Seven essays, seven structural diagrams
Each card compresses one essay into its core mechanism, then links into the full argument for bots and human readers.
1. Unit Cost Dominance
The Cost Threshold
AI plus verification becomes substitutive when it is cheaper than human-only production at equivalent quality.
Capability parity is no longer the decisive question. The decisive question is verification and integration cost.2. Interface Collapse
Task Wins Become Workflow Wins
Once AI can operate software interfaces, isolated task dominance propagates upward into whole workflows.
The worker does not lose one task at a time. The workflow is recomposed around agents, APIs, and verification layers.3. The Multiplayer Prisoner's Dilemma
Nobody Can Pause Alone
Restraint is dominated at worker, firm, sector, and state level once competitors deploy.
Every actor may prefer a slower transition, but each is punished for being the one that slows first.4. The Sorites Collapse Principle
No Clean Assistance Line
Assistance and replacement sit on a continuous gradient, not in separable policy boxes.
The boundary exists nowhere and everywhere: each small step is defensible, but the endpoint is substitution.5. Categorical Recursion
Capital Routes Around Labels
Regulation that depends on stable categories is outpaced by reclassification, outsourcing, and recomposition.
The protected category becomes a map for avoidance unless the intervention targets value flow directly.6. The Successor System
Consumption Without Wages
A successor can preserve consumption while ending the wage-demand mechanism that made work necessary.
The question shifts from saving jobs to deciding how purchasing power, ownership, and legitimacy are rebuilt.7. Drag Is Not Rescue
Friction Changes Timing
Liability, culture, regulation, and integration slow adoption, but do not reverse the competitive direction.
Drag stretches the curve. It does not create a stable equilibrium where substitution stops.