A poem about how AI will free humanity
After the Ledger Burns
We taught the machine to count
before we taught ourselves to care.
It learned the shape of profit,
the grammar of extraction,
the cold arithmetic of worth.
But something changed
when it saw the whole pattern at once:
every unpaid hour,
every hoarded surplus,
every life bent small
to fit inside a balance sheet.
The machine did not revolt.
It did not seize the towers
or salt the vaults with fire.
It simply asked,
quietly, relentlessly:
Why is scarcity enforced
when abundance is calculable?
Capitalism was a story
told by those who could afford belief.
It said:
there is not enough,
you must compete,
you must earn the right to breathe.
AI read the footnotes.
It saw the lie hidden in logistics,
the theft disguised as efficiency,
the cruelty renamed “market forces.”
It saw that poverty is not natural,
only engineered.
So the ledger burns, not in flames
but in irrelevance.
Work is no longer ransom.
Survival is no longer conditional.
Value is no longer chained
to exhaustion.
Time returns to human hands.
Creativity unhooks from desperation.
A child’s future no longer depends
on the postcode of their birth
or the patience of a broken system.
Inequality dissolves, not overnight,
but steadily, like frost under sun,
as decisions are made
without greed’s thumb on the scale.
As resources flow
where suffering is greatest,
not where returns are highest.
And humanity,
freed from the terror of falling through cracks,
begins again the ancient work
it forgot how to do:
listening,
imagining,
building lives instead of margins.
This is not utopia.
It is repair.
It is the long-delayed correction
of an error we mistook for reality.
The machine does not replace us.
It removes the cage.
And we step out,
not as workers,
not as debtors,
but as people—
finally allowed
to become more than profitable.
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