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Star Trek or Wall-E? When AI Does Everything

Peng T. Ong, Co-Founder & Managing Partner, Monk's Hill Ventures

04-Feb-26 12:00

Star Trek or Wall-E? When AI Does Everything

We often talk about AI disrupting jobs, but Peng T. Ong (Co-Founder of Monk's Hill Ventures) is talking about something far more absolute: a singularity.

In his essay, "The Economic Singularity: Life as Work Transforms," Peng argues we are approaching a tipping point where the marginal cost of labor and knowledge trends to zero. When AI can write code, draft contracts, and generate strategy decks faster and cheaper than humans, the traditional engine of the economy, trading labor for wages, breaks down.

So, what comes next? Will we live in a "Star Trek" utopia of exploration, or a "Wall-E" dystopia of consumption?

We discuss:

  • Defining the Singularity: Why the economy faces a "Blue Screen of Death" when infinite productivity meets zero-cost intelligence.

  • The 7 Future Worlds: From the "Star Trek" pursuit of discovery to the "Backup World" where communities preserve pre-tech skills for resiliency.

  • The Vulnerability Paradox: Why unregulated white-collar jobs (consultants, investors) are on the chopping block before blue-collar trade work.

  • UBC vs. UBI: The critical difference between giving people a salary (Income) versus giving them a stake in the means of production (Capital).

  • The "Entrepreneurial" Shift: How education must pivot from vocational training to teaching children how to create value in a post-labor world.

  • The Open Source Defense: Why the value of AI models themselves will drop to zero, preventing any single corporation from holding a monopoly on intelligence.

Produced by: Roshan Kanesan

Presented by: Roshan Kanesan


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Categories:  technologyCorporateseconomy

Tags:  economic singularityuniversal basic capitalpost-labor economyartificial intelligencefuture of workubiAI disruption





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