AI, Productivity, and the End of the Old Economy

AI is advancing at an exponential pace.
And with it comes a paradox.

It promises enormous productivity -- faster output, lower costs, fewer errors -- across nearly every industry.
But it also threatens to break the very system we’ve used to distribute value for centuries.

Jobs will vanish.
Wages will decouple from output.
And for the first time in history, humans may not be the primary drivers of economic value.

So what happens when labor is no longer necessary?

The Political Economy of Post-Human Work

For most of modern history, markets ran on a simple logic:

• You work.
• You produce.
• You get paid.

That’s how value was distributed, whether you were baking bread or writing code.

But AI shifts this.
If machines do the producing, and do it better, faster, and cheaper, then who gets the rewards?

Ray Dalio teaches us to look at this through a cyclical lens.
Periods of technological advancement don’t just create new wealth; they also create new imbalances.
Especially when institutions lag behind innovation.

Just like the printing press destabilized religious authority,
or industrial machines destabilized feudal labor,
AI is now destabilizing our assumptions around productivity, wages, and power.

Rethinking Time, Labor, and Value

In a post-labor world, time no longer maps to money.

What then becomes valuable?

Maybe:

• Authenticity (human-crafted over machine-made)
• Presence (live, in-person experiences)
• Curation (taste in an infinite sea of content)
• Coordination (organizing communities, not outputs)

But even these are threatened by AI.
When a chatbot can simulate therapy, or generate museum-grade art in seconds, we’re not just redefining labor…
We’re redefining meaning.

The Value Crisis

If AI drives exponential value, but most of that value flows to infrastructure owners --
To those who hold capital, not contribute to creation --
Then inequality will spike to new extremes.

Dalio would call this late-stage cycle behavior:

• Growing debt
• Declining trust in institutions
• Rising populism
• Widening gaps between productivity and compensation

Sound familiar?

That’s the setup before a reset; not always a collapse, but always a transformation.

A Post-Fiat Thought Experiment

If AI changes who creates value…
Why should we keep routing all that value through the same old fiat systems?

What if instead of feeding the gains into central banks, we rerouted them to:

• On-chain contributors
• Open-source builders
• Curators, remixers, and community participants
• The people actually creating and coordinating the future

Could this be the Unstable worldview?

Stop faking stability.
Start aligning value to contribution.
Build systems that accept entropy, instead of hiding it behind polished dashboards.

The Next System

This won’t be easy. There are hard questions ahead:

• How do we distinguish human from AI output in a world where everything blurs?
• What do we reward? Efficiency or intention?
• If work doesn’t define identity anymore, what does?

But the old assumptions -- labor-for-wages, fiat-backed value, top-down allocation -- are already fraying.

AI didn’t cause the break.
It revealed it.

And that’s what Dalio, in his own way, has always pointed out:

The biggest dangers come not from the change…
but from the illusion that things will keep working like they used to.

Conclusion

This isn’t doom.

It’s a reset.

AI isn’t the end of the economy. It’s the end of an economy:
One based on wage labor, fiat illusion, and rigid institutions.

What comes next?

It won’t be stable.
But it might be fairer.
And definitely more real.

If you feel the ground shifting beneath your feet.. Good.
That’s not chaos.
That’s clarity.

That’s unstable.