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by hodder 63 days ago
This is a "wishful thinking" take that ignores a brutal reality: AI isn’t just a tool; it’s raising the cognitive floor for employment. We are rapidly approaching a point where the baseline IQ required to contribute at all will surpass the capabilities of a huge segment of the population. And that floor is rising.

You can already see the decoupling: Mag7 hiring has flatlined while their AI capex hits the moon. Even the "brightest minds" are being replaced by the hardware they built. No amount of policy or interest rate maneuvering can stop this shift because you can't legislate away the fact that human labor is becoming an inferior good.

The assumption that this shift can be evenly distributed and broadly wiped away via policy tools is asinine.

This time IS different.

Sidenote: This is exactly why I’m so bullish on risk assets—we are transitioning into an economy where capital no longer needs to drag the weight of a massive, increasingly "useless" workforce, and the policy responses will actually exacerbate the shift (ie. rates down on unemployment = assets up)

2 comments

I think you're right. I think that a majority of people, including myself, will be generally unemployable soon.

I'm early career and have a few hundred thousand dollars I can deploy. What's the best way to invest?

I'd invest in whatever is profitable when the unemployed masses burn these data centers to the ground, like fire trucks.

I'd also invest in companies that make rope.

Sort of agree with this but I do find it amusing that this sort of take on it implicitly discounts that the capital still has to live with all these “useless” people on the same rock, whose numbers will grow to an unignorable amount...The idea that anything will be insulated is for the fairies and seems just as asinine to me