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I read an article last month by a blogger who tried to predict what the world will look like in 2028.

Most of these prediction pieces are forgettable. This one wasn't. The argument was specific enough to stick with me, and the more I've thought about it since, the more I think it deserves a serious conversation that most people in the online business world are completely avoiding.

The prediction was this: AI will trigger a mortgage crisis that sends the global economy into a collapse worse than 2008.

Here is the logic. White-collar workers — lawyers, accountants, analysts, middle managers, software developers, marketers — have historically been the safest borrowers on the planet. Banks built their entire mortgage lending model around these people. Stable income, reliable employment, low default risk. The housing market, the banking system, and the entire financial infrastructure of most developed economies is underwritten by the assumption that white-collar workers keep their jobs.

AI is in the process of eliminating those jobs at a scale and speed that no previous technological shift has matched. The companies doing it are not hiding it. They are announcing it. Laying off thousands, reinvesting the savings into AI infrastructure, and calling it progress. And they are right that it is progress, for their profit margins. What it is for the people losing those jobs, and for the banks holding their mortgages, is a different question entirely.

When a large enough percentage of white-collar workers lose their income simultaneously, they stop paying their mortgages. When enough mortgages default simultaneously, the banks that hold them get into trouble. When enough banks get into trouble simultaneously, the economy that depends on them stops functioning. That is the sequence. It has happened before with a different trigger. The blogger's argument is that AI is the next one.

I think he is probably right about the direction, even if the timing is impossible to know precisely.

What I find more interesting than the prediction itself is what happens next — specifically, how governments respond. Because governments will respond. They always do when the stability of the system they depend on for tax revenue and political survival is threatened.

My best guess is a tax. Some version of a levy on companies that replace human workers with AI systems. The logic would be simple: if you fire a human being and replace them with software, you pay a fee large enough to make that substitution economically painful. The goal would be to slow the rate of displacement, to give the economy time to absorb the shock rather than taking it all at once.

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Now, as I was saying…

I have no idea how they would implement it practically. The accounting alone would be a nightmare. How do you measure what a piece of software replaced? How do you value the human labor it substituted for? How do you prevent companies from restructuring to avoid the classification? These are hard problems, and governments are not historically good at solving hard problems quickly.

The alternative — doing nothing and watching the mortgage market collapse — is worse. So some version of an AI tax is coming. It may be clumsy. It may be poorly designed. It will almost certainly be fought aggressively by the companies with the most to lose. And it will come anyway, because the political pressure to do something will eventually outweigh the lobbying pressure to do nothing.

Here is the mindset shift I want to leave you with, because this is not just an economic observation. It is a business one.

The people who will be hurt most by what is coming are the ones whose income depends entirely on a single employer deciding to keep them. The white-collar worker with the safe job and the mortgage and the retirement plan built on the assumption that the arrangement continues — that person is carrying far more risk than they realize. The safety they feel is borrowed. It belongs to the conditions that currently exist, not to the conditions that are forming.

The people who will be hurt least are the ones who built something of their own. An audience they own. A list they control. Income streams that do not require a single employer's continued goodwill to function. People whose livelihood is distributed across hundreds or thousands of customers rather than concentrated in one paycheck from one company.

I have been saying for years that building your own list is the most reliable thing you can do for your financial future. I believed it when the argument was about algorithm changes and platform shutdowns. Today, the argument is considerably bigger.

The economy is restructuring around a technology that eliminates the kind of employment most people were told was the safe option. The safe option is getting less safe every quarter. The thing that looked like a side hustle or an alternative path is starting to look like the only path that does not depend on decisions being made in boardrooms you have no access to.

Build the list. Own the audience. Control the income.

That was good advice three years ago. Now, it becomes an urgent one.

P.S. If you enjoy these ideas, you’ll love the deeper conversations we have on the List Building Lifestyle podcast.