Two economists just published a mathematical proof that AI will destroy the economy.
Not might. Not could. Will — if nothing changes.
The paper is called "The AI Layoff Trap." Published March 2, 2026. Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Boston University. Peer reviewed. Mathematically modeled.
The conclusion is one sentence.
"At the limit, firms automate their way to boundless productivity and zero demand."
An economy that produces everything. And sells it to nobody.
Here is how you get there.
A company fires 500 workers and replaces them with AI. A competitor fires 700 to keep up. Another fires 1,000. Every company is behaving rationally. Every company is following the incentives correctly. And every company is building a trap for itself.
Because the workers who were fired were also customers.
When they lose their jobs faster than the economy can absorb them, they stop spending. Consumer demand falls. Companies respond by cutting costs — which means automating more workers — which means less spending — which means more falling demand — which means more automation.
The loop has no natural exit.
The researchers tested every proposed solution. Universal basic income. Capital income taxes. Worker equity participation. Upskilling programs. Corporate coordination agreements.
Every single one failed in the model.
The only intervention that worked: a Pigouvian automation tax — a per-task levy charged every time a company replaces a human with AI, forcing them to price in the demand they are destroying before they pull the trigger.
No government has implemented this. No major economy is seriously discussing it.
Meanwhile the numbers are already tracking the curve. 100,000 tech workers laid off in 2025. 92,000 more in the first months of 2026. Jack Dorsey fired half of Block's workforce and said publicly: "Within the next year, the majority of companies will reach the same conclusion."
Nobody is doing anything wrong. Companies are following their incentives perfectly. That is exactly the problem.
Rational behavior. At scale. Simultaneously. With no mechanism to stop it.
Two economists built the math. The math leads to one place.
Source: Falk & Tsoukalas · Wharton School + Boston University ·
i should not have left x
created a vacuum for grifters
i was wrong, that’s on me
elon wanted $50k for my deleted account so i made a fresh handle and kept the bitcoin
Bitcoin is suffering because too many Bitcoiners have abandoned every principle they once claimed to stand for, and now bootlick every conman or politician who gives them even a shred of attention.
Every politician has rugged them so far. Every single one.
And still, the next fraud will show up tomorrow, say a few flattering words about Bitcoin, and the same fools will fall for it all over again.
Huge progress update. We will soon have Cashu Ecash mints in secure enclaves that the mint operator can't steal the Bitcoin from, not can they inflate or manipulate the Ecash supply.
The operator has no access to the private keys of the mint. This is amazing news for users and operators alike.
It allows us to build tools for communities that allow them to run mints without being afraid of malicious actors, internally or externally, such as security threats from hackers.
We're building this for the Bitcoin community first but we're planning to expand this also for local currency communities outside of the crypto space that exist in pockets all around the world. Especially the local currency tech stack is old and antiquated. We're going to give them the most advanced ecash protocol they could ever dream of. For free!
Lots of moving parts here: servers, libraries, backend, wallets, and protocol extensions. Incredible work by the entire Cashu team.
New version of Nostr VPN is out. Like tailscale, but no email addresses or 3rd party accounts, just public keys. New:
* native multiplatform user interfaces
* Nostr-based multihop routing (FIPS protocol) — very useful when NAT holepunching fails
* improved network management UX
Yesterday was the worst day of my life and then the best day of my life… Worst because I thought I might lose my pregnant wife. Best because Carla and the baby survived and are stable.
Thank you to everyone who sent their thoughts and prayers for Carla. It’s been an insane 24 hours…
Carla is stable now and both she and the baby are okay, but it got really fucking bad really fast… Scariest day/night of my life…
Carla is an absolute badass and at the beginning of the slow road to recovery, and I am so damn thankful.
Posting this here for those who’ve been asking what happened:
Carla started feeling weird yesterday afternoon after a nap. We were up all night with our son and had to take him to urgent care in the morning, so we were all resting before going to meet up with the family for Easter Sunday.
When Carla woke up she had some back pain and was very clammy. She was a bit disoriented but still totally coherent. Within 10 minutes she was almost completely unresponsive. Barely conscious. Crazy disoriented. Hardly able to respond even with single words. Zero control of her body. Totally limp in my arms. Vomited.
I called 911 immediately. Paramedics arrived and she was still barely responding and could barely open her eyes. When she did open her eyes she said she couldn’t see, her vision was black. They got her in an ambulance to the hospital. Her BP was insanely low in initial readings, like 55/38… got her to the hospital and BP remained dangerously low. About an hour she appeared to improve a little after multiple rounds of fluids. BP still super low but higher than before. She became lucid and ER staff thought she was stabilizing. She was shivering from the IV and had a bit of back and abdominal pain but it was manageable. They said we’d have to stay the night for monitoring but would be fine to go home tomorrow.
