Turn one: a company licenses AI to replace a significant portion of its workforce. Costs drop. Margins expand. The stock price goes up. Everyone on the earnings call is happy. When Block’s Jack Dorsey laid off nearly half his workforce in March, citing AI coding agents, investors responded with a twenty-five percent stock price surge in after-hours trading. The market rewarded the elimination of human labor with an immediate, massive transfer of value to shareholders.
Turn two: the replaced workers stop earning income. They cut spending. The businesses they used to patronize see revenue decline. Some of those businesses also adopt AI to cut costs, compounding the displacement. Consumer demand contracts across the economy.
Turn three: the company that fired its workers to save money discovers that its customers were, in aggregate, other companies’ workers. Revenue growth stalls. The AI subscription that was supposed to be an investment in efficiency turns out to be a contribution to the destruction of its own market.
Replies (6)
This is like arguing you shouldn't use shovels to dig so that more people can have a job.
shovels 1. help you get more done, increasing wealth, and 2. don't concentrate wealth in the hands of the guy who made the shovel
Turn Four: AI economics were never sustainable. Centralized AI was an economically destructive anti-business model from inception, even before it ever become destructive by force of will narrative alone. Costs exposure for “AI service”buyers increase by 1-to-3 orders of magnitude as VC subsidies evaporate. Customers/Buyers flee, driving a disvirtuous cycle of spiraling cost increases. AI valuations collapse, and trigger a cascade of debt contagion, margin calls and liquidations that force EVERYTHING to sell off. Imploding stock prices, a tsunami of toxic depreciation, and economy spillover effects results in 10x the job loss as the AI narrative itself. You own nothing but your $1000/mo AI subscription always tells you that you’re happy.
Yup.
😂 that got dark fast
If ai isn't doing 1 then everything else is moot
2 ai might concentrate wealth but there's evidence to the contrary as well.
Chinese models are generally 6-9 months behind and are open
Capex is high and one of the major limiting factors is energy. Energy is pretty well distributed
Llm providers as they are have no moat. Anthropic is always trying to get regulatory capture to build one.
