Gary Calcott

Learning something new every day. Into platforms and eco-systems. Reasonable options trader. Wannabe Golf single handicapper. Sun, BEA and MuleSoft alum.

[Carl Benedikt Frey @carlbfrey]

My latest in the @FT today. I make four points:

1) Capitalism's great achievement was moving activity out of the household and into the market — turning domestic production into paid specialisation, creating jobs, and making output visible to the national accounts. AI-enabled self-service might quietly reverse that centuries-long trend.

2) When a technology automates tasks within a service, it can trigger a Jevons paradox: the service gets cheaper, demand expands, and employment grows. When it lets people do the work themselves, demand for the service collapses.

3) AI extends this even to the manual trades, the supposed safe haven of the AI age. If a homeowner can ask a chatbot why their boiler keeps losing pressure, heating engineers lose call-outs.

4) When work shifts to the consumer, it vanishes from the economy statisticians measure. Replace a billing department with a chatbot and a firm records lower costs and higher output per worker; the national accounts register a productivity gain. But the hours patients spend decoding their own test results appear nowhere — not in labour statistics, not in GDP. As self-service spreads into professional domains, that blind spot will grow.

[Gary Calcott @garycalcott]

Very profound and powerful observations. Just as the internet made basically everything self-serve, AI enables lay workers to crack specialist-level problems and avoid paying for (increasingly expensive) services. Recently, this has gone from fixing a quirky Italian coffee machine to extending an existing home battery solution. Amazing times.

[Gary Calcott @garycalcott]

@alojoh Yeah, the car business is crappy.

[Gary Calcott @garycalcott]

@naval Not good, Keir.

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

The world is a cat playing with Australia

[LeoDaVinciWave @LeoDaVinciWave]

Julius Caesar knife block.

[Gary Calcott @garycalcott]

@usmntonly @rohanspatel Nah.

[Gary Calcott @garycalcott]

@rorysutherland Indeed. I remember doing the walking ways back to feed observed behaviour into a model. Long live operations research.

[vx-underground @vxunderground]

Literally the worst cable management I've ever seen in my life

[Viv 🪩 @battleangelviv]

The future belongs to those who build it

[Mario Zechner @badlogicgames]

pope's an OSS guy

[SwiftOnSecurity @SwiftOnSecurity]

When your dog defaults to 320x240 resolution

[phil beisel @pbeisel]

This is EPIC. Oh my.

[Gary Calcott @garycalcott]

Feelin´ like an FDE today 😁

[SemiAnalysis @SemiAnalysis_]

After studying 300 Leetcode Hards, solving every Jane Street puzzle from the Dwarkesh ads, and watching one Horace He lecture, he finally landed the $400k annualized Jane Street internship.

Unfortunately, during onboarding his manager said “this diff is negative alpha,” so Jane Street deployed an AI model to translate all feedback into HR-safe speech in real time.

[Cassie Kozyrkov @decisionleader]

😂😂😂

[Gary Calcott @garycalcott]

@alojoh @grok Nice work, AJ. Let’s hope your prediction for the corridor plays out too.

[Gary Calcott @garycalcott]

@ICannot_Enough Analysts clearly didn’t ask the right questions.

[Gary Calcott @garycalcott]

@HeinrichKuttler Herzlichen Glückwunsch.

[Mike Zaccardi, CFA, CMT 🍖 @MikeZaccardi]

MS: We Are Likely in the Early Stages of Another Productivity Boom

Productivity Growth Appears To Be Turning Higher Again