When economists think and write about the post-AGI world, they often rely on the implicit assumption that parameters may change, but fundamentally, structurally, not much happens. And if it does, it's maybe one or two empirical facts, but nothing too fundamental.

This mostly worked for all sorts of other technologies, where technologists would predict society to be radically transformed e.g. by everyone having most of humanity's knowledge available for free all the time, or everyone having an ability to instantly communicate with almost anyone else. [1]

But it will not work for AGI, and as a result, most of the econ modelling of the post-AGI world is irrelevant or actively misleading [2], making people who rely on it more confused than if they just thought “this is hard to think about so I don’t know”.

Econ reasoning from high level perspective

Econ reasoning is trying to do something like projecting the extremely high dimensional reality into something like 10 real numbers and a few differential equations. All the hard cognitive work is in the projection. Solving a bunch of differential equations impresses the general audience, and historically may have worked as some sort of proof of [...]



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Outline:

(00:57) Econ reasoning from high level perspective

(02:51) Econ reasoning applied to post-AGI situations

The original text contained 10 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
February 4th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fL7g3fuMQLssbHd6Y/post-agi-economics-as-if-nothing-ever-happens

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.