An essay says a 'peopleless economy' isn't technically impossible. The economists in the thread disagree

The claim: not impossible, just grim

The essay Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible argues that an economy in which machines do the producing and a small ownership class does the consuming is not ruled out by any law of economics — that mass human labor, and even mass human consumption, could in principle be engineered out. It opens by asking the reader to drop lazy assumptions, then builds toward a dark equilibrium where automation concentrates output among a few.

The thread's best counter is a trade argument

The most upvoted rebuttal didn't dispute that AI gets capable. It disputed the economics, with a model.

"Suppose we modeled this as two separate countries: AI Island, just runs AI in data centers, and Elsewhere. Wouldn't there be gains from trade? AI Island might provide lots of cheap Internet services, but you can't eat Internet. Wouldn't they want something in exchange?" — a retired software engineer

The point is that "Elsewhere" keeps doing the things that can't be done over a wire and can always trade among itself — which is precisely the labor and consumption the essay tries to delete.

"Listen to economists, not software engineers"

A recurring complaint was about authority and assumptions. One reader drew the boundary: to understand AI capability, "listen to software engineers like this guy"; to understand AI's economic impact, "listen to economists." Another itemized the load-bearing leaps — that Western governments "won't do anything," that they'll "abandon democracy entirely and resort to police and military oppression," that mass poverty is something policing could even contain.

There was also a darker meta-observation about the genre. A reader argued this exact doomer argument has circulated on r/singularity and r/collapse for years, amplified by "upvote algorithms… emotional action-suppressing doomer content," and "is probably responsible for a horrifying amount of suicides at this point." Several pointed to a closely related essay, "The Dead Economy Theory," that drew a 1,400-comment debate weeks earlier — the idea is a recurring fixture, not a novel alarm.

Logically possible is doing a lot of work

The essay's hedge — "not technically impossible" — is also its weakness. Almost anything is technically possible if you assume away politics, retaliation, defection among elites, and the stubborn fact that people who can't buy anything stop being a market. The thread's economists aren't optimists about AI; they're skeptics about a model that holds every messy human variable constant except the one it wants to scare you with. The interesting question the essay raises is real. The certainty it reaches for isn't.