Someday you’ll be out of a job. So will I, so will your neighbor, so will your best friend, and so will all of your family. All of our jobs will be automated, thanks to AI. This is the prediction of Shaw Walters (who in Web3 style typically just goes by “Shaw”), founder of Eliza Labs, and creator of ElizaOS.
“We’re going to automate all of the jobs. Like, all of the jobs are going to be automated,” says Shaw. “There aren’t going to be any jobs. And there shouldn’t be, because any work that I can get a robot to do is beneath me. And I think we will look back on this time like we look back on slavery. Like, ‘What the fuck were we doing?’”
Onstage at the AI Summit at Consensus 2025, Shaw will unpack this theory in a keynote titled, “How AI Agents and Humanoid Robots will Reshape Society…and Why Crypto is the Key.” Here he gives a quick sneak peek.
Interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
What excites you the most about AI Agents?
Personally, this is a sort of selfish quest. I don’t like sitting at my desk all day with my shoulders rounding, becoming this troll who’s coding all day.
What I want to do is to pace around and tell my agents to do things and code for me. Coding has gotten to the point where I have another window up, and I’m just coding with Gemini in Cursor. I just start speaking and saying, “Hey, this is what I want. I want you to change this, this, and this,” and it just starts going.
And why can’t that just be embodied? Why can’t I just be walking down the street talking to my agent and it’s writing my code for me? Why do I have to be sitting here glued to this desk? So I really want to unbox the user interface personally for myself, and have my agent with me everywhere I go. I can just call it if I have an idea. It answers my email.
What do you think will be the first killer use case of agents that really goes mainstream?
Well, definitely coding. It’s already the first case.
Fair. But what about for normies, for non-coders?
Well for us [at Eliza], it’s social agents. And then I run a remote team and DAO community, right? We have 20 people that come to work every day and develop code. I have a group chat right now of eight people. And we have 20 channels on Discord and we have a Telegram. So we have all this communication happening in all these places, and we have these very obvious problems everyone else has. I don’t know what’s going on in most of the chats. I don’t have time to read most of it.
I’d love if it was just summarized for me. They should be like, “Hey, what has this guy been working on right now?” And it’s like, “Oh, he worked on this. He answered this.” Great. So we have a bot that’s doing just that thing. It checks in with every single employee every day and gets a [status update] from them. And it’s tracking every single chat and all of our digital spaces and summarizes everything.
Why, in your mind, is crypto crucial to this larger vision of yours of AI Agents? Why is Web3 necessary?
I think it’s very obvious that it’s hard for me to give an agent a PayPal account. But I can just spin up a wallet for this agent and that agent. I could build a game where I’m like, “I need 10,000 wallets.” Because what I’m really doing is giving an agent the ability to prove that it is itself with a cryptographic signing tool, just like I’m giving any other user. So agents are just proxies for other users and they get the same benefits that any other user does.
But I think that there’s a bigger question here of like why crypto at all? And I think the reason is because I think that we should be able to create our own money. It’s not a power that we should necessarily give to states, although states have the ability to enforce it with force. So there’s a bigger question of, what’s the war we’re fighting here?
This is something that I’ll be sharing in my Consensus talk. We’re going to automate all of the jobs. Like, all of the jobs are going to be automated. There aren’t going to be any jobs. And there shouldn’t be, because any work that I can get a robot to do is beneath me. And I think we will look back on this time like we look back on slavery. Like, “What the fuck were we doing?”
We were making everybody work for dollars with all of their time. That’s crazy to me. They should have been pursuing their passions. They should have been asking, “Why are we here and what are we doing?” They should have been forming their own basis of spirituality instead of just going to work every day. And so, in that reality, well, there’s a big problem.
I can think of a few…
If there’s no jobs, then we have no money. But actually none of the rich people in our country have jobs. How do they make money? They’re investing. And I think this is the world we have to live in, where we’re all investors, and nobody’s a worker. It’s just insane to me that we live in a world where all the rich people don’t work, and yet we think that’s the way to getting rich.
I’m trying to visualize this. It’s wild to imagine a world where no one has jobs, and all the work is beneath us.
It’s inevitable.
Are we writing poetry all day? How are we filling our time? What does humanity look like?
Okay, so let’s say you somehow received an airdrop that you put into a project, and now you have something like $80 million worth of value. What would you do? What’s your next move?
I see where you’re going with this. So the idea is that you think about what your passions are, and how you’d spend your time if you had unlimited money? And then that’s what you’d be doing in this world where all the jobs are automated.
Yeah. I would be at my computer working on AGI. I would be working on that all day.
Let’s go there now. What’s your guess of when we get to AGI, or if we get to AGI?
What is AGI?
[Both laugh.]
So, does AGI to you imply sentience?
Well, my favorite coined term was that AGI is the thing that computers can’t do yet. How about that?
It’s a bit of Zeno’s Paradox, right? It will forever be outside of its grasp.
Yes, we have normalized the fact that, like, I can talk to ChatGPT on voice in my phone and get instant answers to almost anything. Like, we’re sitting here having ChatGPT do tarot readings, and give us answers to how “Magic: the Gathering” works.
Wild times! Thanks Shaw, this was fun. See you in Toronto. Can’t wait for your talk.
Jeff Wilser will host the AI Summit at Consensus 2025, and is host of The People’s AI: The Decentralized AI Podcast.