The viral “Energym” ad, set in a 2030s world where 80% of people have lost their jobs to artificial intelligence, as companies accelerate automation, job cuts and investors grapple with AI’s darker scenarios.
The video clip, created by Belgian studio AiCandy, uses AI-age versions of Elon Musk, Sam Altman and Jeff Bezos to create a fictional gym where unemployed workers use bicycles and train cars to power the AI systems that have taken their place.
Energym’s dystopia fits the real AI acronym
The comic is in the midst of a real wave of technological innovation built around AI tools rather than human employees.
On Friday, Jack Dorsey’s fintech firm Block announced that it is cutting more than 4,000 roles (roughly 40% of its workforce) to focus on using intelligence tools combined with “smaller, more agile teams.”
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The latest labor market data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that demand for some jobs has cooled. Finance and insurance openings fell to 134 by December 2025, down 50% from the previous year, the lowest in a decade.
In February, when a 7,000-word scenario from Citrini Research, an American company that provides information on “changing” trends, the future of AI agents, successive layoffs, wage cuts and a deep market crash at the end of this decade in February increased the market impression.
The report, framed as a scenario rather than a prediction, nevertheless boosted a sell-off in software and payments stocks, with companies such as Uber, American Express and Mastercard falling 4% to 6% in the session as investors reassessed how quickly AI could reduce demand for human labor.
Cryptographic agents as an alternative to “Energym?”
For David Minarsh, CEO of Valory and founding member of the Olas Network, a crypto protocol for collaborative AI agents, Energym’s vision is a possible solution if AI remains “built as black boxes” and belongs to a number of centralized platforms.
He told Cointelegraph that the rapid deployment of AI is already changing software engineering, and almost all of his team’s code is now generated by human-supervised AI, compared to code written mostly by humans just six months ago.
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“If this trend accelerates,” he said, “we are on the path to the future caricatured in the Energym ads,” arguing that society is at a “major turning point.”
Minarsh warned that a world in which AI agents are given something like identity and legal protection could permanently transform humans by making capital, not labor, the dominant input for production.
He pointed to AI labs describing models as “retired” as an early step toward treating systems as stakeholders.
Minarsh said projects like Olas believe that giving people direct ownership and control of AI agents, rather than renting them from platforms, could be a way to stop the Energym scenario from becoming a reality.
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