But then she started having severe abdominal and back pain around her shoulder blades. Pain got to the point where she was screaming like crazy. “Worst pain of my life” (and she has an extremely high baseline pain tolerance). I’ve never seen her in such unrelenting agony like that…
The pain kept getting worse and they did additional scans. The ultrasound showed a lot of fluid in her abdomen, likely blood. They started giving her massive blood transfusions and shortly said she needed surgery immediately. They thought it might be a ruptured ovarian cyst but wouldn’t know for sure until they opened her up. Got her into the OR about an hour after that. Doctor said surgery would take an hour…
2.5 hours in the OR the later the doctor finally came out and said Carla and baby were both OK, thank god… longest 2.5 hours of my life...
It turns out they had to do a giant incision down her entire abdomen from too to bottom to find the source of the bleeding (because it was NOT her ovaries or uterus) and bring in a third surgeon who was on call.
They removed **2+ liters** of blood from her abdominal cavity. For context, the average adult woman has about 4.5 liters of blood in their entire body…
They had to remove her spleen because it had ruptured and was the source of the bleeding… the doctors described it as “battlefield medicine” because of the amount of blood in and out and how dicey things got… but thank god both she and the baby are ok.
The doctor’s still don’t know why the spleen ruptured… it was a “non-traumatic” rupture, meaning there was no physical injury to the spleen which caused the rupture (~1 cm). It was a “spontaneous” rupture, which is quite rare apparently. They did note that the spleen was slightly enlarged but also not sure why yet. Waiting for pathology to see if that provides any answers. May have been contributing physiological/mechanical factors from pregnancy but we just don’t know yet.
The reason her shoulder blades were in such intense pain was because blood from the spleen was pooling under her diaphragm, blood is an irritant, and apparently that triggers the phrenic nerve which the brain interprets as pain between and around the shoulder blades.
Multiple surgeons said she was “this close”…thank god we didn’t waste any time. When one of the surgeons checked in on her today, he said she would have been “dead by midnight” without the emergency surgery and splenectomy…
The doctors also all said this combination of circumstances is very rare. Spleens obviously burst all the time, but usually it’s directly related to intense trauma, which was absent here. They said this case is probably going to be in medical journals because it’s so strange.
Carla is still in a lot of pain (we’re not even 24 hours out from the end of the surgery yet), but she’s handling it like an absolute champ. She was sedated and intubated with a ventilator until about 5AM this morning. This afternoon she was already able to get up and go walking multiple times. The pain is really bad, but should hopefully start lessening with each passing day.
It’s going to be a long road to recovery, especially with pregnancy on top of it, but she and the baby are both OK and right now that’s all that matters. One step at a time.
In typical @carlabitcoin fashion, she’s already been cracking jokes and trying to bribe the nurses. She even fired off a tweet while still a bit loopy from the sedatives but now she’s just trying to manage the pain.
Thankful for the great doctors, nurses, and paramedics who saved her life and our baby.
Thanks again to everyone who has reached out and sent their thoughts and prayers. I’m passing along your messages to Carla and they’re very much appreciated.
This still doesn’t seem real. A normal day turned into a nightmare so damn fast…
Hug your loved ones tight. Life is a gift. Don’t take it for granted.
🚨 PSA: a scammer has taken control of the https://t.co/hUrYquHLko domain. Do not be fooled into downloading malicious software.
How ironic that the FBI seizes control over the domain only for it to fall into the hands of actual criminals.
800,000 human brain cells, floating in a dish, have never had a body. Never seen light. Never felt anything. And they just learned to play a video game.
That's not a metaphor. That's literally what happened.
These neurons are alive. They fire. They adapt. They get better at DOOM over time, which means something inside that petri dish is changing in response to failure. Scientists call it "goal-directed learning." There is no cleaner definition of that phrase than "it kept trying until it got better." The cells have no survival instinct, no reward system, no reason to improve. They just do.
The part nobody's talking about: researchers have to convert the game's visuals into electrical pulses the neurons can interpret. Which means those cells are perceiving something. Not seeing it the way you do. But processing a version of a world that doesn't exist, inside a container that was never meant to think.
The Turing Test was about machines fooling humans. Nobody wrote the test for this.
Two ways to express power: voice and exit. When voice is no longer sufficient, we have one option: exit.
The system is broken. Voice doesn't work anymore, so I'm out. Bitcoin, open source software, and distributed systems. That's our exit.
Buy bitcoin. Build software. End war.
URGENT!
My Telegram account has been compromised.
If you got a Telegram message from my account in the last 24 hours, it was not from me.
Do NOT click ANY links the account sends.