While We Were Sleeping

Artificial intelligence is usually discussed as a question of capability: what machines can do, how quickly they can do it, and which jobs they may perform next. While We Were Sleeping asks a harder question: what happens to a civilization built around human labor when productive intelligence can be owned and deployed without needing most people to work?
Niklas Selenius - Osterman follows that question through production, wages, consumption, ownership, purpose, political legitimacy, surveillance, and social stability. Drawing on economic history, public evidence, earlier essays, and the author's long-running inquiry into technology and power, the book examines how a narrowing payroll base could reach credit, pensions, municipal revenue, public benefits, and household life before it appears as a clean national employment statistic.
This is neither a promise of abundance nor a claim that collapse is inevitable. It is a warning about speed, concentration, and ownership—and an argument that the future of AI is still a political choice. If intelligence becomes infrastructure, who owns it? Who receives the gains? Who carries the risk? And what must remain human if civilization is to remain worth automating?