What If AI Drove Infinite Growth and Collapsed Culture Along the Way?

The Economist sees 30% GDP gains. We see a world where culture, meaning, and authorship become luxury goods.

When the Consensus Starts Dreaming

Why this Economist cover matters more than its content.

In July 2025, The Economist, the world’s favourite Davos briefing guide, the house organ of market orthodoxy and macroeconomic realism, the closest thing we have to a Bloomberg–Ivy League–central banker group chat in print, a weekly newspaper, did what it does well: it ran a cover story that once belonged to the fringe and made it immediately mainstream.

When The Economist elevates a speculative thesis once confined to Substack pieces and Singularitarian retreats, it’s institutionalising and issuing permission for the global political and investor class to take it seriously. This is, in reality, what The Economist does best.

So what’s the gist of it all? Growth is breaking free from labour and we need to start imagining the consequences.

They’re not wrong to bring the topic to the forefront:

AI automating one-third of all economic tasks is the threshold that triggers GDP growth above 20%, according to Anson Ho of the Epoch think tank.

• In simple terms: Once AI can do about 1 in 3 jobs better or cheaper than humans, the economy starts growing faster than any time in recorded history.

Once that threshold is crossed, recursive improvement begins: investment flows into AI R&D, which makes AI better at accelerating itself. Progress becomes multiplicative.

• In simple terms: AI gets good enough to help build better AI and the feedback loop starts spinning faster and faster.

Capital scales without labour: the only constraint on productivity becomes compute, not participation.

• In simple terms: Companies no longer need people to grow. They just need servers, chips, and power.

As Nobel laureate William Nordhaus framed it, this leads to a world where the economy becomes “information produced by information capital, which is produced by information…”.

• In simple terms: The economy runs on ideas generated by AI, which is improved by more AI, which is funded by the value those ideas create. Humans optional.

And according to Sam Altman, AI systems will likely begin producing “novel scientific insights” by the end of 2026 — independent of human researchers.

• In simple terms: AI won’t just write emails or generate code. It’ll start discovering things no human has ever thought of on its own.

The Economist rarely forecasts. It frames things to help people think through them. And at the heart of it is a central concern: If AI really does become the new labour class, and capital becomes self-replicating, then the entire architecture of participation, purpose, and story collapses.

So what do we do about that? That’s where Strange Loop comes in. For me, I’d like to posit a different angle.

The real question behind the headline isn’t “What if growth explodes?”

It’s: “What happens when humans are no longer required to produce value, but still expected to find it?”

Let’s follow the story they didn’t tell - not the macro one, the cultural one.

Today We’re Talking About

• Why The Economist just endorsed 30% AI-fuelled GDP growth and what they forgot to mention about culture, story, and belonging

• How economic acceleration without human participation turns growth into simulation

• What happens when labour disappears and all we’re left with is performance, vibes, and personal branding

• Why friction isn’t inefficiency, it’s the last sacred act in an infinite content economy

• How care, craft, and connection become luxury goods when scale optimises everything else

• What to hold onto when authorship is the only real work left

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Today, subscribers get access to the parts of this work that don’t scale:

• The Strange Loop Self-Check: a reflective practice for staying human in a frictionless economy

• A field manual for creative resistance: how to curate friction, build authorship, and make work that still matters

• Subscriber-only dispatches that go deeper into the cultural, emotional, and strategic implications of AI-driven systems

The Mirage of Infinite Growth

What if the economy triples — and no one feels it?

In The Economist’s vision, the numbers are staggering: Once AI automates a third of all economic tasks, productivity accelerates past 20% annual GDP growth — enough to double the global economy every three to four years.

That’s not just economic acceleration. That’s squarely economic rupture.

But here’s the disconnect: scale without participation isn’t prosperity. Let’s say the math holds. Let’s say AI compounds capital, automates R&D, and invents new materials while we sleep. Who actually feels that growth? Who still sees themselves in the story?

Because productivity might skyrocket, but that doesn’t mean your rent drops, your job feels secure, or your friendships deepen. AI can 10x your workflow, but it can’t tell you who you are, where you belong, or why any of it matters.

That’s the paradox: the system gets smarter, faster and richer, but for most people, it all just feels less human.

In the past, growth came with a ladder, or at least a story of one. Jobs led to careers. Careers led to identity. There were roles, rhythms, rituals. There was a plot you could follow. Today? That scaffolding is gone. We’re in the process of talking about this:

The Attention Economy: How Collapse Became a Business Model

Web1 gave us access, Web2 gave us platforms

You could get online, find an audience, maybe build something. There was friction, yes, but that friction made authorship possible. You still had to show up, make choices, be someone.

But now, as AI pushes us into Web Next (infinite scale, zero friction) that scaffolding disappears. There are no ladders to climb, just algorithms to please. No career arcs, just feed loops. And no stable identity, only outputs, prompts, and performance.

In this structure, labour becomes optional and culture becomes ornamental. In other words, capital doesn’t need us to grow anymore.

“If machines get sufficiently good at replacing people,” writes The Economist, “the only constraint on the accumulation of capital is capital itself.”

