Machine Workforce
Description
Chor Pharn:
“You run a single job across multiple campuses — Wisconsin, Canada, Chile. Wherever the electrons are.”
Wherever the electrons are.
Not where the people are.
Not where the company is.
Not where the nation is.
That was the giveaway — that the largest, most capable “workforce” on the planet
no longer lives in any of the places we associate with work.
The interview gave us something far more profound than an update on AI strategy. It revealed the outline of a new labour class that is already larger, faster, and more consequential than any workforce before it.
A labour class that:
- has logins, entitlements, identity boundaries;
- performs cognitive and operational tasks;
- lives entirely inside global energy and compute estates;
- and follows electrons, not borders.
A labour class that is invisible, yet performs most of the civilisation’s work.
This is the Machine Workforce — not robots, not humanoid servants, but swarms of synthetic agents operating across continents and energy fields, unseen by the societies they serve.
And once you see this workforce, the world begins to reorganise itself:
America becomes the first truly post-societal civilisation, its machine workers living abroad while its society drifts at home.
China becomes the first energy-attached machine civilisation, rooting its machine workforce inside its own land, building coherence from electrons up.
The Gulf becomes the first petro-electro sovereign, turning energy abundance into machine labour at planetary scale.
Middle powers like Singapore face a new question:
- How does a small human society remain sovereign when sovereignty now scales with gigawatts, not populations?
None of this is speculative. None of it requires AGI, humanoids, or science fiction.
It is already here — the quiet sequel to the Industrial Revolution we did not recognise while it was happening."
(https://thecuttingfloor.substack.com/p/where-the-electrons-go)