A.I.: An Upbeat View March 5, 2026March 4, 2026 HEADLINE: Private companies added 63,000 jobs in February, January revised to just 11,000. OF NOTE: Since 1989, 96%, have been created under Democratic presidents. WHAT’S NEW: The A.I. tsunami described in that must-read Matt Shumer piece I posted last Thursday. (You read it, right?) Executive summary: A.I. and robots will eliminate most jobs. (See also: Jack Dorsey laying off more than 4,000 of his 10,000 employees, not because business was bad — it’s good — but because they’re not needed.) BUT WAAAAAAIT! Rob B.: “You might enjoy this upbeat treatise on the looming/at hand “Intelligence Explosion”. Fairly impressive CV of the lead author.“ Oh, wow: SOLVE EVERYTHING.ORG The following three scenarios are extrapolations based on the “Industrial Intelligence Stack” and the economic physics described in this essay. . . . We are dropping you directly into the deep end of the timeline to let you feel the texture of the acceleration. This is what it feels like when the exponential progress curve turns vertical. We are living in the vertical asymptote now. . . . The old guard is still holding press conferences about “AI safety guidelines” but the Rails are already winning. The shift is visceral. You can feel it in the panic of the boardrooms where the metric of survival has shifted overnight. . . . Agents aren’t just chatting anymore. They are executing. In a cluttered dorm room overlooking the Charles River, an MIT sophomore is currently out-competing a global defense prime. He just used a Compute Escrow account to rent a localized swarm of engineering agents. He didn’t write the code. He wrote the “intent.” He specified a new guidance system for orbital debris removal that handles trajectory optimization and collision avoidance simultaneously. The agents swarmed the problem, wrote the software, and most importantly generated a Replication Pack. This is a downloadable and cryptographically signed file proving that the code is bug-free and mathematically safe. This is a project that would have taken a government lab three years and fifty million dollars in 2024. He did it in four hours for the cost of a late-night pizza. . . . Hunger is now recognized as a logistical error rather than a resource limit. It’s LONG, and (obviously) speculative. But is it science fiction? If you start reading, it may just suck you in. And if you understand it all, you’re way smarter than me. But I get the gist. Rob B. also sent this entirely unrelated but dazzling rendition of House of the Rising Sun. Which led me down the rabbit hole to this equally unrelated but dazzling While My Guitar Gently Weeps. And since we’re all thinking the same thing, I saved you the trouble of finding the clip: “Open the pod bay doors, HAL.” “I’m sorry, Dave. I can’t do that.” Tomorrow: Isaac Asimov.