Economist Paul Novosad: AI shifts surplus from those without agency to those with it
paulnovosad · x · 2026-10-28
Economist Paul Novosad: since the industrial revolution, economic forces pushed firms ever larger, with humans exercising narrow specialties repeatedly. AI is a major force in the opposite direction.
Key points:
- The narrower and more repetitive your specialty, the more replaceable you are
- Entrepreneurs are super-powered with cheap AI expertise in every domain
- People with vision and agency have unprecedented capabilities; those trading 9–5 non-agentic labor for salary and quiet life will be most disappointed
- A big reallocation of surplus is coming: from those without agency to those with it
This is destabilizing, he argues, because modernity's promise was that you could forgo agency and someone else would make it all work out.
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