In plain terms: You’re no longer just the bottleneck, you’re no longer even in the frame.

And you can already feel it, especially in the culture industries:

• Film/TV/Streaming: Content output has exploded, but budgets shrink, writer rooms collapse, and everything looks like it was made by the same ten prompts.

  (Remember when Netflix shows felt different from each other? Neither does anyone.)

• Music: Viral hits are algorithm-trained. Major labels prioritise TikTok-first tracks over albums. Streaming payouts are fractions of pennies.

  (It’s never been easier to make a song or harder to make a living.)

• Publishing: AI slush floods Kindle. Midlist authors vanish and bestseller lists now favour influencers over literary craft.

  (What’s the difference between a book and a content pillar? Don’t ask your imprint.)

• Gaming: UGC tools are everywhere, but major titles ship unfinished. Live service fatigue replaces narrative immersion.

  (Games got longer. Stories got thinner. Franchises got milked.)

• Theatre: Experimental work disappears as venues chase IP, musicals, and “Instagrammable” spectacle.

  (When tickets are £160 and every revival is safe, what’s left to invent?)

We got scale, but the artists didn’t get paid. The writers went on strike, the culture got flatter and no one agreed on what mattered anymore.

“A booming but workerless economy may be humanity’s ultimate destination,” The Economist notes. Not ominously. Just… plainly.

What they don’t ask, and what we must, is this: What happens to culture when it no longer needs people to make it? Or audiences to believe in it?

Because even if the GDP triples and the models hold, there’s no chart for meaning. No dashboard tracks the erosion of authorship and no growth curve captures the collapse of feeling.

That’s the mirage: a system designed to grow without us, asking us to keep applauding.

So let’s ask again: If we’re no longer central to value, what are we central to? And if the answer is still “culture,” then we’d better defend it like it matters.

When Labour Loses Its Myth

No gods, no managers, no Mondays.

For centuries, labour wasn’t just how you earned, it was how you existed. It shaped time, morality, identity. From divine calling to industrial rhythm to career as personality, work gave life a plot.

But now we’re entering a future where AI underprices human labour across the board. And when that happens, we lose income and we lose the story. If machines can do it faster, cheaper, better, more consistently, then what, exactly, is the point of you?

As The Economist puts it: “If machines get sufficiently good at replacing people, the only constraint on the accumulation of capital is capital itself.”

And this isn’t just theory:

Nordhaus and MIT projections show that once capital can fully substitute labour, all income eventually flows to capital holders.

• In simple terms: If machines do all the work, the money goes to the people who own the machines, not the people they used to hire.

The cost of running an AI system sets a declining ceiling on human wages — if the model is cheaper, you’re out.

• In simple terms: Employers won’t pay a human £50/hour when an AI does it for £3. Your value isn’t your skill, it’s your cost relative to a model.

And historically? We’ve seen this before: in 1800, an English construction worker earned the same real wages as in 1230.

• In simple terms: You can have centuries of economic growth and still leave everyday workers exactly where they started.

Centuries of growth, no participation.

• In simple terms: The system got richer, people didn’t.

We’re on track to repeat the pattern, just with more output and fewer humans.

So what happens when labour is no longer essential to the economy? We lose jobs and rituals of progress.

• No Monday to Friday.

• No training, tenure, or craft.

• No arc, no ladder, no structured becoming.

Even in culture, that shift is visible:

• AI scores your film, writes your script, generates your game level.

• You’re not the writer, you’re the editor, the curator and the vibe selector.

It’s efficient, but is it anything?

We were promised freedom, but it seems we’re gunning for disorientation.

Scaling these tools without guardrails doesn’t just increase output, it accelerates the collapse of meaning. And culture, at its core, is nothing if not the act of making meaning.

But if the old story of work is ending, maybe it’s time to write a better one. If labour no longer defines us, authorship might. Not just what we make, but what we choose to care about. In this world:

• Curation becomes clarity.

• Storytelling becomes structure.

• Presence becomes a skill.

This isn’t about going backward. It’s about rebuilding meaning in a system that no longer knows how to make it.

And if AI can do everything, what matters most is what we choose to do on purpose.

Why Friction Still Matters

In a world optimised for speed, choosing slowness is the final act of authorship.

Labour losing its role is one problem. What replaces labour is the bigger one.

As work disappears, we default to performance: we post, we style, we curate coherence. We have already begun abdicating meaningful output for algorithmic-driven aesthetic alignment. We’ve swapped productivity for legibility.

This is what fills the void when progress becomes unavailable but identity is still required. And in the future, in the absence of economic necessity, we still scramble to be visible, to be relevant, to be perceived.

But here’s the trap on a personal and societal level: aesthetic performance flattens culture into content. Not because it’s fake, but because it’s frictionless.

When the system removes effort, ritual, and resistance, we’re left with the simulation of liberation, or clarity, of personal progress, or learning.

• You don’t read the book, you summarise it.

• You don’t listen to the album, you preview the tracks out of sequence.

• You don’t live the idea, you clip the quote.

