Post-AI economics (and the role of crypto in the post-AI future)

### TL;DR AI is advancing at breakneck speed, concentrating wealth and rendering labor less valuable—a problem traditional economics can't solve, but crypto networks built on community and redistribution might. ## The AI Landscape It’s been about 1000 days since ChatGPT launched. AI is the fastest-adopted technology in history: 1.3 billion people (16% of the global population) now use it, a feat accomplished in under four years. Capabilities expand every day—models improve on every cognitive benchmark, from curing dog cancer to building complex software. AI is also reshaping science: estimates suggest that this year, all scientific breakthroughs will involve AI assistance, and by next year most will be fully AI-driven. But human creativity still holds an edge. If you train AI only on music before 1900, it won’t invent jazz or hip-hop. That kind of raw originality remains uniquely human. Complexity (defined as the time a human would need to complete a task) doubles every seven months. For programming specifically, it doubles every 70 days. Why such heavy investment in AI coding? Because everyone is optimizing for “recursive self-improvement” (also called “hard takeoff” or “fast takeoff”). OpenAI, for instance, goes from 5000 human engineers to 5 million AI agents doing research. That’s the path to an intelligence explosion, AGI, and superintelligence. For years we talked about keeping humans in the loop. In the next 1000 days, the conversation will shift to removing humans from the loop—AI running on FPGAs at 15,000 tokens per second makes human involvement a bottleneck. ## Economic Implications of AI AI labs aren’t building better chatbots. Their mission is to absorb all economically valuable work—whether or not that destroys demand or millions of jobs. It’s the ultimate prisoner’s dilemma: if you don’t do it, a competitor or geopolitical rival will. Technology is inherently deflationary. From introduction to maturity, unit costs fall 90-95-99% (memory chips, solar, DNA sequencing). AI already shows this: the cost per unit of intelligence drops ~90% per year. So why has the cost of living skyrocketed over the past 20-30 years? Because we live in a fiat system. New money and credit creation drive inflation, especially in sectors that don’t scale well—food, housing, healthcare. Technology and inflation are both headwinds against labor. Technology makes labor less necessary; inflation erodes purchasing power and widens inequality. The gap between capital and labor has grown relentlessly for 50 years. Capital is becoming the only thing that truly matters. AI creates new wealth—that’s not the issue. The issue is distribution. AI concentrates capital in fewer hands, concentrates outcomes (successful companies do more with fewer people), and concentrates robotics (scale economies and vertical integration). White-collar cognitive jobs are being replaced. The U-shaped unemployment curve—splitting senior and junior workers—is a symptom. Geographically, think of India’s IT outsourcing or the Philippines’ customer service. Redistribution via taxing AI sounds nice, but will AI labs actually redistribute to save those sectors? Unlikely. Business models are approaching zero terminal value. CEOs now ask: will this business exist in two years? Not all moats are equal. Networks, communities, and liquidity are robust post-AI—AI can’t inflate, forge, or dilute them. Proprietary data is also a strong moat, but differently. The old formula was “capital plus labor produces more capital.” Now capital can buy more GPUs directly. Economics 101 is insufficient. Enter “post-labor economics.” ## The Problem of Distribution and Human Spirit Optimists talk about abundance and post-scarcity. I’m bullish on AI—it will unlock new discoveries. The challenge isn’t AI itself, but the transition to an economy where human labor may become worthless or infeasible. This isn’t new: labor value has been declining structurally for 50 years. AI accelerates that. Most post-AI wage scenarios point toward zero. The traditional channel—a paid job—breaks. That breaks household income, which breaks consumption, demand, and the tax base. Economists propose redistribution: UBI, universal basic equity, public funds that invest and distribute dividends. Financing options include printing money, taxing automation, or monetizing natural resources. Examples: Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, Alaska’s Permanent Fund ($1000-2000 per citizen per year). Historically, the U.S. government acted when unemployment hit 10%. We’re not there yet, but youth unemployment is already 8% in the U.S. and over 21% in China. But UBI alone would destroy the human spirit. It kills economic autonomy—the ability to influence one’s economic future through property rights, work, investment, participation. Without autonomy, there’s no meaning; without meaning, we cease to be. The elephant in the room: the end of social mobility. The doors are already narrow; post-AI might close them entirely. ## The Human Advantage: Empathy and Community Technology makes things faster, better, cheaper, safer. If it does all that, it’s irrational for humans to keep doing the task. So what can humans offer the market? All jobs combine four basic elements: physical strength, dexterity, cognitive ability, and empathy (including authenticity, intuition, trust). Machines already surpass us in strength, dexterity is close, and cognitive ability is being overtaken by AI. What remains is empathy, authenticity, meaning, trust—where humans can win for a very long time. Most AI experts agree. Yoshua Bengio (AI godfather, >1M Google Scholar citations) says humans in the post-AI era must refocus on connection, relationships, meaning, and community. ## Crypto: The Overlooked Solution So the key insights: - Networks are powerful moats post-AI. - Humans will re‑center on empathy and community. - Wealth redistribution is necessary. This means you should build and invest in things with strong network effects, that are community‑based, and inherently redistributive. Crypto fits exactly. Crypto is a network phenomenon. Look at Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, Dogecoin—even new tokenized communities like SPX—they are first and foremost networks. Their market caps map almost perfectly to network value. Crypto also enables redistribution directly to participants, without a central authority. It gives people economic autonomy through programmable property rights, permissionless participation, and community governance. In a post-AI world where labor becomes redundant, crypto networks can be the infrastructure for a new economy—one built on human connection, shared ownership, and distributed value. --- **Source:** [Post-AI economics (and the role of crypto in the post-AI future) - YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-c-TMzIIQzE)