Meta's announcement of 1,500 layoffs in its virtual reality division has sparked growing unrest among the company's employees. In an ironic twist, workers who helped develop artificial intelligence technology now find their own jobs threatened as AI advances faster than expected. Despite their internal frustrations, employees are scrambling to keep their positions.
On the evening of January 30 (local time), Meta's headquarters in Menlo Park, California, was bustling despite it being a Friday evening. The parking lot remained packed with cars as employees worked voluntary overtime, unwilling to leave their desks while colleagues disappeared without warning. The few workers waiting for buses into the city sat at stops, hunched over laptops.
After falling behind in the early AI race, Meta is scaling back its metaverse operations to focus on AI, pushing once-promising top engineers to the front of the layoff line. An Indian researcher outside Meta's headquarters described the move as "an unavoidable choice to compete with OpenAI and Anthropic," adding that "tensions are running high internally."
As AI advances rapidly, predictions are spreading that the era of "Homo Laborans"—the laboring human—may end sooner than anticipated. Workers across IT, manufacturing, and transportation are already being displaced by AI and humanoid robots. The struggle between humans and machines for jobs is expected to intensify.
The disappearance of human labor would necessitate fundamental changes to national systems including social security and taxation, which depend on workers' income. With concerns growing that economic value derived from labor could effectively vanish, some argue that much of modern mainstream economics—developed since Adam Smith—may need to be redesigned. "Jobs that exist today could disappear suddenly with the emergence of physical AI," said Kim Ki-seung, a professor of economics at Pusan National University. "We need new thinking about economic structures beyond just tax policies based on labor income."
Is Human Labor Still the Only Source of Value? Adam Smith's Theory Challenged
At CES 2026 in Las Vegas last month, Siemens drew attention by presenting a new model for manufacturing. The company plans to deploy "Agentic AI" at its Erlangen plant in Germany, putting AI in charge of design, procurement, logistics, production, and quality control instead of humans. This differs fundamentally from Adidas's smart factory, which closed in 2019. Adidas's AI merely connected robots performing repetitive, predetermined motions. The Erlangen AI will organically control robots capable of independent judgment and human-like work. If the plant operates as planned, it could become an entirely new type of factory—opening the door to the once-impossible "dark factory" staffed only by a handful of supervisors and no workers.
How would Adam Smith, who laid the foundations of capitalist economics with "The Wealth of Nations" 250 years ago, react to a dark factory? His most advanced machines were spinning jennies and steam engines, so a factory producing goods without workers would surely astonish him. But the greater fear might be having to confess that the labor theory of value—the notion that "all wealth originates from labor," which he proposed and countless economists embraced—"could be wrong."
Until now, technological advances and better machinery never completely negated the labor theory's basic premise. But when humanoid robots enter factories and production shifts from humans to machines, with human labor input converging to zero while product prices hold, we must reconsider what explains those prices.
The theory of marginal productivity may also be shaken. This theory assumes that labor and capital are each compensated according to the additional output they generate. But an AI system's performance in a factory cannot easily be divided into individual contributions. Data, algorithms, GPUs, cloud computing power, and on-site operations must combine as one unit. When efficiency stems not from "individual marginal contribution" but from "systemic integration," the traditional formula of "compensation matching contribution" becomes difficult to apply.
David Ricardo's comparative advantage theory explains that differences in opportunity costs between nations drive trade—hence labor-intensive industries in developing countries and service or knowledge industries in advanced economies. But in the age of humanoid robots and AI, competitiveness may depend more on possessing ecosystems around mega AI companies like Google and Nvidia than on natural resources or labor costs. If production concentrates in countries with such ecosystems, international polarization will only deepen.
Keynesian effective demand theory—which holds that demand, not supply, drives the economy—faces the challenge that while humanoid robots could rapidly expand production capacity, shrinking wage income could chronically suppress consumption. The Phillips curve, which describes how lower unemployment raises wages and prices while higher unemployment reduces them, may flatten as humanoid robots effectively increase labor supply, weakening upward wage pressure. Changes to the links between prices, wages, and employment would force central banks and governments to redesign policy tools.
Joseph Schumpeter's "creative destruction"—the idea that innovation topples old industries while creating new ones—and human capital theory, which links education to productivity gains and higher wages, also face revision.
"Traditional economics holds that as scale increases, marginal productivity declines, creating exchange value in markets," said Cho Joon-mo, a professor of economics at Sungkyunkwan University. "In the AI era, winners like Google and Nvidia control supply while achieving monopolistic dominance. This situation effectively destroys all traditional economic logic."
The push to build dark factories is not merely about how smart factories can become. It signals that new principles must be established as labor markets could be disrupted before any new economic order is even discussed. "For capitalism to remain healthy, social safety nets and market economies must be guaranteed together," Cho said. "We urgently need a blueprint for how this new AI capitalism will develop and how Homo sapiens should respond."