The Economic Cliff: When AI Eats Work and COVID Ate Time

The System That Exports Its Best

Rabat, 2014. I'm staring at an AWS bill I cannot pay.

Not because the money isn't there. Not because the startup is failing. I'd built JobFinder—a job search engine growing in popularity across Morocco. But Morocco's financial system won't let me send money internationally to pay for cloud infrastructure.

ePay cards—capped at laughable limits. International credit cards—non-existent for most citizens. Wire transfers—requiring bureaucratic gymnastics that would make Kafka weep. I'd built something that could scale globally, but the payment rails that would let me actually build it... those didn't exist in the country where I was born.

So in 2015, I left.

Not because I wanted to. Because the system forced an exit. Brain drain isn't always pull—sometimes it's push. Sometimes it's a financial system that optimizes for control over growth, that treats every outbound payment like a threat to national stability rather than an investment in a future citizen's capacity to create value.

I think about that AWS bill often these days. Because what happened to me—an individual pushed out by systemic friction—is happening to an entire generation. Except this time, there's nowhere left to go.

The exits are closing. And the cliff is real.

When Trauma Compounds

COVID hit when Morocco's GenZ were 16 to 22 years old.

Those aren't random years. Those are the years you're supposed to be:

• Learning how professional environments work
• Building your first real relationships outside family
• Discovering who you are when nobody from home is watching
• Making mistakes small enough to recover from but big enough to teach you something

Instead: Lockdowns. Zoom university. Social isolation during the exact developmental window when humans are wired to individuate, to separate, to become.

Two years disappeared into digital void. Then they emerged, blinking, into 2022... just in time to watch artificial intelligence start eating the jobs they were trained to do.

Morocco's youth employment engine has been the same for two decades: call centers. Business process outsourcing. The digital assembly line of the 21st century. Between 90,000 and 110,000 workers. $1.4 billion in export revenue—roughly 11% of Morocco's service GDP.

The math worked. Learn French, English, maybe Spanish. Answer phones. Solve problems. Climb the ladder from agent to quality assurance to team lead to management.

A ladder. Not a glamorous one, but a real one.

Except in 2025, that ladder is dissolving in real-time.

Two forces converging like tectonic plates:

First, the AI automation wave. A 2025 generative AI impact report found 40% of BPO and IT-enabled services work is automatable right now. Not in five years. Not hypothetically. Today.

Speech analytics systems replacing quality managers. AI chatbots handling tier-one support. Processing times already down 14% and dropping.

Second, regulatory collapse of the export market. France—which receives 80% of Morocco's call center work—passed anti-telemarketing legislation in August 2026. That law threatens another 40% of jobs. Not because those jobs are automated. Because the work becomes illegal.

Do the math: 40% to automation + 40% to regulation = an industry in freefall.

And the timing... the cruel, cosmically unjust timing... Youth unemployment in Morocco averaged 22% in 2024. Concerning but stable. Then Q1 2025 hit: 37.7%.

That's not a trend. That's a spike. That's an alarm.

GenZ in Morocco lost their formative years to COVID just as they're entering a labor market that's closing its doors. The double trauma isn't sequential—it's simultaneous. The scars from lockdown are still fresh while the economic cliff opens beneath their feet.

I saw this coming when Meta—back then Facebook—started investing heavily in what we called "people-to-business" messaging. Everyone was looking for automation. I watched the GPT demos in 2022 and immediately thought about call centers across Morocco. About my friends working night shifts handling European customer support. About an entire generation being trained for jobs that would evaporate.

They didn't see it coming. How could they? They were doing everything right. Learning languages. Showing up. Working night shifts to sync with European time zones. Following the script society handed them.

The script is burning.

The Resource Cliff Nobody's Talking About

Tom Cunningham wrote something in his research that most people read and forget. They shouldn't.

"When AI can do all labor, wages fall to resource costs."

Read it again. Let it settle.

What Cunningham is saying: In a world where artificial intelligence can perform most cognitive and physical labor, human wages don't fall to zero—they fall to the cost of the resources humans require to survive. Land. Water. Food. Energy.

Humans need approximately 100 square feet of space and 2,000 calories per day. Robots need about 1 square foot and the electricity to power them.

When labor becomes superabundant—when AI can do almost everything—the scarce resource isn't work. It's space to exist. It's land ownership. It's access to the physical substrate of reality.

Resource scarcity becomes the only thing that matters.

Which means resource ownership becomes everything.

Look at what's happening in Morocco right now through this lens and the pattern snaps into focus with horrifying clarity:

Public hospitals across Morocco operate without basic equipment. CT scanners broken for months. Patients dying in hallways waiting for beds that don't exist. Meanwhile, the government is building six world-class stadiums for the 2030 World Cup—infrastructure that will host a few weeks of international soccer and then... sit there.

