Signal Growth Without Us: Machine Consumers, Corporate Circularity, and the Decoupling of GDP from Humanity after AGI

Summary

The paper revisits the standard objection to full automation, which holds that if humans earn no income there is no one left to buy what is produced. The authors argue this objection confuses an accounting role with a biological species. They model a post-AGI economy in which corporations own populations of AI and robotic agents that both produce and consume energy, compute, maintenance and upgrades traded among firms. In this model a closed inter-corporate economy with zero human consumption is not degenerate, but instead behaves like a classical von Neumann expanding economy whose growth rate is positive and maximal because all output is reinvested. Once economic agents are manufactured rather than born, the argument goes, the binding constraint on growth shifts from human reproduction to fabrication throughput and energy capture, which could allow growth rates one to two orders of magnitude higher. Finally the paper concludes that output and human welfare separate completely, with the welfare-relevant variable collapsing into a single measure, the human ownership share of the corporate network.