"Plenty happens and none of it requires you" This essay by Owen McGrann about his “dead economy theory” is the best doomer take on the AI debate I’ve read yet. What Owen does, which I’m not seeing elsewhere, is remove AGI / ASI as a prerequisite for doom. Owen thinks we’re headed there regardless, because the tech industry depends on it:
As we’re getting excited about discovering how to use claude.md files in Cowork, the industry is pitching a different reality. Every investor presentation of an AI agent “doing the work of ten analysts” is telling you the same thing: the product is labor replacement.
Owen goes on to describe a repeating three turn loop of doom:
- layoffs (because AI)
- spending cuts (because layoffs)
- revenue decline (because spending cuts)
Seems plausible, and apparently it has its own name: [The AI Layoff Trap](https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.20617)
The essay only gets better from here. Not only does it make a compelling case, Owen takes the opportunity to eviscerate some tech CEOs, deploy large / obscure words I had to look up, and sprinkle in a few interesting concepts I hadn’t previously considered. Here’s a few choice quotes:
On blue / white collar co-misery: The twenty-something software engineer in San Francisco and the displaced factory worker in Ohio are staring at the same question: what happens when the market decides my skills are worthless?
On the “exceptional founder”:
Start with Nietzsche, because the Valley loves Nietzsche… The Übermensch gets trotted out as justification for the exceptional founder, the visionary who transcends conventional morality because he’s operating on a higher plane. Nietzsche was diagnosing the crisis of meaning after the collapse of metaphysical certainty, not writing a management philosophy for people who got rich selling advertising technology.
On AGI / ASI not even being the worst case scenario:
The worst outcome may not be superintelligent AI. It may be adequate AI, deployed aggressively by companies chasing stock prices, eliminating jobs it can’t actually do well because the quarterly incentives demand it.
On what exactly he means by “dead economy”:
The dead economy is one where plenty happens and none of it requires you. Where the productive capacity of civilization has been captured by a system you have no stake in, no input into, and no vote on.
Highly recommended reading. Good comments section, too.