A number of doomer-style articles about AI, and its economic effects, have gone viral and everyone is asking about the fate of the economy. There are three ongoing trends that provide a constructive, not-so-doomy guess at how to answer these questions.
Life will change, and change can't be positive for everyone. Life is going to go on, though, and hopefully this perspective can help you adapt more constructively.
It’s funny...between reading all of these articles, I was driving in my car listening to the local oldies station, which loves to joke again and again that it is still humans selecting the music on the radio. This is framed as a nice perk for listeners. It's important, though, as we are on the cusp of an economy where humans are the ultimate luxury good.
Many of us are very scared of AI, and we don’t always think how powerful this fear is in shaping how things actually play out. People really want to talk to another human, to feel like a human is part of their experience.
Related: I’ve joked with friends for a long time that any job you have in 2026 is also a mental health support job for some stakeholder or another you encounter at work (in addition to whatever else you are supposedly hired to do).
And this brings us to...
Trend Number One: Humans Interaction is THE Prestige Good
Human interaction itself will remain economically valuable. Even as automation improves, there will increasing demand for roles that provide, overtly or often covertly, human connection.
Trend Number Two: We Are Entering an Era of Dynastic Wealth
This ongoing trend is rarely discussed in the context of AI, but whether it is good or bad, we are entering an era of dynastic wealth. Going forward, more than anything we’ve seen in the past hundred years, who is rich and who is not will increasingly be determined by inherited wealth (or not).
Many doomer narratives suggest that AI will take all the jobs and leave nobody with money to spend. This will be less of a factor than many expect for many reasons, including that wealth will matter more than income when it comes to spending power.
In this environment, where consumption patterns are increasingly determined by inherited wealth rather than career prestige, prestige consumption will be more important than ever. This brings us back to Trend One: What is the new hot luxury good? Increasingly, it will be access to people rather than machines.
Once again, demand for human labor will look different than what we are used to but it is not going away.
Trend Number Three: Large Corporate AI Adoption Is Incremental
AI adoption in large corporations is happening very quickly in terms of purchases... but it seems to be happening much more slowly in terms of actual productivity gains and workforce displacement.
You should also be skeptical of many AI-related layoff announcements. There are always layoffs that corporate managers want to make or feel pressured to make, and AI can serve as a convenient justification. In a strict practical sense, it is not accurate to say workers are being replaced by AI at scale right now.
Because of slow practical adoption and political / organizational dynamics (nobody likes to have their own headcount reduced) large employers (and the large portion of total employment they represent) will experience relatively slow disruption.
Another overlapping trend is that the workplace is increasingly becoming many Americans’ primary social outlet, especially for people with families and children. For many people, life is basically work and home.
If you look closely (and you are not encouraged to do so), many decisions in corporate office environments are partially about social comfort and signaling who is important. Headcount often becomes a proxy for value. This is a harbinger of the infant trend that humans themselves are becoming a luxury asset.
We tend not to talk about the economy this way because it doesn’t perfectly align with how we think economic systems should work. It's just not true, though, that everything is driven purely by ruthless, abstract efficiency.
AI is being introduced into a world shaped by human desires and many human desires are fundamentally social.
A Quick Example: Palantir
Disclaimer: I don’t have any special inside knowledge about Palantir. If you know more, consider this my idiosyncratic fantasy based on gossip about Palantir.
People often talk about Palantir in hushed tones as if they have some kind of mysterious or extremely advanced technology. In a more private setting, the hushed tones are used to discussed that they don't have any such thing.
What I observe is that they have the phone numbers of many Department of Defense generals who trust them to build exotic dashboards for the consumption of high-prestige stakeholders.
Like many businesses, part of what Palantir has going is established relationships. Important people at the Department of Defense don't want to negotiate multi-billion-dollar purchases with robots. They want to talk to a human. If there have a favored human they have worked with before, that human relationship is the real business asset.
If you are a company whose value is based on relationships ... if your employees are the luxury good that the AI era is implicitly increasing demand for ... then you are probably in a good position.
By contrast, if you are in the business of providing commodified, boilerplate dashboards, AI will make your commodification even more uncomfortable.
Your strategic choices then are either:
Make what you do more about relationships between people, or
Go all-in on AI and become very good at competing on commodity efficiency.
To Recap
Things are probably going to be… fine-ish. The economy will begin to revolve around the implicit idea that dealing with humans a luxury good. Feast and famine for different firms will turn heavily on how well they are positioned to provide this luxury to the stakeholders with money to spend. Someone will feast, try to stay calm and position yourself so that it is you.