to expect from the AI crisis that we believe is coming.

Zack Exley
New Consensus