Back Research Notes When Growth Detaches from Labor: How AI Disrupts the Macroeconomic Framework Published on March 4, 2026 By Jordi Visser When Growth Detaches from Labor: How AI Disrupts the Macroeconomic Framework Executive Summary: The Great Decoupling This paper is a philosophical exploration of a potential future rather than a report on current economic conditions. It serves as a framework for thought regarding the ways the world may change as we enter an Agentic era. While our current system remains intact today, I believe the modern macroeconomic operating system is approaching a point of structural failure. For over a century, productivity gains supported human labor. However, a transition toward a world driven by artificial intelligence suggests that output could eventually scale through compute rather than human headcount. If these views hold true, the foundational links driving models like the Phillips Curve and Okun’s Law will fracture as growth begins to detach from labor participation. This gets away from the debate of job destruction and focuses on the relationship between labor and our historically based thinking around macroeconomics in a world of digital knowledge workers and physical humanoid laborers. For investors, this shift suggests a move away from cyclical timing toward a practice of structural handicapping. In this potential future, AI innovation could compress decades of creative destruction into months. This would create a two tier economy defined by massive capital concentration in physical infrastructure like energy and chips alongside hyper accelerated churn in software applications. As corporate decisions shift from the cost of hiring to the cost of compute, traditional monetary policy may lose its efficacy. In such a regime, rigor is not found in the precision of a back tested model but in the ability to update probabilities as the exponential curve of intelligence moves from scarcity toward abundance. Investor Implications If growth begins to detach from labor and macroeconomic relationships become less stable, several structural shifts for investors are likely to follow: Higher volatility and higher volatility of volatility as markets adjust to faster technological change and shorter competitive cycles. Wider credit spreads as earnings visibility declines and fixed obligations become riskier in a world of accelerating disruption. Long duration assets face structural pressure as predictability declines and discount rates reflect greater uncertainty about the future. Liquidity becomes increasingly valuable as investors favor assets that can adapt quickly in a rapidly changing economic environment. Passive investment strategies face growing challenges because capitalization weighted indexes allocate capital based on past winners rather than emerging leadership. Equity dispersion increases as innovation cycles accelerate, creating larger gaps between companies that successfully adapt to AI and those that do not. Real assets tied to energy, compute, and physical infrastructure gain strategic importance as AI development requires massive increases in power, chips, and data centers. Corporate leverage becomes more dangerous as faster creative destruction shortens the lifespan of competitive advantages. Monetary policy becomes less predictive as traditional transmission channels tied to labor markets weaken. Liquidity conditions become a more important driver of markets than traditional macro indicators such as unemployment or GDP. The ultimate endgame described here is a shift toward fiscal dominance and a total revaluation of the capital structure. If the labor wage consumption cycle weakens as I expect, political pressure will likely force even greater fiscal intervention and a reorganization of the tax base. In this scenario, sovereign debt might lose its status as a safe asset and begin to carry equity like risk. This paper provides a framework for navigating this macro paradox. It is an argument that the most successful investors in the coming decade will be those who stop trying to fit an exponential future into a linear past and instead prepare for a world that does not yet exist. It also opens the door for a better understanding very soon for all investors around how the financial guardrails of the world will also change to support the Agentic world and a world of deepfakes and cyber-attacks. A Breakfast Discussion First of all, this is the first long form philosophical piece I have written for 22V. I usually save this for Substack but this one is something I have worked on for a long time and I think it has become more important due to how fast things are moving and the disruptions already taking place, so the time for posting it is now. It is long but you can always put it into your favorite LLM if you want a summary beyond the Executive Summary, but I do think it is an important one for all investors and parents to think about as we accelerate in the year of the rise of the Agentic world. This week I sat down for breakfast to share my current views, which triggered finishing the paper on the train. One of the people at the table was a smart, experienced, well read person who thinks in macroeconomic terms. He has a deep understanding of the ways the macro economy has worked historically and strong beliefs about what has driven growth. I have historically loved these back-and-forth discussions but I have learned over the last year in these types of conversations that we will inevitably reach the point where my views around the singularity and what the future may look like lead to a deep difference in opinion. Once the question at the table becomes, “What do you think the world will look like in five to ten years,” it always seems to bring out emotions. For those wondering why I write things for 22V but also on Substack, it is this reason. I want to be able to share my deep philosophical views ten years out regarding AI, jobs, the economy, and especially crypto, because none of us know but I do think about it a lot and what I write today will inevitably change along the way. Most importantly, you cannot make money off ten years from now, so I would never send something to an audience of 22V investors making decisions each day that does not help that process. For this five-to-ten-year view, I described a world where artificial intelligence replaces not just tasks but entire cognitive functions at scale. Where humanoid robots begin entering the physical labor force. Where the speed of innovation compresses what used to take decades into years. Where the macroeconomic frameworks we were both trained on, the ones built on labor participation, wage transmission, and consumption driven growth, begin to fracture under the weight of a technology that does not need people to produce output. The reaction was immediate and familiar. Strong disagreement. Too much narrative, not enough facts. Where are the models? Where is the data? You are telling a story, not making an argument. All true when pushed into five-to-ten-year views, and what makes it worse is that I said it with conviction but not certainty since we do not know. When sharing views, they should come with conviction or not at all in my opinion. Make your own decisions but collect anyone who has thought deeply about an important topic. Since my visit to Singularity University in 2013, this has been my focus, not since AI became a headline. This back and forth about facts versus things that are difficult to measure, like the future, is a divide that has defined much of my career. Equities versus bonds, or hope versus facts. Discretionary versus quantitative. People who think in narratives about the future versus people who think in models built on the past. And it only gets worse if I bring up Bitcoin, which is why I have learned to draw the line at certain tables. But here is what I have come to understand. Like everyone else, I do not know for certain what the fu