What does it mean for capitalism to end with Artificial Intelligence?
In the first part, we examined the ambiguous meaning of the word end. We recalled that, in Spanish, fin names both a goal and a termination, and that this double condition comes from the Greek term télos, where goal and end are not mutually exclusive, but form two sides of the same movement. There we explored the end as a goal: the internal orientation of neoliberal capitalism towards total automation, the progressive reduction of the human role, and the search for frictionless efficiency. Artificial intelligence then appeared as the technology capable of fully realizing this historical impulse.
In this second part, we focus on the other meaning of the term: the end as a termination. Not the direction in which a system moves, but the point at which that trajectory, when fully materialized, reveals its limit. The end understood not as an external interruption, but as the culmination of a process that, by fully realizing itself, exhausts itself.
For centuries, capitalism presented itself as a regime inseparable from human activity. It needed people to produce, hands to manufacture, minds to organize, desires to consume. Its vitality depended on life. But that dependence was never a moral principle; it was a technical limitation. Wherever the human being introduced slowness, uncertainty, or unpredictability, the system sought to replace it.
Artificial intelligence marks the point where this substitution becomes qualitatively different. It is not limited to automating physical or routine tasks: it automates creation, interpretation, coordination, planning, recommendation, monitoring, and decision-making. Approximately 65% of global employment is currently concentrated in the service sector: administration, finance, logistics, education, commerce, customer service, transport, health, bureaucracy, digital market. It is precisely this terrain — that of applied cognition, communication, organization, and analysis — that AI is beginning to massively occupy.
Estimates vary, but converge on a disturbing order of magnitude. Recent studies by the McKinsey Global Institute, the OECD, and the World Economic Forum agree that between 30% and 60% of service sector tasks are technically automatable through artificial intelligence systems. These figures do not describe a distant scenario, but a potential that is already viable with the current capabilities of generative AI and advanced analysis models, although their full implementation depends on business decisions and regulatory frameworks.
Translated into people, this range implies that hundreds of millions of workers from the so-called “global middle class” —administrative employees, technicians, accountants, salespersons, analysts, support staff, knowledge professionals— are exposed to their function becoming unnecessary, not due to incompetence or lack of productivity, but because the system has found a more efficient way to operate without them.
The economy can circulate, grow, optimize, predict, and accumulate without a huge part of the population participating in that circuit. The machine continues to function, but it does so increasingly disregarding those who were previously necessary to sustain it. This displacement —the system's continuity even when it drastically reduces the need for subjects— constitutes one of the first indications that the process is reaching a new threshold.
The current form of capitalism: four decades of accelerated concentration
For more than forty years, the logic of neoliberal capitalism has operated without significant brakes. This is not a prediction or a hypothetical scenario: the effects are fully visible in current wealth distribution data. Today, the richest 1% of the planet —about 80 million people— concentrates nearly half of all global wealth and controls around 45% of existing financial assets. Controlling financial assets means, in practice, controlling capital, and therefore controlling the future generation of wealth: it means deciding which sectors grow, which companies prosper, and what part of the surplus is redistributed or retained.
On the opposite extreme, the poorest half of the world's population —about 4 billion people— accesses barely less than 1% of global wealth. In recent years, while the richest 1% captured more than 60% of the newly created wealth, the poorest 50% received less than 1%. This is not a temporary anomaly: it is the stable form of the system for at least two decades, consolidated in successive cycles of financialization, deregulation, and wealth concentration.
If we broaden our view to the top 10%, the structure takes on its most revealing form. This 10% —about 800 million people, including the richest 1%— concentrates around 75% of all global wealth. The direct consequence is that the remaining 90% of humanity, more than 7 billion people, shares only 25% of the total wealth.
Below this 10% apex is the intermediate 40%, about 3.2 billion people, the so-called “global middle class.” This group holds around 24% of global wealth, a proportion that has been decreasing in relative terms for more than four decades. It is a segment that works, produces, and sustains administrations, businesses, and services, but whose economic weight has been progressively eroding under the neoliberal framework: stagnant wages, rising cost of living, loss of purchasing power, increasing debt, and constant exposure to job instability. It is not a poor sector, but an increasingly fragile one, where the distance between stability and precariousness has become narrower than at any other recent time.
At the base of the pyramid is the poorest 50%: about 4 billion people who collectively share only between 0.6% and 1% of the planet's wealth. But this figure, however overwhelming, only makes sense when inscribed in its historical trajectory: we have had more than four decades with a system that systematically and stably excludes half of humanity. This is not a cyclical accident or an economic oscillation, but a structure that, year after year, consolidates the material irrelevance of one out of every two inhabitants of the world.
This prolonged exclusion has concrete, immediate, and deeply physical consequences: chronic difficulties in accessing sufficient and quality food; collapsed or inaccessible health systems; intermittent or precarious schooling; unstable, overcrowded, or directly nonexistent housing; lives marked by insecurity, informal employment, and the absence of any form of social protection.
