New MIT Paper on AGI Economics: Human Verification Bandwidth is the New Bottleneck
ccatalini · x · 2026-08-26
MIT professor Christian Catalini and co-authors released a new paper titled "Some Simple Economics of AGI," exploring key constraints in an economy driven by autonomous agents. The paper argues that as AI decouples cognition from biology, driving the marginal cost of measurable execution toward zero, traditional models treating AI merely as a labor substitute or complement are incomplete. In an economy where agents act with broad agency, the binding constraint on growth is no longer intelligence, but Human Verification Bandwidth: the scarce capacity to validate outcomes, audit behavior, and underwrite meaning and responsibility amidst abundant execution.
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