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- The Economists Are Wrong About AI.
Everyone's got an opinion about AI and jobs right now.
The headlines all say the same thing: AI will replace workers. Wages will drop. The robots are coming.
I get why people think that. If a machine can do what a person does, the person becomes less valuable. Simple supply-and-demand logic.
Makes sense on a whiteboard.
Doesn't make sense in real life.
The Ad Campaign That Explains Everything
Here's the lens I use.
If I'm running an ad campaign and it's delivering a 300% return on ad spend, I don't sit back and think "Great! How can I spend less on this?"
No.
I think "How do I pour more money into this thing as fast as humanly possible?"
Because the return justifies the investment. The higher the return, the more I want to invest.
Now apply that to people.
When AI makes a team member 3x more productive, that person didn't just become expendable. They became the most valuable person in the building. They're now a high-performing asset that I want to double down on and not cut.
And yet the doomsayers would have you believe I should fire that person because a tool helped them perform better?
That's like firing your best salesperson for using a CRM.
The Scarcity Mindset vs. The Abundance Mindset
This is where the disconnect lives.
Economists are trained in scarcity. It's baked into the discipline. Limited resources, zero-sum tradeoffs, somebody wins and somebody loses. A new technology enters the system, and their mental model says it must displace something.
Entrepreneurs think differently.
We create something from nothing and call it Tuesday. We don't look at a new tool and see a threat, we see leverage. More output per unit of effort means more opportunity, not less.
The scarcity-minded person sees AI doing half the work and thinks: "Now I need half the people."
The abundance-minded person sees AI doing half the work and thinks: "Now my people can do twice as much. What else can we build?"
It’s a completely different conclusion from the same technology.
This Has Happened Before. Every Single Time.
The ATM was supposed to kill bank tellers. The number of bank tellers increased after ATMs rolled out, because banks could open more branches at lower cost and redeploy tellers into advisory roles.
Spreadsheets were supposed to kill accountants. Instead, the demand for people who could use spreadsheets exploded. The profession didn't shrink. It evolved.
The internet was supposed to kill retail. Instead, it created an entirely new $5+ trillion economy that employs millions of people in roles that didn't exist in 1995.
Every single time a major technology arrived, the pessimists predicted displacement. And every single time, the optimists built something bigger.
The pessimists look smart in the short term, but the optimists get rich in the long term.
What This Means for You
If you're worried about AI making you less valuable, you've been listening to the wrong people.
The people who win in every technology shift are the ones who lean in. They learn the tool, use it aggressively, and become the person in the room who knows how to get 10x the output from the same input.
That's not a person any sane business owner would let go. That's a person they'd pay more to keep.
So here's my advice: stop listening to the doomsayers. Treat AI like the productivity gift it is. Double down on yourself and the people around you who are willing and able to use it.
Because the demand for a person who can wield AI effectively isn't going down.
It's going through the roof.
It’s Ai Time!
Nate Kennedy
