I'm telling you guys if you think the powerful are gonna let us all continuing living after our value becomes obsolete you have a big surprise coming.

You can have all the GPUs in the world, and all the AI datacenters in the world, but when we are barreling towards a global energy crisis (first Russia/Ukraine, then the Strait of Hormuz shutdown, and in a few decades we will run out of fossil fuels altogether), what are all of those GPUs and AI datacenters going to do without energy? Nothing. I say this because I think this will have a far larger effect on the economy than anything else this article is talking about (AI replacing labor, a possible AI bubble crash, etc.)

The former head of sales at Google once told me “we only focus on growth because you can only cut down 100% but you can grow 10,000%.”

This always stuck with me and baffles me why we aren’t listening to that now.

There is this bizarre math now where it’s for every person we cut the remaining with 5-10x with AI but I’m not seeing anything like that yet at all.

The first bit is just a restatement of the "paradox of thrift":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_thrift

If every business cuts headcount and costs, then you overall get a contraction in the economy and high unemployment and a recession. Everyone's spending is someone else's salary and revenues.

Couldn't get through the rest of it because it was a bunch of overly verbose human-slop writing.

I think the bigger issue right now is also just straightforward economic pressure caused by tariffs and high energy costs and inflation. If the affluent consumer starts to buckle, businesses may get caught in a downsizing spiral where they start posting lower profits, firing actual management, stock prices decline, and the affluent consumer retracts. No AI required to fuel that.

Right now with stocks hitting record highs, the affluent consumer is not changing their behavior at all and just spending even harder, which is keeping profits pumped up, and keeping stocks at record highs. At the margins, though, fewer and fewer people are participating in the economy, which is a trend that is going to be unsustainable.

I think AI is going to be most relevant in the debt collapse that it leaves behind, and in the excuses it gives to shed employees. This economy is going to hit a wall at some point, AI or not.

> Every investor presentation of an AI agent “doing the work of ten analysts” is telling you the same thing: the product is labor replacement.

I have a solution for that. Let's use AI to replace all these corporations who just lost their big moats. Conveniently, they just laid off a bunch of people with all the critical know-how and I bet they are very willing to just give it up out of spite.

Can someone point me to credible evidence/examples of productivity increases from AI spending, among non-ai providers? And if you'd bear with me, I'm asking for productivity in the sense of "accelerating the businesses pursuit of its existing goals" rather than quantity. I think that in most sane business's, output quantity bereft of output quality is utterly useless in said pursuit.

One of the authors of the linked article (https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.20617) is a computer scientist not an economist. Just bc something is published in arxiv economics does not make it written by an economist.

>article complaining about AI destroying the economy >includes 2 dozen AI generated images in the article

I think this essay is very solid in a lot of ways but long section at the end talking about how billionaires didn't read enough philosophy just strikes me as -- for lack of more diplomatic phrasing -- useless nerd rage.

Yeah, tech billionaires sometimes show large gaps in their education. But it doesn't matter. Reading the right books doesn't prevent people from chasing wealth and power, it just makes them more articulate while they do it.

This is a great article, but it under-emphasises the fact that it’s middle-class jobs under threat. The studies that are summarised show what happens when working-class people are kicked out of the economy, but the historical record shows that when middle-class people are kicked out of the economy, they use their education to form and lead revolutions.

Unless the bubble pops and destroys all these companies, I don’t think the leaders of AI companies will die natural deaths.