The result? Everything is accessible and nothing is lived.

This is where the myth of frictionless culture collapses. Because meaning isn’t found in access but in attention. Attention requires effort, duration, choice. And that choice of attention requires elimination of everything else.

As Jung wrote: “There is no coming to consciousness without pain.”

And as Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa put it: “Chaos should be regarded as extremely good news.”

Both understood the same truth: growth requires discomfort. To evolve, we have to stay with what doesn’t resolve instantly, the tension that doesn’t break, the question that refuses to collapse into an answer.

Friction isn’t inefficiency. Friction is the interface between self and transformation.

And this is also what culture is. If culture is how we make meaning, then meaning demands resistance: friction against time, against self, against existing culture itself, against the urge to skip ahead.

Remove friction, and you don’t just kill depth, you erase the conditions for meaning itself.

That’s why intention isn’t optional, but foundational. As AI progresses to do everything, what matters most is what we choose to do on purpose. This is how we vote now: not with our wallets, but with our attention. With what we refuse to rush. With the parts of life we let stay hard.

Friction is the last sacred act, and choosing it is how we stay human.

Baumol’s Curse for Meaning

AI is making everything cheap, except connection.

We just argued that friction is the last sacred act, the substrate of meaning and the condition for transformation.

But here’s the next trap: even friction gets priced out. When AI makes everything else faster, cheaper, and scaleable, the only things left with economic weight are the things it can’t do.

Enter Baumol’s cost disease: the quiet mechanism behind the spiritual inflation of the post-AI economy.

• In simple terms: when productivity explodes in one part of the economy (AI-built tools, automated logistics, infinite content), the cost of non-automatable labour rises by comparison.

Some examples:

• You can stream 70 million songs for £10/month, but it’s £250 to see one artist live, in a room, where they can look you in the eyes.

• ChatGPT will draft your entire brand campaign by lunch, but it takes months to earn the trust to launch anything that actually changes how people feel.

• You can binge ten shows on Netflix tonight, but good childcare costs more than rent, and your therapist has a six-month waiting list.

• Midjourney can paint you anything, but you still stare at your friend’s hand-thrown ceramic mug because something real touched it.

As The Economist notes, this leads to “selective abundance.”

Free entertainment, cheap calories, infinite scroll.

But the moment you want presence, care, or craft, the price spikes. As The Economist illustrated:

Historically, Americans spent 43% of their income on food in 1909. Today? Just 11% — even though they consume more calories.

That’s what exponential productivity does: it drives prices down, but value doesn’t always follow. And now, AI supercharges that dynamic.

Baumol’s logic implies that growth, real economic weight, shifts toward the things AI can’t touch:

Live art. Embodied care. Storytelling that doesn’t get consumed easily. The long conversation. The trusted therapist. The live concert. The unskippable moment. The weird film you can’t believe got greenlit.

And because these human experiences can’t be automated, scaled, or mass-produced, their price goes up… even as everything else gets cheaper. But if those become more expensive (as we’ve all seen they are), who still gets access to meaning? Who gets to access culture? Who can afford it?

That’s the real curse: not just that AI makes things cheap, but that it makes real human experiences harder to access. If friction is how we stay human, we now live in a system that pushes it out of reach, just when we need it most.

To summarise a different way: We say we want realness, but the system rewards speed, reach, and replication. The most meaningful things don’t scale, so they get crowded out.

Culture is flooded with polished, AI-generated content, but the messy, personal, human stuff? That takes time, effort, presence. And more and more, it costs money, or gets buried by the algorithm.

Care still matters, but only people with time or money can afford to offer it. Art still moves us, but only if we’re able to sit with it. And for many, that kind of time or access is a luxury.

The most meaningful parts of life haven’t disappeared, they’ve just become harder to find and harder to afford.

And that doesn’t just create inequality but also disconnection, and at its peak, alienation.

What We Actually Want

Spoiler: It’s not GDP.

What humans want is orientation, coherence, relation and story. Said differently, we want to feel where we are, to know what matters, to belong to something real and to make sense of it through narrative we help shape.

Because growth doesn’t solve loneliness and infinite productivity doesn’t build kinship.

The only work left that matters is the labour of attention: choosing where to care, what to create, who to sit with, and what to keep hard.

As Nordhaus points out, wages may rise in absolute terms, but shrink as a share of the whole.

The Economist imagines manufactured goods becoming “close to free” but the meaningful stuff gets priced out.

To put it another way, when the only things left with value are the ones you can’t scale, authorship becomes non-negotiable.

Subscriber-Only: Strange Loop Self-Check

If you lost your job tomorrow but gained 10K followers for posting AI-generated quotes over Mykonos sunsets…

• Would you feel valuable?

• Would you feel real?

• Would your parents understand what you do?

Now try asking that without irony. The aesthetic economy rewards coherence, but the algorithm rewards engagement. But meaning — real meaning — still requires friction, intention, and a sense of why you’re doing any of it.

How to Survive the Infinite Growth Era

A guide for staying human when growth no longer includes you. A field manual for authorship in a world that keeps trying to automate you.