The World Has Always Found a Way to Adapt

The Kobeissi Letter, arguing that AI abundance is the most underpriced scenario in markets right now:

The most underpriced possibility today is not dystopia, it's abundance. AI may compress rents, reduce friction, and restructure labor markets, but it may also deliver the largest real productivity expansion in modern history.

The core observation is correct and underweighted: when the cost of producing something collapses, demand doesn't stay flat. It expands. PCs, the internet, cloud — every time. The "Abundance GDP" framing — real gains transmitted through falling prices rather than rising wages — is a useful concept that most doom-loop analyses ignore entirely.

But the piece does that thing contrarian financial writing always does. It finds a real crack in the consensus, pries it open, and then fills the gap with its own unfalsifiable optimism.

The speed problem is the tell. The piece itself notes that AI is commoditising cognition "across every white-collar workflow simultaneously." That's the thing that makes this cycle structurally different from PCs or the internet, which each commoditised one layer of the stack over a decade or more. And then the analysis just… proceeds as if that observation doesn't matter. Previous transitions gave people fifteen years to retrain. This one is giving them fifteen months. Maybe.

"AI lowers the barrier to entrepreneurship" is working overtime here. Sure, one person can now automate accounting, marketing, and support. But if everyone can automate accounting, marketing, and support, you're back to competing on capital, distribution, and brand — which is to say, you're back to the incumbents winning. The piece asserts this will "flatten the wealth divide" without noticing that cheaper tools have historically benefited people with existing advantages disproportionately. Chainsaws lowered the barrier to logging. The lumber industry still consolidated.

The geopolitics section — "AI-driven abundance could end wars" — is the part where I checked whether I'd accidentally scrolled into a different article. Industrialisation preceded both World Wars. The declining-battle-deaths chart has nothing to do with AI. It's filler dressed as vision.

And then there's the structure of the thing. It opens with "the obvious trade never wins," positions itself as the clear-eyed contrarian view, and closes with a pitch for a trading subscription that has "returned nearly five times the S&P 500 since 2020." The bull case is the product. That doesn't make the analysis wrong, but "what if everything is actually fine?" is itself a piece of content optimised for conversion in a fear-saturated market.

"The world has always found a way to adapt" is true at civilisational timescales. It is completely useless advice for someone whose job is being repriced this quarter. Adaptation is an outcome, not a plan. The interesting question — the one this piece never gets to — is what does the adaptation actually look like, who pays for it, and how long does it take?

That's the hard essay. This is the easy one.