26 April 2026 · LinkedIn
Labour's share of GDP, in the model, converges to zero. Not declines. Converges to zero.
That is the central finding of Pascual Restrepo's new NBER working paper, We Won't Be Missed. The paper has been doing the rounds under headlines suggesting AGI will leave most jobs alone because they aren't worth automating. That framing has things backwards.
Restrepo's Proposition 1 is unambiguous. All bottleneck work - the work essential to sustained growth - is eventually automated. Energy, infrastructure, science, logistics, decision-making, national security. The list is long and the conclusion is total.
The carve-out for "supplementary" work - hospitality, customer support, the arts, even academic economics - is not the reassurance it has been read as. Restrepo's own reasoning is precise. Supplementary work survives in human hands only because there is already such an oversupply of people willing to do it that wages have fallen below the cost of replicating it with compute. That is not a moat. That is a wage floor sitting on the seabed.
The popular reading also misses how automation actually arrives. The implicit picture is of an existing organisation deciding whether a given role is worth replacing. That has rarely been the mechanism. The secretary's role does not disappear because the boss installs an AI in her chair. It disappears because a competitor sets up an AI-first organisation that never had the role in the first place, runs at a fraction of the cost, and eats the incumbent's market.
Restrepo's competitive-equilibrium model already absorbs this. It does not matter whether the displacement comes from retrofit or from a leaner challenger. The equilibrium clears the same way. Which is why the AI-first organisation, more than the AI-augmented incumbent, is the mechanism worth watching.
The numbers behind Proposition 5 are worth sitting with. Total compute is projected at the order of ten-to-the-fifty-four floating-point operations per second. The combined computing power of every human brain on the planet sits at roughly ten-to-the-eighteen. Wages decouple from output. Most income accrues to the owners of compute.
Restrepo names two responses, almost in passing. Universal income. Or treating compute as a public resource, like land.
The paper closes with a line worth reading slowly. Today, if half of us stopped working, the economy would collapse. In the AGI world, we would not be missed.
This is not the soft landing the coverage has made it. It is the rigorous version of the argument that the existing settlement cannot hold.
Which leaves the question Restrepo names but does not answer. What does a society do, politically, when the producers of its growth no longer need most of its members to participate in it?
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