Luke Wroblewski

Humanizing tech. MD: Sutter Hill Ventures Founder: Polar (Google acquired) Bagcheck (Twitter acquired) Wrote: Mobile First, Web Form Design Pre: NCSA eBay Yahoo

[Luke Wroblewski @LukeW]

this argument lands better for "why designers matter in an AI age" than simply saying "taste"

[Alex Imas @alexolegimas]

New essay on the economics of structural change and the post-commodity future of work.

1. Almost any question about the impact of advanced AI on the economy needs to start at the same place: what is still scarce? Answer that, and the analysis becomes pretty straightforward. This essay explores what becomes scarce if AI really can replicate most of what humans do in production, and what this mean for the future of jobs.

2. My conjecture, working through the economics: labor reallocates across sectors, and the sector it reallocates to has properties that keep labor a meaningful share of the economy. Ultimately this is about the structure of demand itself. For this, we have to go back to Girard, Augustine and Rousseau: once people's base needs are met, their preferences shift to comparative motives (e.g., status, exclusivity, social desirability). This motive is inherently non-satiated.

4. The key paper is Comin, Lashkari, and Mestieri (Econometrica 2021). As people get richer, they don't buy proportionally more of everything. They shift spending toward sectors with higher income elasticity. They estimate income effects account for 75%+ of observed structural change.

5. The ironic consequence: the sector that gets automated becomes a smaller share of the economy, not a larger one. Agriculture got massively more productive and its share of employment collapsed. Manufacturing too. The "stagnant" sectors absorb the spending and the jobs.

6. So the question is: which sectors have high income elasticity in a post-AGI world? I argue it's what I call the relational sector. Categories where the human isn't just an input into production, it is part of the value.

7. Why does the relational sector have high income elasticity? Because human desire has a mimetic, relational dimension. We don't just want things for their intrinsic properties. We want what others want, and we want it more when others can't have it. Girard, Rousseau, Augustine, and Hobbes all saw this.

8. In work with Kristóf Madarász, we showed this experimentally: WTP roughly doubles when a random subset of others is excluded from the good. And in new work with Graelin Mandel, AI involvement kills the premium. Human-made art gains 44% from exclusivity; AI-made art only 21%.

9. This all comes together for the core argument. The sector that absorbs spending as AI makes commodity production cheap is one where human provenance is part of the value, and demand for it grows faster than income. Exactly the profile that keeps labor meaningful.

10. To be clear about the claim: I'm NOT saying aggregate labor share must rise. It may fall. The claim is about sectoral composition, i.e., where expenditure and employment go once commodities get cheap, and the fact that the sector that will absorb reallocated labor maps to a substantial component of human preferences and desire.

11. If you're interested in the formal model, a linked companion technical note works out all the economics.

Read the essay here: https://t.co/NcjVgn2o8g

[Taesung Park @Taesung]

Diffusion models are known to be very compute intensive, even more so than LLM training. Now that we reduce images into layouts, we turn it into a next token prediction problem. This gives us a big boost.

[Reve @reve]

Today, we’re launching Reve 2.0, the best 4K image model in the world.

We invented a new way to generate and edit any image using precise layouts. For the first time, it’s possible to create images you can touch.

[Christian Cantrell @cantrell]

An unprecedented level of control and consistency is coming to image generation.

[Luke Wroblewski @LukeW]

try it yourself: https://t.co/GGzNZKQQLY

[Luke Wroblewski @LukeW]

updated my LukeW character maker with new image model released this morning.

[Luke Wroblewski @LukeW]

future of design deliverables is custom tools that create assets on demand, with brand guidelines encoded:
https://t.co/zVEAHmCTZX

[Luke Wroblewski @LukeW]

@sampullara it gets meta fast

[Luke Wroblewski @LukeW]

AI "search"

[Luke Wroblewski @LukeW]

@sampullara it keeps going...

[Luke Wroblewski @LukeW]

latest for our Physics AI company: https://t.co/Wwwe09wpdZ

[Luke Wroblewski @LukeW]

with AI, we still craft Websites.

[Luke Wroblewski @LukeW]

“these new tools are gonna take people’s jobs away.” -hominid, 2.9 million years ago https://t.co/NRK51PWAh4

[Luke Wroblewski @LukeW]

human + tool = better human

[Scott Kominers @skominers]

Wild that an LLM autonomously disproved the unit-distance conjecture 🤯

But it’s also striking to me that, almost immediately after seeing the construction, a human mathematician was able to improve it further.

Speaks to the potential of human–AI collaboration in math, QED 🔲

[Luke Wroblewski @LukeW]

ummm..

[Luke Wroblewski @LukeW]

@benhylak "win"

[Luke Wroblewski @LukeW]

from https://t.co/fbd9NzVoZK

[Luke Wroblewski @LukeW]

91% of designers use AI weekly, up from 54% in 2025.
7 average AI tools used per designer up from 3 in 2025.

[Luke Wroblewski @LukeW]

everybody's building the same thing (chat edition).
https://t.co/kUVCrv6q5o

[Luke Wroblewski @LukeW]

everybody’s building the same thing.

[Luke Wroblewski @LukeW]

everybody's building the same thing (agent edition).

[Amelia Wattenberger 🪷 @Wattenberger]

$20 if you can guess which app is which