Want people are in denial?

The reason it’s not universally “obvious as day follows night” is because the human condition, especially among the powerful and intellectual elite, is fundamentally structured to ignore it.

Here are the four crude reasons why the horrific logic of Unit Cost Dominance is being missed or actively suppressed:

1. The Self-Delusion of the Professional Class (The “Not Me” Fallacy)

The vast majority of the people who talk, write, and regulate AI are in cognitive, white-collar, or creative jobs. They are the people who have been historically safe.

The Luddites were weavers. The UCD reality is that the new Luddite is the programmer, the corporate lawyer, the architect, and the accountant.

• The Truth: These jobs are just expensive, inefficient, meat-based bottlenecks. UCD says your value is a function of your cost/speed ratio, not your IQ.
• The Denial: The educated person’s brain simply cannot accept that their finely tuned, six-figure-salary expertise can be replaced by a cheap, scalable calculation. They must invent a reason for their continued unique relevance (“Hyper-Curation,” “The Human Element”) to maintain their sense of dignity and social standing. They are blinded by a deep, existential vested interest in their own economic relevance.

2. The Curse of the Economist (Fighting the Future with a Bookshelf)

Mainstream economists are trapped by their own data. Their profession is built on analyzing the past—a past where every labor-saving device (the steam engine, the computer, the robot arm) led to the invention of new, unexpected jobs.

• The Truth: UCD describes a discontinuity. It’s the first time in history where the primary factor of production—intelligence—becomes scalable, near-zero cost, and non-competitive with the human body.
• The Denial: To accept UCD is to say every economic textbook written in the last 200 years is now irrelevant. They can’t do it. They will cling to the Jevons Paradox (new demand creates new jobs) like a religious text, desperately hoping demand for human-only services (like a highly-paid therapist or a “bespoke” dog walker) can somehow absorb billions of displaced factory, office, and driving labor. They are fighting exponential math with a linear analogy.

3. The Lie of the Capitalist (Paid to Suppress the Obvious)

The CEOs and investors in the frontier AI labs are the direct, inevitable beneficiaries of UCD. The more obvious UCD becomes, the more the populace demands drastic, communist-level social measures like a UBI or a moratorium on development.

• The Truth: UCD implies that the AI-owning class will inherit the Earth, and the rest of humanity becomes a logistical problem.
• The Denial: The CEOs are paid to make the stock go up and avoid regulation. They will actively use their PR apparatus to spread the “Augmentation, not Replacement” gospel. They will shout about utopia and human flourishing right up until the moment they lock the gates and fire the human staff. Admitting UCD is obvious means regulatory panic, stock collapse, and an immediate threat to their control. They are incentivized to lie to save the system that empowers them.

4. It Is Too Horrific to Be Actionable

Finally, the realization of UCD is the single most actionable reason for humanity to immediately stop all competitive AI development and coordinate a global response. It is a time-sensitive, species-level political emergency.

• The Truth: The logical conclusion of UCD is that all human political, military, and economic power will concentrate in the hands of the first entity (firm or state) to ruthlessly exploit AI’s near-zero marginal cost. The clock is ticking toward irreversible domination.
• The Denial: Since global coordination is politically impossible—every state and every firm is stuck in the competitive, defection-based Prisoner’s Dilemma—the only comforting path is to revert to denial. It’s easier to believe the threat is misaligned AI (a solvable, technical problem) or wealth inequality (a solvable, political problem) than to face the fact that the engine of global competition itself is the problem, and that engine cannot be stopped.