Finally, to understand how wealth concentration operates even within the global elite itself, it is enough to look again at the richest 1% —about 80 million people— and break it down into its three internal levels. Although this 1% concentrates approximately half of all the planet's wealth, that half is not distributed uniformly, but stratified in an extremely marked hierarchy.
At the apex is the top 0.01%, about 800,000 people, who own about 12% of global wealth. Just below appears the next 0.09%, about 7.2 million individuals, who accumulate around 16%. And finally, the remaining 0.9% —approximately 72 million people— collectively gathers around 22% of global wealth.
Thus, half of the planet's resources are concentrated in a demographic segment that, in turn, is internally ordered by levels of accumulation that multiply inequality even within the elite itself. It is not just that the 1% dominates most of the world's wealth, but that within that 1% there are abysses that reproduce, on a small scale, the same logic of extreme concentration that characterizes the system as a whole.
Human history shows that the human mind always finds strategies to bear the unbearable, to tolerate the intolerable, and, when there is no other way out, to look without seeing. But there are moments when this capacity for adaptation becomes an obstacle: it prevents us from understanding the magnitude of what is before us. To understand it, a simple example is enough.
Today, after forty years of a sustained process of economic concentration, a family of four belonging to the global middle class has wealth equivalent to that of 120 people from the poorest segment of the world's population. This disproportion is already difficult to assimilate, but it is still legible within our social intuition: we can imagine a hundred lives, we can even visualize their fragility.
What happens at the top of the pyramid, however, defies any human scale. A family of four from the richest 0.01% of the planet possesses resources equivalent to those of some 250,000 people from the poorest 50%. Yes: in terms of assets, four people accumulate what a quarter of a million human beings at the base of the distribution would need.
If the first was disconcerting, this borders on the unrepresentable. To think that a single table of four diners concentrates the economic equivalent of some 250,000 people from the poorest end of the distribution —and that this difference not only exists, but has been continuously, measured, documented, and administered for forty years— overwhelms any intuitive scale. It is a disproportion that our perception cannot grasp and that, nevertheless, is structural to the functioning of the world in which we live.
Artificial intelligence and capitalism: when the goal becomes the end
Artificial intelligence does not arrive at a neutral system, but at an order that has been oriented for more than forty years towards concentrating wealth, reducing costs, and operating with as little human friction as possible. In this context, AI does not transform the logic of neoliberal capitalism: it perfects it. It acts as a technology that operationalizes an intention that the system has been carrying for decades. And in doing so, it reconfigures the social pyramid from top to bottom.
Its impact is not homogeneous: it strengthens the position of the top 10%, erodes the intermediate 40% to the point of irrelevance, and deepens the exclusion of the bottom 50%, already consolidated for decades. The system's historical goal —to function with minimal human dependence— approaches its culmination. And at that point, the goal becomes the end.
The richest 10%: automation and capital autonomy
For the top 10% —the bloc that gathers three-quarters of global wealth— artificial intelligence is not a threat, but an accelerator. It does not come to displace their position, but to expand it. The contemporary productive structure had already made it clear that the wealth of the upper stratum does not come from wages, but from the ownership of financial assets. And it is precisely in this terrain that AI introduces the deepest leap.
Financialization has led the planet to debt levels that triple the size of the real economy. Every day, speculative markets move volumes of capital far exceeding those of material production. AI turns this tendency into automatism: systems that arbitrage prices, algorithms that correct markets, models that decide the destiny of billions in microseconds without human intervention. Capital no longer needs to produce to grow: it only needs to operate. In the top 10%, this amounts to something decisive: wealth is completely disconnected from human life.
AI reinforces this disconnection. It allows increasing margins without increasing staff; replacing work without increasing wages; expanding operations without increasing political risks. Capital becomes more abstract, more automatic, more autonomous. The economy, in this segment, becomes independent of any material reference to society.
It does not need our strength, nor our decisions, nor our attention, nor even our desire. Life remains outside the main circuit of value. At its apex, capitalism ceases to be a human system and becomes a self-reproducing machine.
The intermediate 40%: the middle class facing cognitive automation
The deepest transformation does not first manifest itself in the impoverished base, but in the broad segment ranging from 10% to 50% of the distribution: that intermediate 40% that for decades embodied the promise of stability, social ascent, and normality in capitalist democracies. It was the symbolic space of full citizenship: those who sustained offices, schools, hospitals, service companies, public administrations; those who managed procedures, attended to clients, analyzed data, produced reports, coordinated processes, designed strategies, advised, mediated, organized. They were, literally, the human infrastructure of the system.
And it is precisely there —in that fabric of cognitive, organizational, and relational tasks— where automation breaks in with greater force. When an AI model can simultaneously attend to thousands of users, write documents, filter resumes, evaluate risks, write contracts, suggest diagnoses, plan routes, or generate content, what is automated is not an edge, but the functional core of these jobs.
The consequence emerges on two closely linked levels.