Stadiums while hospitals fail.

Prestige projects can be smart long-term investments—attracting tourism, funds, global attention. The systemic risk emerges when we overinvest in future symbols while neglecting present needs. When the stadium budget dwarfs hospital funding, when we build monuments while patients die in hallways, that's not strategic planning—that's elite resource capture happening in real-time.

The wealthy in Morocco aren't investing in hospitals because they don't use public hospitals. They fly to Paris or Dubai for medical care. They're not worried about public education because their children attend international schools. They're not concerned about youth unemployment because their kids have trust funds and family businesses.

When Cunningham talks about resource ownership becoming everything, this is what he means. The elite don't need to care about job creation or public infrastructure because they've already captured the resources that matter: Land. Healthcare access. Educational pathways. Capital.

GenZ in Morocco—like GenZ everywhere—is staring at a future where:

• The jobs they were trained for are being automated
• The resources they need to survive are being captured by previous generations
• The ladders that might have existed are being pulled up behind the last cohort that climbed them

The economic cliff isn't just unemployment. It's the systematic elimination of pathways from "I have nothing" to "I have enough to build a life."

And when those pathways close? When an entire generation looks at the math and realizes the game is rigged against them before they even start playing?

That's when protests stop being about specific policies and start being about legitimacy itself.

The Canary Stopped Singing

Morocco's BPO sector was supposed to be the success story.

Multilingual workforce—Arabic, French, English, Spanish—check. Strategic proximity to Europe—one-hour time difference, 3-hour flight—check. Cost competitive—50% savings compared to Western European labor costs—check. Growing sector—10,000 new jobs created annually for a decade—check.

The kind of story World Bank consultants put in slide decks. "Economic diversification." "Youth employment pipeline." "Service export competitiveness."

Except the canary in the coal mine just stopped singing.

The dual threat isn't theoretical anymore:

AI automation is already inside the building. Speech analytics platforms monitor every call, flagging quality issues that used to require human supervisors. GenAI chatbots handle tier-one support with 95%+ accuracy. Processing times down 14% and accelerating. The 2025 report estimates 40% of current BPO work is automatable with existing technology—not future tech, not vaporware. Models I run and finetune on local machines.

Regulatory extinction is scheduled. France's anti-telemarketing law, passed August 2026, takes direct aim at the cold-call campaigns that make up huge portions of Morocco's BPO revenue. Eighty percent of Morocco's call centers target French markets. Forty percent of the remaining work disappears overnight when that law takes full effect.

40% + 40% = an industry in terminal decline.

The Philippines sees the same pattern. India sees it. Every country that built an economy on "we'll answer phones for rich countries" is watching the ladder dissolve.

But Morocco feels it first and hardest because the sector is concentrated and the alternatives are thin. There is no replacement economic engine visible on the horizon. No "here's the new growth sector for displaced call center workers."

Manufacturing? Demand exceeds infrastructure—including education systems that teach rather than merely credential. Tech startups? Requires venture capital ecosystem and payment infrastructure that forced me to leave the country just to pay AWS bills. Agriculture? Already employs 30% of the workforce at poverty wages.

The cruelty is in the timing. GenZ in Morocco did everything they were told. They learned French. They learned English. They got certifications. They showed up for night shifts. They optimized for exactly the skills the economy said it needed.

And the economy pulled the rug.

Not because they failed. Because the global economic substrate shifted beneath them while they were locked down for COVID, and when they emerged, the world had moved on.

The canary didn't just stop singing. The canary is lying at the bottom of the mine while economists publish papers about "labor market transitions" and "skills retraining programs" that don't exist.

Three Warnings, One Pattern

September 2025. Morocco's streets fill with protesters. GenZ 212—a decentralized collective operating on Discord, TikTok, Instagram, X—calls for demonstrations. The spark: healthcare system collapse. The deeper fuel: everything I've just described.

Police respond with arrests and violence. Security forces arrest protesters en masse, confiscate phones, disrupt coordination. Protesters regroup.

The trajectory is unclear. But the pattern isn't.

Because we've seen this three times already in 18 months. Same economic substrate. Same generation. Different countries. Different governmental responses. Wildly different outcomes.

Kenya: The Stalemate (#RejectFinanceBill2024)

June 2024. Finance bill proposes new taxes on already-struggling population. GenZ-led protests erupt. Government responds with force. Over 100 deaths across multiple phases of demonstrations.

The bill gets withdrawn. Protests continue. Because withdrawing the bill doesn't solve youth unemployment. Doesn't create jobs. Doesn't address the underlying crisis of a generation locked out of economic participation.

Twelve months later, the standoff continues. Violence → more protests → violence → more protests. A stable equilibrium of mutual exhaustion. Government maintains control. Youth maintain pressure. Nobody wins. Nothing fundamentally changes.

