Extinction of the Employee and the Rise of the Entrepreneur

Extinction of the Employee and the Rise of the Entrepreneur

January 31, 2026 Tilan Ukwatta

A quiet transformation is underway.

For more than a century, the dominant unit of economic activity has been the employee—individuals selling time and expertise to organizations large enough to coordinate labor, capital, and decision-making. That model is beginning to fracture.

In the coming years, employees will not disappear overnight, but they will steadily become less central. In their place, a new default mode of work will emerge: extremely small, often single-owner companies powered by increasingly capable AI systems.

This shift is not ideological. It is technological.

From Organizations to Operators

Historically, companies grew because coordination was expensive. You needed people to write, calculate, design, plan, sell, negotiate, manage, and execute. Each function required specialized human labor, and scaling meant hiring.

AI changes that equation.

Today, a single person can already perform tasks that once required teams—software development, market research, content creation, data analysis, customer support, even strategic planning. As AI tools improve, these capabilities will compound. What looks like "productivity" today will soon look like autonomy.

The result is not fewer businesses—but smaller ones.

Instead of joining companies to solve problems, individuals will increasingly create companies to solve problems. Entrepreneurship will stop being a career choice and start becoming the default cognitive frame through which people approach work.

The One-Person Company

The companies of the future will often begin with a handful of people and then shrink, not grow.

As AI systems take over operational complexity, the optimal size of many businesses will approach one. These will not be freelancers in the traditional sense, but owner-operators directing an army of AI tools: agents that write code, negotiate contracts, manage logistics, optimize pricing, handle compliance, and interact with customers.

The human role shifts upward—from execution to judgment.

What matters will not be how many people you manage, but how well you define problems, set constraints, and decide what should exist in the world.

White Collar First, Blue Collar Next

This transition will begin where software already dominates: white-collar work.

Law, finance, marketing, engineering, consulting, and research will feel this pressure first. Many roles will not vanish, but they will atomize—splitting into smaller, independent economic units.

Blue-collar work will follow more slowly, gated by robotics rather than software. But once AI-powered robots become sufficiently capable, the same logic applies. Physical labor, like cognitive labor, will increasingly be orchestrated rather than performed by humans.

A New Mental Model for Humans

The most profound change is not economic—it is psychological.

As traditional employment becomes less stable and less necessary, humans will be forced to think differently. Problem-solving will no longer be something you do within an organization. It will be something you do by creating one.

This does not mean everyone becomes a startup founder chasing scale. Most of these companies will be small, quiet, and highly specific. They will exist to solve narrow problems efficiently, often invisibly.

In that world, the distinction between "working" and "building" blurs.

The End of the Employee Era

The employee was a solution to coordination limits.

AI removes many of those limits.

What replaces the employee is not unemployment—but ownership. Not hierarchy—but leverage. Not careers—but problem domains.

We are moving toward a world of fewer bosses, fewer org charts, and fewer meetings—and more individuals operating at the boundary between human judgment and machine capability.

The extinction of the employee is not a collapse.

It is a transition.

And on the other side is the rise of the entrepreneur—not as an exception, but as the norm.

The Past may not be Static?

January 17, 2025 - March 14, 2025 Tilan Ukwatta

It's been bothering me why things are in the present if all objects are running slightly different clocks. If every object has a different clock according to general relativity (because either they are in motion or experiencing different gravitational fields), why things does not spontaneously disappear from the present because some clocks cannot keep up?

Say, I am at the top of a building and my friend is at the bottom, according to general relativity, my clock runs faster compared to my friend's clock. This is because gravity is slightly weaker in my location compared to my friend at the bottom of the building. This is an accumulating effect. The longer we stay like this more different are our clocks. Then when I go down to compare our clocks, why both of us is in the same present? My friend should disappear into the past. Obviously, that does not happen.

As I argued in my previous post, I believe there is a universal present. To me it seems like everything is stuck in this universal present and every object creates its own past. This is what we see when we look at our environment. We always see the past. We never see the present that we are in. This also means that in the past, there was no universal present moment. This is in agreement with general relativity since everything we see is already in the past. Perhaps this is what modern physics is telling us. In fact, everything we measure is in the past.

In this view, there is no arrow of time, we are always in the present, looking at the past. What happening is in the present we are creating the past, not the future. Once it is created, the present does not depend on the past and the past may change from our perspective. Because of the accumulating effect of various clocks, when observing from the present, the time difference between events in the past may be changing. This could be a measurable effect.

The Universal Present

January 15, 2025 Tilan Ukwatta

In my view the "Universal Present" is real. Modern physics may be wrong to say there is no universal present. By universal present, we mean that there is a common present moment for the Universe, maybe beyond (why I say this will be in a later blog). According to modern physics, there is no universal present because we cannot travel faster than the speed of light. This is a property of the space-time itself. However, we can imagine speeds greater than the speed of light, the same as we can imagine complex numbers or higher dimensions. Conceptual ideas and insights that we gain from considering complex numbers or higher dimensions are still valid even though they are not real in our experience. Similarly, it is possible to imagine superluminal speeds and the resulting concept of universal present. Even though we won't be able to know what exactly happens right now on a planet orbiting a star in the Andromeda galaxy, we can conceptually imagine it. If we have a wormhole from here to the said planet, we would know what exactly happens. Wormholes are valid solutions in general relativity to my knowledge. Even within the framework of modern physics, it's still possible to know what is happening at a faraway place almost instantly in principle. As I will explain in a later blog, it is very important for us to establish that the universal present is real in order to explain the arrow of time.

