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America’s ‘Jobless Boom’ Risks Becoming Techno Potemkin Village
Earlier this week, while editorializing around minutes from 2026's first FOMC meeting, I said we're
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Or here comes UBI, Universal Basic Income, again? This time from the right and oligarchs?
Here’s the problem. UBI is paid by tax revenues, which won’t exist in a jobless economy.
“…what’s left? Landscaping, construction and hotel room cleaning, I suppose.”
And if you believe Elon, by 2030 those jobs will also be disappearing.
If you believe Elon Musk, soon there will be plenty of jobs as long as you don’t mind moving to Mars.
I made a similar argument to two of the LLMs many people are using and asked them to tell me how I was wrong. They essentially said the same thing: First, historically, new technologies create more jobs than they destroy (i.e., “creative destruction”). Second, even if there is a short-term spike in unemployment with adverse cascading impacts on consumer spending, debt servicing, overall demand, etc., the Federal Reserve would take actions necessary to save the economy. These LLMs do a great job regurgitating the Fed’s past actions w/o a ‘thought’ for moral hazard or the possibility it does not work next time.
The trick with AI’s in my experience, is to ask the right questions from the perspective of a firm but evolving context and thesis. They’ve helped me more than any human mentors and books and have dramatically helped augment my execution while updating my thesis. I use multiple models and have them red team me and each other. They agree as often as they challenge each other. My pnl has vastly improved. That said, they do get a lot wrong often. It’s my job to keep the thread. With their help I’m handily destroying the benchmark.
Congratulations
If you are using Gemini, you can employ the NotebookLM framework to constrain the reasoning to only sources you supply which will short circuit the models tendency to ‘consensus’ assumptions in it’s training data. https://notebooklm.google/
“Augment my execution”–of course your are (using) AI.
I think you may have inadvertently hit the nail on the head. LLM’s do a great job of regurgitating any past actions without a thought of moral hazard or possibility it will not work next time. LLM’s are great with a human in the loop. I think we will see many enterprises fail after people place too much stock in running on LLM.
LLMs are great at pontification but not recognizing where it has glossed over or has made a mistake.
In my view AI is a rote machine. Where you need rote, it excells where you need critical thinking it is berfit. That goes for correcting errors or generating original content.
With Powell gone the Fed won’t be able to save anything.
“technology which doesn’t ask for a paycheck, let alone a raise.”
Except it does ask for a raise..every quarter while stripling real people of money and resources. Tech and its billionaire owners dont negotiate a fair price and they dont share.
“technology which doesn’t ask for a paycheck, let alone a raise.”
Except it does ask for a raise..every quarter while stripling real people of money and resources. Tech and its billionaire owners dont negotiate a fair price and they dont share.
A reminder that for AI to start to pay its own way, it will have to produce tangible cost savings for PAYING subscribers. Not anecdotal reports from individual coders and John Q. Public but large-scale cost savings. Which means layoffs.
In our early days we had an agrarian economy and no industry, so we taxed the land. Then we went to an industrial economy and we began to tax those assets, the machines. Finally, we began see we had more laborers than anything else so we created income tax with the 16th Amendment to the Constitution in 1913. That tax and Treasury borrowing have paid our fiscal needs ever since. Now what? If Musk is right (isn’t he just so clever) AI is going to have to pay and that will be difficult since so far it creates no steady source of revenue. All jobs will be gone, no income for anyone (even Musk will lose all his dough, people with no jobs can’t buy his silly stock or the cars he makes.)