One Man & His Laptop

I'm a prog rock loving, ZX Spectrum playing dude, worried about the climate crisis and curious about motives.

[One Man & His Laptop @OneManLaptop]

There are legitimate reasons to block people from your Twitter profile, but those who do it in response to losing a fair and honest debate, achieve nothing more than highlighting their willful ignorance to opposing ideas. Every block is a validation.

[One Man & His Laptop @OneManLaptop]

@FlackJimmmy @reformparty_uk Yeah, she doesn't represent my politics but she's met this and other moments well.

[Niall B🅰️rry 🇺🇦 @BarryNiall]

@GadSaad @smpl1 @realDonaldTrump Your glorious Fuhrer added $12tr to American's National Debt of $39tr.
He's just spent $70bn blowing up Iran to now giving them $300bn for reparation!

[Jack @jackcoder0]

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 ·

[. @deityofnightt]

l've never seen anything more accurate

[One Man & His Laptop @OneManLaptop]

@apoliticaleye @DPJHodges @SelfBuildDreams Fair play, they got a proper LOL. 😂

[One Man & His Laptop @OneManLaptop]

We don't hate these people enough.

https://t.co/mrTNqsTc7o

[One Man & His Laptop @OneManLaptop]

Many people don't care much about eco-crime because its effects are delayed. Drink contaminated water and breathe poisoned air long enough, and it will kill you. The people making these decisions should be held criminally liable.

[Nithya Shri @Nithya_Shrii]

If you poured a gallon of poison in a CEO's pool, you'd be arrested, for attempted murder.

They pour 10,000 gallons into your drinking water, that's just business.

[One Man & His Laptop @OneManLaptop]

@DPJHodges Holding any large organisation together, let alone one charged with all the fervour and passion of a political party, must be the Devil's own task. Look how Your Party utterly imploded as soon as the rubber hit the road. I wouldn't bet against it all coming apart before the GE.

[One Man & His Laptop @OneManLaptop]

It seems to me that China is very clearly winning the AI war. Dramatically cheaper to run, open source and so able to run on your own infrastructure. They are now side-stepping NVIDIA and training on their own chips!

https://t.co/T7feBNlxGf

[𐌁𐌉Ᏽ 𐌕𐌉𐌌𐌉 @OrevaZSN]

Teenagers have started calling AI art "boomer art" and consider it cringe, and YouTubers have stopped using AI-generated thumbnails because teenagers find them cringe and won't click on them. I honestly couldn't be happier.

[maddie @madsssagascar]

if someone ran a marathon and someone else drove 26 miles i wouldnt congratulate the driver just because he ended up at the destination

[One Man & His Laptop @OneManLaptop]

@MrMatthewTodd @ProfBillMcGuire I'll bet that's a light read. 😂

[One Man & His Laptop @OneManLaptop]

@Marlonious @GBPolitcs @FindoutnowUK I mean I'll laugh my arse off for a start. The mad thing is, we've had these terrible local elections, but ever since, the news about the economy, investment and migration have all been good across the board. I don't think Starmer hanging on is unthinkable, even if Burnham wins.

[One Man & His Laptop @OneManLaptop]

@WiganEmptySeat @_Hinkypunk @ElectionMapsUK @Moreincommon_ This is the hard truth. When he has to make decisions which disappoint people, then we'll see the dip. To be fair, that dip can be reversed if time proves him right.

[Joe Kent @joekent16jan19]

God bless Thomas Massie.

He walks out of this with his honor intact. He’s a patriot & kept his integrity.

As long as the voters give their votes to whoever can run the most ads we will have politicians who are purchased by foreign governments & corporate interests.

[Mario Nawfal @MarioNawfal]

The CEO of Take-Two, the company behind GTA, just said something the entire AI industry doesn't want to hear.

And he said it without being anti-AI.

Strauss Zelnick's argument is precise. AI is built on datasets. Datasets are backward-looking. Creativity is forward-looking. A model trained on everything that already exists cannot, by definition, produce something genuinely unexpected. And all hits, by their very nature, are unexpected.

Asset creation and hit creation are not the same thing. AI is getting very good at the first one. The second one is what actually makes money, builds franchises, and changes culture. Nobody has shown AI can do that yet.

The derivative property problem is real. You can clone GTA with existing technology. You could do it before AI. It would take 3 years and look identical. It still wouldn't sell. Because it isn't GTA. It's a clone of GTA.

And consumers, despite what the industry occasionally pretends, can feel the difference between something genuinely new and something assembled from the residue of things that already worked.

Thousands of mobile games ship every year. 0 to 5 hits get made. The same studios make them every time. The technology to make more games has been commoditized for years. It didn't democratize hit creation. It just flooded the market with more forgettable product.

The Silicon Valley thesis that AI unlocks game creation for everyone is true in the same way that cheap cameras unlocked filmmaking for everyone. They did. And the same 5 studios still make the movies everyone watches.

What Zelnick is saying, without quite saying it, is that the thing AI cannot replicate is taste. The instinct for what hasn't been done yet. The cultural antenna that detects the gap in the market before the data can see it.

Data tells you what people wanted. Hits tell people what they want next.

Those are different jobs.

[One Man & His Laptop @OneManLaptop]

How about this for a tonic? I swear that politics had become so tribal, exchanges like this seem borderline surreal they're so rare. We can fight the fight without dehumanising each other.

[Andy Burnham @AndyBurnhamGM]

@PolitlcsUK And I would say the same about Luke. We need a bit more decency in politics and much less vitriol. 👏🏻

[Julián🇲🇽🐌 @rexdelay]

@iamswoboda @OrevaZSN This is perfectly normal then

[Radical14 @TorkerBoy]

@implausibleblog A personal favourite of mine 😂 #WillSelf

[Nick Lowles @lowles_nick]

Just look at Tommy's core team. This is Guramit Singh, he's been around since the early EDL days.

He was once sentenced to six-and-a-half years for his part in a violent attempted robbery, when he and two others pinned a shop assistant to the ground and made threats to slash his throat if he did not hand over cash.

https://t.co/D8B2AoOlaw