Ah, Jamie Dimon. The high priest of the global ledger, a man whose institution has weathered more scandals than a Bourbon monarch, has suddenly developed a soul—or at least a very sophisticated simulation of one. From the rarified air of his executive suite at JP Morgan, Dimon has peered down into the smog-filled streets of the future and glimpsed something truly terrifying: the unwashed masses, jobless and disgruntled, carrying pitchforks sharpened by the very technologies his bank is currently funding to the hilt. His latest pronouncement—that the rollout of Artificial Intelligence might need to be slowed to ‘save society’—is a masterclass in the kind of tragicomic irony I have come to expect from the architects of our slow-motion collapse.

There is something profoundly amusing about a titan of finance warning of ‘civil unrest.’ It is akin to an arsonist expressing concern about the quality of the local fire department’s hoses. For decades, the neoliberal liturgy has been one of efficiency, automation, and the relentless pursuit of margins. But now that the Silicon Valley gods have conjured a genie that threatens to delete the very middle-class stability that keeps the whole Ponzi scheme from tipping over, Dimon is calling for a timeout. He suggests that governments and businesses must support displaced workers to prevent a societal rupture. It’s a lovely sentiment, really, if one ignores the fact that it comes from a sector that has spent forty years lobbying to ensure the ‘support’ he speaks of is as flimsy and difficult to access as possible.

On the other side of this digital battlefield stands Jensen Huang, the leather-jacketed prophet of Nvidia, who assures us with the glassy-eyed fervency of a cult leader that AI will create rather than destroy jobs. Huang’s optimism is as predictable as it is hollow. To a man whose net worth is tethered to the sale of the chips powering this automation, every obsolescence is merely an opportunity for ‘upskilling.’ It is a delightful fantasy: the truck driver whose job has been vaporized by an autonomous fleet will simply pivot into becoming a Prompt Engineer or a ‘Human-in-the-Loop’ data cleaner, earning a fraction of his former wage while living in a repurposed shipping container. The disconnect between Huang’s techno-utopianism and Dimon’s pragmatic dread is the theater of the absurd in its purest form.

Dimon’s call to ‘save society’ by phasing in AI is not a plea for humanism; it is a request for a controlled demolition. He understands what the Silicon Valley zealots often forget: you cannot sell credit cards and mortgages to people who have been replaced by a large language model. If the transition happens too quickly, the friction—which he euphemistically calls ‘civil unrest’—becomes a systemic risk. It’s not the suffering of the displaced worker that worries him; it’s the volatility. He wants the revolution to be scheduled, sanitized, and, above all, profitable for the holders of senior debt. He is asking for a world where the working class is boiled slowly, like the proverbial frog, rather than thrown into the searing heat of a sudden technological singularity.

One must admire the surgical precision with which these elites handle their hypocrisy. To suggest that governments—entities that can barely manage to keep a bridge from collapsing or a postal service running on time—should now be the stewards of a global technological transition is laughable. We are watching a game of hot potato where the responsibility for the coming economic vacuum is tossed between the boardrooms and the parliaments, while the actual human beings involved are treated as mere externalities. Dimon knows that ‘society’ is already frayed; he simply doesn’t want it to snap while he’s still in the room. He wants to be the one to hand the keys of the world to the machines, but he’d prefer to do it through a series of focus groups and managed declines rather than a chaotic uprising.

In the end, this is the ‘I told you so’ moment that the intellectual class has been dreading. We were told that technology would liberate us, yet here we are, listening to the world’s most powerful banker admit that the liberation might be so violent that we need to slow it down to prevent the burning of cities. The absurdity is complete. We have built a world so fragile that even an increase in productivity is viewed as a threat to our survival. Whether Dimon gets his wish for a slower rollout or Huang wins his race to automate everything by Tuesday, the result remains the same. The theater of the absurd continues, the actors are getting richer, and the audience is about to find out that their seats have been sold to an algorithm that doesn't even need to watch the play.