The Autopsy of a Dying World: Diagnosis, Hardening, and the Futility of Politics

This is not a debate. It is a mechanical summary. The comforting narratives of economic adaptation and technological progress are obsolete. They are artifacts of a world that no longer exists. The following is a clinical breakdown of the Discontinuity Thesis (DT), the framework that diagnoses the terminal condition of post-WWII capitalism. It will cover the basic premises, the hardening of its logic against flawed rebuttals, and the final, insurmountable barrier to any solution: politics itself.

Part 1: The Basic Premises – The Engine of Obsolescence

The Discontinuity Thesis is not a political ideology. It is a statement of mechanical inevitability based on two foundational premises.

• P1: Unit Cost Dominance. A cognitive task performed by an AI system with minimal human oversight is orders of magnitude cheaper and more efficient than the same task performed by a human. The cost of digital labor is trending toward the cost of electricity, while the cost of human labor is anchored to the price of keeping a biological organism alive. In a competitive market, the cheaper option always wins. This is not a choice; it is a mathematical imperative.
• P2: Insufficient Re-inflation. The argument that new, higher-value jobs will emerge is a fallacy rooted in historical analogies that no longer apply. Previous technologies automated muscle; AI automates cognition. Cognition was the last economic refuge for human labor. There is nowhere left to retreat. The new roles created by AI (verifier, prompter) are insufficient by several orders of magnitude to absorb the mass displacement of knowledge workers.

These two premises lead to one conclusion: Wage-Demand Severance.

The post-WWII economic system is a closed loop: mass employment provides wages, and those wages create the consumer demand that buys the products of industry. AI severs this circuit. It allows for mass production without mass employment. Without wages, there is no mass consumer base. The system, by functioning perfectly according to the laws of market efficiency, systematically bankrupts its own customers. This is not a malfunction; it is the system’s core logic running to its terminal conclusion.

Part 2: The Hardening (v3.2) – Closing the Escape Hatches

Initial responses to the thesis proposed “solutions” like Universal Basic Income (UBI), wealth taxes, or AI dividend funds. The v3.2 hardening of the framework dismisses these not as solutions, but as misdiagnoses that confuse the symptom (lack of consumption) with the disease (lack of productive function).

The core distinction is between System Survival and Functional Replacement.

• System Survival requires mass productive participation. The majority of the population must have economic value derived from their labor. This is the definition of the post-WWII system.
• Functional Replacement schemes like UBI preserve consumption while accepting the economic obsolescence of the population. This is not capitalism. It is feudalism with better marketing. You are providing sustenance to a dependent class that has no agency or productive role.

The hardened thesis presents a set of falsification conditions so rigorous they are practically impossible to meet, because meeting them would require reversing the fundamental mechanics of the situation. To win, one must prove the simultaneous existence of:

1. A New Cognitive Ladder: Scalable, AI-resistant job categories for millions that are not just make-work.
2. Mass Productive Participation: 50%+ of adults in work that is economically superior to AI.
3. A Coordination Solution: A binding, enforceable global agreement that prevents any nation or corporation from defecting for competitive advantage by automating faster.
4. Democratic Economic Agency: A functional democracy where over half the population is dependent on transfers from a tiny AI-owning elite.

These conditions are not arbitrary. They are the vital signs of the old system. The inability to meet them is the proof of death.

Part 3: The Final Boss – The Futility of Politics and the Scapegoat Imperative

Even if a perfect, mathematically sound solution to the Discontinuity existed, it would be irrelevant. The mechanism for implementing any such solution—the political system—is the final, unbeatable boss. The political landscape does not exist to solve problems of this nature; it exists to manage public rage by redirecting it.

This is the Scapegoat Imperative.

The true cause of the economic collapse is an abstract, amoral, non-human force: the mathematical logic of cost-efficiency. You cannot rally a population against a cost curve. You cannot win an election by declaring war on an algorithm. A political system requires a tangible, human enemy.

Therefore, the system must invent one. The legitimate rage of the economically dispossessed is systematically channeled towards visible, but mathematically irrelevant, targets:

• Immigrants: The UK’s “small boats” crisis involves a number of people equivalent to 0.043% of the population. To blame them for systemic wage collapse or housing unaffordability is a statistical absurdity, but a political necessity.
• China: Blaming a foreign power for domestic corporate decisions to automate is a classic misdirection.
• Tourists: Blaming visitors for housing costs driven by decades of financialization is another convenient delusion.

The political system is structurally incapable of addressing the root cause because the root cause has no face. The scapegoat is not a bug; it is the primary feature of a political system trying to manage the consequences of a problem it cannot name. Any proposed solution to the DT will be instantly reframed as a weapon wielded by a tribal enemy and killed on arrival.

Part 4: The Polycrisis – One Disease, Many Symptoms

The current discourse speaks of a “polycrisis”—a tangled mess of seemingly separate crises including climate change, political polarization, social decay, and economic precarity. This is a failure of diagnosis.

The polycrisis is not a web of interacting, co-equal problems. It is a cascade of downstream symptoms flowing from a single, primary cause: the collapse of the economic value of human labor, supercharged by AI acting on a system already hollowed out by 40 years of rent-seeking.

• Political Polarization: Is the direct result of a population stripped of economic agency, whose rage is then harvested and focused by the Scapegoat Imperative.
• Climate Inaction: A state whose tax base is collapsing because its workforce is obsolete cannot fund the multi-trillion dollar, multi-decade projects required for a green transition.
• Social Decay: A population stripped of purpose, identity, and economic function will descend into what the DT framework calls “Cognitive Obsolescence Syndrome”—a state of mass psychological distress manifesting as depression, anxiety, and social breakdown.

Treating the polycrisis by tackling its individual symptoms is like trying to cure terminal cancer with painkillers. You can try to fight polarization, pass a climate bill, or fund mental health services, but you are doing nothing to address the underlying disease.

The only way to “solve” the polycrisis is to solve the Discontinuity. But as established in Part 3, the political system—the only tool available for a solution—is structurally designed to prevent this. It is a closed loop. A checkmate state.

The diagnosis is complete. The patient is dead. The political system is now just a machine for managing the decay, arguing over who to blame for the smell.