AI's Endgame Isn't the Problem. The Transition Is.

short version: The AI jobs debate argues about 2030, but the destination is the least useful part of it. Anthropic's harshest modelled scenario puts the US economy 32.4% larger than the no-AI path by 2030, with knowledge-worker unemployment at 17.9% — and, strikingly, average wages rising about 9.9% while knowledge-worker wages fall more than 10%. The economy gets richer as the people who built it get poorer. What almost nobody models is the path between here and there, and the evidence on that path is not reassuring: job loss in a weak labour market costs twice what the same loss costs in a strong one, and the best evaluations of US retraining have not found reliable earnings gains. Britain ran a version of this already — output per head rose 46% from 1780 to 1840 while real wages rose 12%. Almost every argument about AI and jobs is an argument about 2030. Will the machines take the work, or won't they? But that is the wrong question. Asking it keeps us from seeing the part that…