[the__prestige]

Where do I even begin?

Speed is unrealistic. It compresses a decade of enterprise adoption into 18 months. Organizations don't restructure at the speed of a demo. And if it were true, companies would also stop buying AI once their customers are broke and revenue is falling. The "rational firm" logic cuts both ways.

"No new jobs" is asserted, not argued. It dismisses 200 years of counter-evidence in two sentences and treats intelligence as one thing when it's really a bundle of very different skills.

Ignores the deflationary benefit. If AI makes everything cheaper, the purchasing power of remaining income rises. The article only looks at the income side and never the cost side.

Consumption collapse is too fast. It ignores savings buffers, severance, spousal income, and automatic stabilizers. Even 2008 took years to fully hit spending.

"Ghost GDP" is wrong. Corporate profits don't vanish. They flow out as dividends, buybacks, investment, and taxes. The distribution changes, but money doesn't disappear from the economy.

Overstates the intermediation collapse. People don't optimize purchases like machines. Brand loyalty, identity, and experience aren't just "friction."

Stablecoin disruption is fantasy. It ignores KYC/AML rules, consumer protection laws, chargebacks, and the reality of merchant adoption.

Assumes zero regulatory response. Governments moved in weeks during COVID. White-collar professionals are politically powerful and vocal. Regulation would arrive fast.

[davedx]

Some slightly more structural-technical critique I thought of too--

Assumptions that I think warrant closer inspection:

- agents will always win vs antibot firewalls: highly doubtful given my experience with openclaw. Antibot measures are everywhere, they're advanced, and the more agents threaten legacy business models the harder they'll fight to protect them. Think e.g. Uber investing more in anti-bot tech to stop agents turning them into a whitelabel API. Think CloudFlare's recent moves in this area. Think Salesforce reducing access to Slack API. Data moats will be guarded more strongly.

- total cost of inference will be cheaper than the margin destruction caused by agents: inference is currently heavily subsidized. I have serious doubts "on device" inference will ever be reliable and competitive enough to be viable for running high capability agents (will they even be online enough?). What's the real cost of inference? Does Claude Code really cost $200/month at maximum utilization?

It indeed assumes steady state responses from all incumbents and governments while AI agents move at the speed of innovation. Not sure about that.

[munksbeer]

I don't pretend to know how all of this will unfold but at the very least your argument has more depth and nuance than the average response to all this which is - only a few people will control everything and the rest will scrape around in the dust, if we're allowed to live.

Just no depth of thought to those sort of replies at all, on a site where curiosity and deeper thinking is encouraged.

[GeoAtreides]

A site with vote ranking or indeed any ranking will never encourage curiosity and deep thinking, just group thinking

[adw]

> Organizations don't restructure at the speed of a demo.

I imagine I'm not alone in having seen a _big_ secular shift in colleague behavior since Opus 4.5 came out. The organization will lag the behavior, but weird things are happening.

(I'm not speaking to the rest of your points; the crypto-bro stable coin bit was jarring for me too. Europe will just go onto Faster Payments, the US will eventually catch up with FedNow, you don't need crypto).

[Rover222]

This was a nice, soothing response after having read the entire article.

[GeoAtreides]

>AI makes everything cheaper, the purchasing power of remaining income rises

hahaha, hilarious, imagine thinking prices will go down instead of companies just pocketing the difference

>People don't optimize purchases like machines

correct, machine optimize purchases like machines. that was the author point

>Regulation would arrive fast.

what regulation? "Stop using AI or you will get fined?" "Extra tax on AI companies"? good luck passing those in today America. also, the author touches on the exact point as well

[jonwinstanley]

Presumably price would reduce due to the ease of which people can spin up competitors?

[nozzlegear]

I stan the spirit of the free market as much as any red-blooded American patriot, but we've seen time and again throughout history that competitors just get bought up or regulated out of existence by the established players. They don't actually compete.

[GeoAtreides]

OP was talking about commodities, not SaaS

[nightski]

Commodities are more price sensitive than SaaS by definition.