“We can only eat so much food. There may be a lump of labor fallacy, but I'm pretty sure the lump of food principle is roughly right. I'm only going to eat so many calories. You're describing a classic 'we lose money on everyone and make it up on volume,' brought to employment: all the restaurants cut their staff and replace their kitchen workers with robots, but we'll have a lot more restaurants. I just don't see the math working out.”

Prakash's counter was restaurants. Family restaurants died on thin margins. Robot kitchens would make them profitable. And so you would get more of them.

But

But you are right. You know, I don't think the human consumption is really where the growth is. The growth is always going to be in the AI consumption going forward, as you can see. So you have these concentric circles of the economy, and the AI economy is always the one going to be expanding…

It sounds more dystopian than utopian to think that the bulk of human activity will go into status games, I have to say. I'm like a bear on employment, bullish on people's ability to find meaning in absence of employment, I think, certainly relative to most. I really think way too many people in…

Part five, five to ten cents. Michael Freeman is Senior Director of Threat Research at ServiceNow. His team watches AI agents attack companies, and he has spent his career finding and exploiting vulnerabilities. I asked what he makes of the current moment.