A defining characteristic of the industrialized world has been the promise of meritocracy: if you’re smart and work hard, you can improve your position in life. The promise has always had limits, and class mobility has often been more aspiration than reality, but the belief itself has been a driving motivation for much of society. Across nearly every country, a large majority of respondents rate hard work and ambition as essential or very important to getting ahead.
That promise is unlikely to keep holding.
The end of hard work as leverage
Much of what we have thought of as “hard work” is on the verge of being automated, if it isn’t already. Agriculture, transportation, manufacturing, and increasingly service work — the industries that employ most of the population — are all becoming cheaper to run with machines than with people. For the average person, this means their skills will hold little marginal value. Beyond a set of specialty positions, which won’t have room for most of us, it is unclear what would motivate the employment of humans at all.
If effort no longer converts into advancement, what does? The obvious fallback is what came before meritocracy: wealth and power held by families and dynasties, passed down through succession. Those who have it keep it; those who don’t, can’t get it.
How do we square the promise of an “abundant” future with the power dynamics of today? An abundance that applies only where it doesn’t infringe on the domain of someone who was more powerful than you in 2026 is inherently constrained, and ultimately authoritarian.
The dynasties of old
This would be bad in the familiar way — without the possibility of revolution or turnover, we risk being stuck in the same patterns indefinitely. But it may be worse than historical dynasties.
In past empires, power was concentrated in individuals or small groups, and their competence varied wildly over time. That instability was, perversely, a source of change. An incompetent or overly oppressive ruler degraded the system quickly and hastened their own replacement. In the world we’re heading toward, the machinery of governance and production can run largely independently of who benefits from it. A poor heir no longer brings the system down with them, which removes one of history’s most reliable correctives.
There is a silver lining: as long as power ultimately rests with humans, it inherits human irrationality. Whims, feuds, and mistakes will continue to create openings, even in an otherwise stable system.
The game isn’t over
Two aspects of our trajectory give me hope.
The first is that future is not settled. Even under optimistic assumptions about progress, today’s leaders and power holders will not personally live forever — though their dynasties might. The power transitions that remain therefore become critically important in shaping what comes next.
The second is that no individual or fiefdom can yet wield a majority of power. Supply chains are too complex, dependencies too intertwined, and motivations too diverse. As long as that remains true, alliances are possible and competition persists. The game may become more efficient, but it still offers a basis for counteracting individual dominance and a platform for collective bargaining.
Looking outward
Still, the existence of statistical or game-theoretic paths to advancement doesn’t fill the hole left by meritocracy. Individual ambition seems to be an important part of our humanity, and something we should structurally try to preserve.
Ambition thrives when we are small relative to our environment — when the thing we push against is nature, or the unknown, rather than each other. It is much harder to sustain when the main game is dividing up a fixed pie. Our best hope, then, is to look outward: to find a larger frontier, a bigger obstacle we can push against together, and reframe the problem as one where ambition still has a role to play.