My latest in the
@FT today. I make four points:
1) Capitalism's great achievement was moving activity out of the household and into the market — turning domestic production into paid specialisation, creating jobs, and making output visible to the national accounts. AI-enabled self-service might quietly reverse that centuries-long trend.
2) When a technology automates tasks within a service, it can trigger a Jevons paradox: the service gets cheaper, demand expands, and employment grows. When it lets people do the work themselves, demand for the service collapses.
3) AI extends this even to the manual trades, the supposed safe haven of the AI age. If a homeowner can ask a chatbot why their boiler keeps losing pressure, heating engineers lose call-outs.
4) When work shifts to the consumer, it vanishes from the economy statisticians measure. Replace a billing department with a chatbot and a firm records lower costs and higher output per worker; the national accounts register a productivity gain. But the hours patients spend decoding their own test results appear nowhere — not in labour statistics, not in GDP. As self-service spreads into professional domains, that blind spot will grow.