Energym AI dystopia goes viral as crypto projects tout user-owned AI agents

A viral spoof “Energym” advertisement set in a 2030s world where 80% of people have lost their jobs to artificial intelligence has struck a nerve as companies accelerate automation, job openings slump and investors grapple with darker AI scenarios.

The video clip, created by Belgian studio AiCandy, uses AI-aged versions of Elon Musk, Sam Altman and Jeff Bezos to hawk a fictional gym where unemployed workers pedal bikes and row machines to power the very AI systems that replaced them, trading lost income for a new sense of “purpose.”

The Energym scenario. Source: Shubham Mishra

Energym’s dystopia meets real AI layoffs

The satire lands amid a real wave of tech restructuring built around AI tools rather than human staff.

On Friday, Jack Dorsey’s fintech firm Block announced that it was cutting more than 4,000 roles (close to 40% of its workforce), in a bid to go lean using intelligence tools, paired with “smaller and flatter teams.”

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Fresh labor market data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics show demand for some office jobs has cooled. Finance and insurance openings fell to 134 a month by December 2025, 50% lower than the year prior, marking a decade-long low.

Finance and insurance job openings. Source: FRED

Market jitters over where this trajectory leads intensified in February when a 7,000‑word scenario from Citrini Research, a US firm that provides insights on “transformative” trends, sketched out a future of AI agents, cascading layoffs, falling wages, and a deep market crash later this decade.

The report, framed as a scenario rather than a forecast, nevertheless helped drive a sell-off in software and payments stocks, with companies such as Uber, American Express, and Mastercard dropping between 4% and 6% in one session as investors reassessed how quickly AI could erode demand for human labor.

Crypto-native agents as an alternative to “Energym?”

For David Minarsch, CEO of Valory and founding member of Olas Network, a crypto protocol for co-owned AI agents, the Energym vision is one possible path if AI remains “built as black boxes” and owned by a handful of centralized platforms.

He told Cointelegraph that rapid AI deployment was already reshaping software engineering, with almost all his team’s code now generated by AI under human oversight compared to mostly human-written code just six months ago.

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“If this trend accelerates,” he said, we are on a path to a future that’s caricatured in the Energym ad,” arguing that society was at a “pivotal inflection point.”

Minarsch warned that a world where AI agents are granted something like personhood and legal protections could permanently “disenfranchise humans” by turning capital, rather than labor, into the dominant input for production.

He pointed to AI labs that describe models as being “retired” as an early step toward treating systems as stakeholders in their own right.

Minarsch said that projects like Olas were betting that giving people direct ownership and control over AI agents, rather than renting them from platforms, could be one way to stop the Energym scenario from becoming a reality.

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