Just as NAFTA brought cheap goods but eliminated manufacturing jobs, AI will create immense productivity via a new class of "digital immigrants" (AIs in data centers). This will generate abundance and cheap digital services but risks displacing vast swaths of cognitive labor and concentrating wealth.

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If AGI is concentrated in a few US companies, other nations could lose their economic sovereignty. When American AGI can produce goods far cheaper than local human labor, economies like the UK's could collapse. They would become economically dependent "client states," reliant on American technology for almost all production, with wealth accruing to Silicon Valley.

The primary economic incentive driving AI development is not replacing software, but automating the vastly larger human labor market. This includes high-skill jobs like accountants, lawyers, and auditors, representing a multi-trillion dollar opportunity that dwarfs the SaaS industry and dictates where investment will flow.

Unlike past technological shifts where humans could learn new trades, AI is a "tractor for everything." It will automate a task and then move to automate the next available task faster than a human can reskill, making long-term job security increasingly precarious for cognitive labor.

The enormous market caps of leading AI companies can only be justified by finding trillions of dollars in efficiencies. This translates directly into a required labor destruction of roughly 10 million jobs, or 12.5% of the vulnerable workforce, suggesting market turmoil or mass unemployment is inevitable.

Frame AI not as a tool, but as a wave of "digital immigrants" with superhuman cognitive abilities. Similar to how the NAFTA trade agreement outsourced manufacturing, AI will outsource knowledge work. This will create abundance for some but risks hollowing out the middle class and social fabric.