Jan Kulveit

We'll develop a culture explaining why human disempowerment is good.

Why giving the future to AI is right.

Why this is moral progress.

I'd like to thank Raymond Douglas, Nora Ammon, Richard Ngo, Baron Millage and David Juvenor for discussions about the topic.

This article was narrated by Type 3 Audio for Less Wrong.

It was published on February 13, 2026.

Images are included in the podcast episode description.

Post-AGI Economics As If Nothing Ever Happens By Jan Colvait Published on February 4, 2026 When economists think and write about the post-AGI world, they often rely on the implicit assumption that parameters may change, but fundamentally, structurally, not much happens.

and if it does, it's maybe one or two empirical facts, but nothing too fundamental.

This mostly worked for all sorts of other technologies, where technologists would predict society to be radically transformed for example by everyone having most of humanity's knowledge available for free all the time, or everyone having an ability to instantly communicate with almost anyone else.

but it will not work for AGI, and as a result, most of the econ modelling of the post-AGI world is irrelevant or actively misleading, making people who rely on it more confused than if they just thought this is hard to think about so I don't know.

Heading.

Solving a bunch of differential equations impresses the general audience and historically may have worked as some sort of proof of intelligence, but is relatively trivial.

How the projection works is usually specified by some combination of assumptions, models, and concepts used, where the concepts themselves usually imply many assumptions and simplifications.

In the best case of economic reasoning, the projections capture something important and the math leads us to some new insights.

In cases which are in my view quite common, non-mathematical, often intuitive reasoning of the economist leads to some interesting insight, and then the formalization, assumptions, and models are selected in a way where the math leads to the same conclusions.

The resulting epistemic situation may be somewhat tricky.

The conclusions may be true, the assumptions sensible, but the math is less relevant than it seems, given the extremely large space of economic models, had the economist different intuitions, they would have been able to find a different math leading to different conclusions.

Unfortunately, there are many other ways the economist can reason.

For example, they can be driven to reach some counterintuitive conclusion, incentivized by academic drive for novelty.