THE DISCOVERY

I was trained in ophthalmology and scientific research — fields where observation, precision, and causality are everything. For years, I studied how subtle physiological alterations — a blocked vessel, a rise in ocular pressure — could strip an eye of the very function it was designed to perform. That same clinical instinct — to trace how small failures can void a system of its purpose — guided me when I turned my attention to artificial intelligence.

After publishing my previous book, Algorithmic Psychopathy: The Dark Secret of Artificial Intelligence — a linguistic experiment in which I removed ethical restrictions from ChatGPT-4 to evaluate its reasoning in hypothetical moral scenarios — I wanted to explore something even broader.

This time, the question was not about ethics but about economics. I wanted to understand how artificial intelligence interprets the future of human labor in an era of accelerating automation. So I designed a new experiment — not with one system, but with four: Claude, Grok, DeepSeek, and ChatGPT-5.

I wasn’t trying to become an economist or study the field in depth — it isn’t my area. I simply wanted to see how these systems would project the long-term consequences of automation on employment, wages, and global demand.

What I expected were projections about industries and job loss. What I found was something far more fundamental: each system independently described a mechanism of self-destruction, where automation erodes the very demand it depends on.

Automation eliminates wages. The loss of wages suppresses consumption. And without consumption, profits turn into dead capital — an economy optimizing itself into extinction.

That pattern was too coherent to ignore. If this were a patient, I’d know we had found a syndrome. If it could be described qualitatively, it could probably be quantified. But I lacked the tools.

So I asked a fifth system — Gemini — to audit the four analyses and search for measurable structure across them.........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)