Artificial intelligence will not save the economy, it accelerates it, and this in all directions. Because if the productivity gains are real, massive, and measurable, they are added to a budgetary and social model which is already above ground.
Too many decision -makers confuse technical progress and economic progress, but AI is not a solution, but an amplifier. It will enrich those prepared there, and will precipitate others in a brutal destabilization, whether the states, middle classes, or even social systems.
An economy that goes by humans
The virtuous work loop → Income → Consumption is breaking. The most advanced companies no longer hire and automate. In no case do they seek to “create IA jobs”, but seek to reduce costs, industrialize processes, and lock their value chain as much as possible.
Productivity increases, but without redistribution, and worse, it eliminates the need to redistribute because we produce more … with fewer people.
Gold Capitalism without work is a contradictionif employees become an adjustment variable replaced by models, which will finance the demand? Who pays contributions? Who feeds retirement, health, or even insurance systems?
Insolvent states in the face of super profitable companies
While companies rationalize, and startups are now created in minimalist teams, states go into debt. In France as in the United States, deficits explode, social spending rises, when tax revenues stagnate. The taxable basis of wages contracts, while public needs increase with the aging of the population, precariousness, deindustrialisation, ecological transition, and increasing geopolitical instability.
The AI models are held by globalized private actors, with extraterritorial benefits that are difficult to tax. At the same time, national states must assume the social costs of a technological transition alone that they do not control.
It is not a crisis, but a diet transition.
We must stop believing that we live a “technological revolution” in the classic sense, because it is not a new industrial phase that opens, but a real historical break.
In previous transitions (energy, digital, automation), Productivity gains were disseminated by employment, infrastructure, mass consumption. The AI completely skips this scheme with light, distributable tools, little dependent on the local fabric. Their efficiency is based on models, centralization of data, computes them and energy.
It is a new economy that is created, without friction, without arms, without border, but also, without balance.
The real subject: the social contract is collapsing
The implicit contract of the 20th century was based on a promise: if you work, you will have access to a certain level of economic security, but this contract is being dissolved by technological dynamics (IA, robotization), without anyone replacing it.
School and higher education are late, tax policies are obsolete, public debates are in the wrong time, and the middle classes won, not for lack of talent, but by lack of visibility in their place in this new economy.
The question is no longer what IA can do, but what will we do with the world it produces?
It’s time to stop fantasizing AI as an economic miracle. It requires rebuilding a lost balance, because if we continue to think of growth at the top and austerity at the bottom, private productivity and public debt, automation without redistribution, then we will have the answer to the question asked, yes, The AI will enrich a minority, and will ruin everything else.
