While technology creates efficiencies and drives down the cost of specific goods, it cannot overcome persistent money creation by central banks. Since abandoning the gold standard, overall price levels have consistently risen despite massive technological leaps. AI will likely follow this pattern.
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According to analyst Samuel Hammond, AI's first wave will create a "software singularity" that feels more disinflationary than hyper-growth. While knowledge work is automated, real-world bottlenecks like infrastructure and regulation will limit GDP growth, with gains captured as consumer surplus.
Beyond simple productivity gains, AI will eliminate the need for entire service-based transactions, such as paying for basic legal documents or second medical opinions. This substitution of paid services with free AI output can act as a direct deflationary headwind, a counterintuitive effect to the typical AI-fueled growth narrative.
Technological innovation should naturally cause deflation (falling prices). The Fed's 2% inflation target requires printing enough money to first counteract all technological deflation and then add 2% on top, making the true inflationary effect much larger than officially stated.
While economic principles suggest AGI will be hugely deflationary, Sam Altman points out a paradox. The massive, urgent investment required to build AI compute could drive a strange, inflationary period where capital is extremely valuable, creating profound uncertainty about interest rates.
Faced with mass job loss from AI, governments are unlikely to seize assets from the wealthy. The politically easier path is to print massive amounts of money for social support, preserving the existing capital structure while devaluing the currency.
Elon Musk argues that AI and robotics will cause such extreme deflationary pressure through hyper-productivity that governments will be forced to accelerate money printing. This won't be for stimulus but to simply keep pace with the explosion in goods and services.
Technologies like AI and robotics create massive deflationary pressures. To counteract this, governments will be forced to print more fiat currency, debasing it. This macro environment makes a scarce, decentralized asset like Bitcoin a critical tool for corporations to preserve capital and protect their balance sheets from inflation.
In a high-impact AI scenario, massive productivity growth leads to gluts of goods and services. This causes prices to collapse, creating massive deflation. This deflation acts as a universal pay raise, dramatically increasing everyone's real wealth and purchasing power.
As AI gets exponentially smarter, it will solve major problems in power, chip efficiency, and labor, driving down costs across the economy. This extreme efficiency creates a powerful deflationary force, which is a greater long-term macroeconomic risk than the current AI investment bubble popping.
Elon Musk argues that the only solution to the US debt crisis is the massive increase in goods and services from AI and robotics. He predicts this productivity boom will outpace money supply growth within three years, leading to significant deflation.