Silicon Valley has built a vast economic edifice on an assumption that remains surprisingly untested: that once artificial intelligence becomes sufficiently capable, almost everyone will use it as intensively as software engineers do. The assumption matters because extraordinary sums are being committed to make it possible. Technology companies are spending hundreds of billions of dollars on data centres, specialised chips and the electricity needed to run them.

The investment is premised not merely on AI becoming useful, but on it becoming an indispensable and heavily consumed utility across the economy. So far, software developers offer the strongest proof that this can happen. AI coding assistants have moved rapidly from novelty to everyday tools. Engineers increasingly use AI to generate, debug and rewrite code, allowing a single worker to accomplish tasks that once required considerably more time. For technology companies, programmers are therefore the model customer: digitally sophisticated, frequent users whose work generates an obvious and measurable demand for computing power. But coders can supervise an AI system without........

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