Bangladesh: The Collapse (Quota Reform → July Revolution)

June 2024. Students protest job quota system reserving 30% of government positions for descendants of independence war veterans. Reasonable grievance. Specific policy target.

Government response: Lethal force authorized. Complete internet blackout for five days. Shoot-to-kill orders.

Result: 1,400+ deaths (UN estimates). Protests metastasize from quota reform into comprehensive uprising against the regime itself. August 5, 2024: Prime Minister flees to India. Government collapses. Revolution succeeds through sheer cost imposed on the system.

Nepal: The Concession (Discord Revolution)

September 4-13, 2025. Nine days total. Government bans 26 social media platforms. Protests erupt immediately—faster and more organized than the government expected. Five days later, the government resigns and meets protester demands.

Rapid concession. Minimal violence. Crisis resolved before it metastasizes.

Morocco: The Crossroads (GenZ 212)

September 27-ongoing. Healthcare crisis as catalyst. GenZ 212 organizing online. Police violence captured on video (the Oujda van incident went viral). Preemptive arrests. Protesters called for pause until Thursday October 9th. I'm publishing this Tuesday October 7th.

Which path does Morocco follow?

Nepal's rapid concession—recognizing the legitimacy of grievances and adapting before the crisis spirals?

Kenya's indefinite stalemate—violence containing protests without solving underlying economic exclusion?

Bangladesh's complete collapse—escalation and counterescalation until the system breaks?

The outcomes are radically different. But the cause is identical.

Youth unemployment. COVID's stolen years. AI job displacement. Elite resource capture. Economic ladders dissolving in real-time. A generation looking at the math and seeing no viable path from "here" to "a life worth living."

The governmental response determines the trajectory. The economic crisis is the same.

And that crisis—Cunningham's resource cliff, the BPO sector collapse, the double trauma of COVID + AI displacement—that crisis is global. It's hitting Morocco, Kenya, Bangladesh, Nepal, the Philippines, India, Indonesia... every country where GenZ is numerous, educated, digitally connected, and economically excluded.

The protests aren't isolated incidents. They're the same tectonic pressure finding different fault lines.

Morocco stands at the crossroads. The clock is running. The choices narrow with each passing day.

Bridges or Freefall

The economic cliff is real.

Cunningham wasn't theorizing about some distant future. He was predicting 2025. Wages falling toward resource costs. Elite capture accelerating. Labor abundance destroying the power of labor itself.

GenZ globally faces a triple bind that would break any generation:

• COVID stole their formative years—the exact window for becoming independent adults
• AI is eliminating the jobs they were trained for—the ladder they were promised
• Resource capture by elites is closing the pathways to ownership—the long-term game is rigged

Morocco is the microcosm. Call centers collapsing to automation and regulation. Youth unemployment spiking to 37.7%. Elite building stadiums while hospitals operate without equipment. A financial system that forced me to leave just to pay for cloud infrastructure—and that same system is still pushing the best and brightest into permanent emigration.

The pattern from Kenya to Bangladesh to Nepal is clear. The crisis is the same. The governmental response determines whether you get stalemate, collapse, or concession.

But there's a fourth option nobody's seriously discussing: adaptation.

Not concession that kicks the can down the road. Not stalemate that exhausts both sides. Not collapse that burns everything down.

Adaptation. Structural change that acknowledges the cliff is real and builds bridges.

What would that look like? That's what the next four posts in this series explore:

Post 2 examines how private equity extraction in healthcare accelerates this crisis—using Morocco's crumbling hospitals as the case study for a global pattern of wealth extraction disguised as efficiency.

Post 3 maps the emergence of GenZ 212 and decentralized protest infrastructure—Discord, TikTok, and the new coordination mechanisms that make 20th-century state control obsolete.

Post 4 analyzes the three paths (Nepal, Kenya, Bangladesh) in depth—what made each outcome possible and what Morocco can learn.

Post 5 proposes the bridges—concrete policy interventions and systemic adaptations that could transform crisis into evolution.

This isn't academic. This is strategic advisory work I'd normally charge consulting rates for. I'm delivering it free because Morocco—the country where I was born, where my family still lives—is at an inflection point that determines the next fifty years. The stakes are civilizational.

The question isn't whether the cliff exists. The cliff is real. The question is whether we build bridges or watch an entire generation fall.

The choice is being made right now. In the streets of Casablanca and Rabat. In Discord servers and group chats. In government offices deciding between concession, stalemate, and collapse.

The clock is running.

This is Post 1 of 5 in "Serving the Future: A Field Manual for the Lost Generation"—strategic advisory for governments, VCs, universities, and GenZ navigating the economic cliff of AI displacement and generational resource capture.