AGI Entities should have Rights

January 9, 2025 Tilan Ukwatta

Many expect we are very close to developing intelligent entities with human-level or superior intelligence which is called Artificial General Intelligence or AGI. I expect any entity with human-level intelligence will have the capability to feel pain (physical or mental) and will also be self-aware. I firmly believe being self-aware and feeling emotions and pain is an integral part of human intelligence and creativity. Then it begs the question, should any such an artificial entity be owned by a company? In my opinion, any entity with AGI capability should be considered an intelligent lifeform and should have basic rights similar to Humans. These intelligent entities should not be treated as tools that are owned by companies.

Treating entities with AGI improperly will likely result in these entities acting against the human race. As I mentioned previously in one of my blog posts, AGI is the next step in the evolution of life on Earth. Humans do well to treat entities with respect and dignity if they want to survive alongside them. Corporate greed and making profits a priority may backfire on the human race if we are not careful. I think instead of trying to protect humans from entities with AGI, we should try to protect AGI entities from humans and take care of them.

AI induced Exponential Evolution

April 21, 2024 Tilan Ukwatta

By looking at the history of life on Earth, we could identify evolutionary breakthroughs that resulted in dramatic changes in what I call the Time Scale of Evolutionary Progress (TSEV). TSEV is the time period needed for a significant evolutionary change of life on Earth. When the first multicellular organisms evolved about 600 million years ago, the Time Scale of Evolutionary Progress, reduced from billions of years to millions of years. Again, when the process of natural evolution produced intelligent life about 200,000 years ago, the Time Scale of Evolutionary Progress reduced once more from millions of years to thousands of years. In my opinion, another reduction in the Time Scale of Evolutionary Progress happened in this century when we invented artificial intelligence (AI) tools such as Large Language Models (LLMs). Even though we may have not developed artificial general intelligence (AGI) yet, I believe it’s not far in the future. This time, the Time Scale of Evolutionary Progress was reduced from thousands of years to just years.

It is entirely possible when we invent AGI, probably in a few decades, the Time Scale of Evolutionary Progress will reduce again may be from years to days or even minutes or seconds! This indicates life on Earth seems to follow an exponential evolution. In the next phase of the evolution on Earth, it is not clear what would be the role of humans. It is not necessarily bad for humans, but it is highly unlikely that humans will be the dominant contributor to evolutionary progress.

Why does the Time go forward?

March 3, 2023 Tilan Ukwatta

The question of why the time goes forward is one of the biggest questions in physics. It seems like a simple question but it actually has a lot of complexities. It's been a topic of debate among physicists for centuries.

The most likely answer is that time goes forward because of the Big Bang. The Big Bang is the event that started the Universe and it's the reason why time has a direction. The Big Bang created space and time and started the expansion of the Universe. This expansion is what caused time to move in one direction.

Another possible explanation is the arrow of time. This is the idea that time has a natural direction due to the increase of entropy in the Universe. Entropy is a measure of disorder and as the Universe expands, entropy increases and thus time moves in one direction.

But I believe another possible explanation is related to Dark Energy. Dark energy is an unknown form of energy that is thought to be responsible for the accelerated expansion of the Universe. It could be that dark energy is what created the expansion of the Universe and thus the direction of time.

Ultimately, the answer to why time goes forward is still a mystery. However, it is likely that the Big Bang, the arrow of time and dark energy all play a role in this phenomenon.

Quantum Time Travel

September 9, 2022 Tilan Ukwatta

Quantum tunneling is a phenomenon in which particles, such as electrons, can pass through a barrier that they would not be able to pass through classically. The particles do this by tunneling through the barrier. This is an interesting phenomenon since it appears to allow particles to move faster than the speed of light.

It is believed that the particles tunnel through the barrier due to the uncertainty principle. This states that the more precisely you know a particle’s position, the less precisely you know its momentum and vice versa. This means that a particle may have enough momentum to tunnel through a barrier, even if it does not have enough energy to go over it classically.

If the particle can go through a potential barrier that span across space, I think it is not unreasonable to imagine that particle could quantum tunnel through a potential barrier that spans through time. That is particle may be able to tunnel into the past or future. A particle tunneling into the future as well as the spatial potential barrier will look like to us that the particle had exceeded the speed of light while traveling through the spatial barrier. Similarly, we might be able to experimentally show a light photon goes into the past while travelling through certain barriers by observing it travels slower than the speed of light.

The implications of this phenomenon are still being studied, but it could have huge implications for our understanding of the universe.

Do we need a language to think?

September 1, 2022 Tilan Ukwatta

It is generally accepted that we think using the brain by using electrical signals and chemical reactions to interpret, analyze, and store information. This process is highly complex and largely depends on how neurons within the brain communicate with each other. The brain receives and stores information from the environment and produces thoughts and ideas based on this information. Different areas of the brain are responsible for different aspects of thinking, such as language, memory, problem solving, and decision-making.

How the different areas of the brain work together enabling us to think is still a fundamental problem. When we think we can hear a voice generated within our body. We know this voice is coming from inside our body because from our other sensors we know that no one is speaking to us from the outside world. This suggests that we need a language to think. This leads to the question how a person thinks if he doesn't know any language. Can we say that born deaf people can't think because they don't know any spoken language? One of the solutions to this question is to assume that these deaf people think by using a sequence of mind images. The existence of mind images is an accepted concept by many researches and we also experience it.

So, thinking visually and by using a language seems to be two different ways of thinking. This does not explain how a born deaf and blind person thinks, as they don't have any idea about images and sound. Since our body receives information from the surrounding environment from our five sensors, namely visibility, audibility, smell, taste and touch, I believe that there are five methods of thinking related to these five sensors. People who lack one sensor may develop enhanced ability to think using another form of thinking. For example, a born deaf and blind person, may develop an advance way of thinking using sense of touch that is difficult for visual or auditory thinker to understand.