clickbridge // THEORIES

Theories

The big ideas about AI, work and the economy — each one laid out with who argues it, who pushes back, and where it breaks. Working positions, kept current, not settled answers.

7 theories
Automation Displacement
AI mostly replaces workers rather than helping them, holding wages down and sending the gains to whoever owns the technology. The pessimistic case.
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The Augmentation Thesis
AI's value is in making people better at their work, not replacing them. The middle position, and the one with the most field evidence behind it.
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Jevons' Paradox, applied to AI
When something gets cheaper to use, we use more of it. Cheap cognitive work likely means far more cognitive work, not the same work with fewer people.
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The Great Stagnation, and AI as the way out
Productivity growth slowed around the 1970s. AI is the strongest candidate in fifty years to end that. The fight is over how fast, and whether it reaches beyond software.
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Techno-Optimism
Technology is close to an unalloyed good and abundance is the endpoint. The loudest position in the debate, and the one that argues with itself most.
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AI Alignment and Existential Risk
Capable AI could cause catastrophe, and getting it to want what we want is unsolved. The vocabulary, the camps, and who rejects the frame entirely.
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Game A vs. Game B
The way civilization runs now is competitive, extractive and built on endless growth, and it's hitting its limits. Game B is whatever grows up inside it.
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No matches.