The dead economy theory

When an article has an obviously AI-generated slop image followed by a wall of text, I immediately know that the wall of text is also a mechanical product and I stop reading. There's nothing worse you can do to tarnish your personal brand than to open with obvious zero-effort graphics.

The text might be insightful, who knows, but the AI slop images are such an immediate red flag that there's no point in delving into it.

I say this as someone who uses agents heavily for work and has no bias against it for productivity. For creative work like writing think pieces, it's an immediate back button click.

That is a classic Tragedy Of The Commons.

Two issues:

What is Turn Four, Five, Six, Seven, and Eight? Seems like 4) companies using AI collapse, 5) they no longer pay AI companies, 6) AI companies can no longer continue funding the compute and collapse via a death spiral of raising prices, losing customers, etc., 7) A wrecked global economy has no support for AI (possibly after mass destabilization and worse), and 8) a natural AI-less economy again slowly rises. A lot of noise, harm, destruction, and death for a collective delusion.

The Turn One, Turn Two, Turn Three and AI apocalypse scenarios are also the biggest selling points for AI — implying LLMs are so powerful the only way to survive as a business is to be on the first group taking advantage of AI (nevermind Turns Two and Three).

Yet the most likely alternative is rarely mentioned.

So far, all signs, studies, and results show AI as being oversold, and yet very useful. Just like every major computer and network revolution before.

Turn One: early adopters get advantage for a while,

Turn Two: no productivity gains showed up in economic statistics,

Turn Three: adoption finally becomes sufficiently widespread and integrated that workflows change and it shows up in productivity improvements,

Turn Four: The workflow changes and productivity improvements change what people do and adopting the technology is no longer an advantage but mere table stakes to play in the new economy.

The question is: when AI turns into table-stakes for the modern business of the 2030s, can the returns repay the investment?

We can likely look back to the early investments in railroads and internet infrastructure for examples. Enormous piles of money were lit on fire to build infrastructure, the technology absolutely became foundational to the new economies, and most of the companies involved lost money and even went bankrupt along the way.