I don't agree with much of this essay, but it's visionary, cool and worth sharing.By 2040, the value of the world’s manufacturing output is over a thousand times what it was in 2025. Most of this is spent on geopolitical competition, inter-elite status rivalries, and an increasing fraction on AI machinations with only the most tenuous link to any human activity, but which the humans who on-paper own all of this barely notice as it gets lost in the maelstrom of everything else. Even the most entrenched, long-term-oriented, and value-laden executive jobs are (whether de facto or de jure) entirely done by AIs, with very little human understanding of what is concretely happening on the ground. Human society and the human-to-human economy is a leaf riding on a vast wave of automated activity.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CCnycGc ... -2025-2040