On the one hand, a progressive and massive substitution, which pushes millions of professionals towards forms of labor degradation: fragmented tasks, lower wages, less stability, less protection. Each innovation cycle reduces the need for workers, and each business restructuring displaces a new group to the economic periphery.
On the other hand, an even greater concentration of economic power, because cost reduction and centralization of decisions directly translate into more profits for the top 10%. The productivity that automation frees up does not decrease; it increases.
Thus, this 40% ceases to be the backbone of the system and begins to be treated as potential surplus: useful as long as it guarantees efficiency and continuity, but available to be replaced as soon as algorithmic logic allows. Functional irrelevance, which for decades marked the destiny of the poorest half, is now projected onto one of the largest and most symbolically central groups of society.
The promise of stability that defined the global middle class unravels from within, not due to a specific crisis, but due to a technical reconfiguration that turns its social function into something that can already be done —and optimized— without them.
The poorest 50%: four decades of structural irrelevance
For the poorest 50% of the planet, AI does not inaugurate anything new: it continues a process that has been underway for forty years. This group had already been excluded from the effective distribution of wealth: they lived with less than 1% of global assets and with precarious access to food, health, education, and housing.
This is not a recent phenomenon, nor a temporary dysfunction, but a sustained and fully documented pattern: for four decades, the system has shown that it can function by stably leaving out half of human beings. Their exclusion was not accidental: it was structural.
Artificial intelligence does not reverse this process; it consolidates it. Not because it directly attacks this group, but because it simply ignores it. The system has already learned to operate without them. It does not depend on their work, nor their consumption, nor their political integration. AI merely perfects a pre-existing dynamic: it continues to optimize processes that never took this half of the world into account. This exclusion is consolidated in its continuity: a permanent condition of functioning.
The culmination of capitalist telos: a system with no place for almost anyone
Exclusion was always part of capitalist architecture: poverty, peripheries, invisible jobs, reserve armies. But there was a decisive feature: even the excluded still remained, potentially, a labor force. Their time, their body, their knowledge could be absorbed when the economy needed it. There was exploitation, but there was still a link, a half-open door towards integration.
Today another category emerges: functional irrelevance. It is no longer about being exploited with low wages or in harsh conditions, but about being unnecessary altogether. Of not being required to produce, to coordinate, to manage, not even to consume in a decisive way. When the poorest half of the planet collectively possesses barely 1% of the wealth, and when a growing part of the intermediate 40% sees its material stability erode, what is configured is not a regime of intensive exploitation, but a regime of structural abandonment.
Artificial intelligence amplifies this drift by displacing not just tasks, but entire functions. Production, analysis, coordination, circulation, distribution, decision, content generation: each of these areas can operate with minimal or directly zero human intervention. The system ceases to need the subject and, consequently, ceases to be interested in sustaining them.
For centuries, as long as the economy needed human labor, an implicit pact existed: working was the condition for being part of social life. That pact —always unequal, always fragile— was the foundation of the modern narrative: progress, ascent, stability, citizenship. Cognitive automation undoes that pact from within. Not because it destroys work, but because it makes it irrelevant as a means of integration.
The narrative of the 20th century —work, mobility, well-being, participation— ceases to be compatible with the technical structure of the system. The economy continues to function, but it does so following a logic that no longer considers the majority as a necessary part of its metabolism. The idea of a shared world sustained by human production is silently but irreversibly broken.
For forty years, capitalism progressively narrowed its perimeter, systematically leaving out one out of every two human beings. AI does not inaugurate this trend: it accelerates it, deepens it, and turns it into a structural horizon. What was once progressive exclusion now becomes technical possibility: a system capable of operating, dispensing not just with half of humanity, but potentially with nine out of ten people.
This is not a metaphor, but the direct consequence of two converging movements: 40% of the population —the global middle class— whose economic function is being absorbed by cognitive automation, and 50% that has lived for decades in consolidated structural irrelevance. If we relate these two dynamics, the system's logic points to a scenario in which only a minimal fraction is necessary for its functioning.
And not because that system will collapse, but because of the opposite: because it can continue to advance without them. Not because it disappears, but because it abandons those it no longer considers necessary for its operation. The end of capitalism thus presents itself as a paradox: a human system more efficient than ever, but one that no longer needs to integrate almost anyone.
This is the end as a termination: the moment when an order persists, even perfects itself, but no longer counts on humanity as a constitutive part of its functioning. A system that reaches its goal only to discover that, in doing so, it no longer needs those who made its existence possible.
The data presented in this article on inequality and wealth concentration can be verified in the main international sources dedicated to the study of global wealth distribution. These include reports from the World Inequality Lab —including the World Inequality Report 2022 and the Global Income Inequality 2023 update— and the World Inequality Database series (2022–2024). Analyses from Oxfam published in 2022, 2023, and 2024 are also incorporated, along with wealth studies from the Global Wealth Report 2023 by Credit Suisse/UBS and its complementary databases (2019–2022). All these sources are public, verifiable, and provide a solid framework for cross-referencing this information.