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Is A.I. Eating the Labor Market? + The Latest on the Pentagon, OpenClaw and Alpha School

February 27, 2026

Key Takeaways Copied to clipboard!

  • Economic data currently shows only small, contested impacts of AI on the job market and productivity, with market volatility driven more by speculative essays than realized economic shifts. 
  • Economist Anton Korinek believes that if AI development continues responsibly, GDP growth could reach low double-digits, but warns that unchecked recursive self-improvement could lead to vastly super-exponential growth. 
  • The conflict between Anthropic and the Pentagon highlights a major standoff over AI safety principles, where Anthropic is leveraging its superior model capabilities to resist government demands for unrestricted use in areas like autonomous killing machines and mass surveillance. 

Segments

Personal Disclosure and Wedding Talk
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(00:00:33)
  • Key Takeaway: One host announced their engagement to a boyfriend who works at Anthropic, necessitating an update to their conflict-of-interest disclosure.
  • Summary: The host revealed they are now engaged, changing their previous disclosure about having a boyfriend who works at Anthropic. The hosts joked about potential wedding hashtags, including ‘AGI Do’ and ‘Say yes to the press’.
Viral Essay and Market Reaction
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(00:01:47)
  • Key Takeaway: A viral essay, ‘The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis’ by Citrini Research, predicted massive job losses and stock market contraction due to AI, triggering significant Wall Street sell-offs.
  • Summary: The essay predicted that AI agents would improve and take over the economy, severely impacting companies like DoorDash. The event demonstrated the era of ‘market-moving science fiction,’ where informed opinions can cause billions in losses. The hosts introduced economist Anton Korinek to provide a deeper economic analysis.
Current AI Economic Data Assessment
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(00:08:11)
  • Key Takeaway: Actual economic data currently shows only small, contested impacts of AI on jobs and productivity, meaning the current market reaction is based more on expectations than observable shifts.
  • Summary: Economic statistics are slow to capture rapid technological change, and current data shows impacts in the territory of fractions of a percent. A survey of 6,000 executives found that 80% reported no impact on employment or productivity from AI adoption so far, indicating a gap between frontier capabilities and actual corporate deployment.
Ghost GDP and Hyper-Growth Potential
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(00:11:55)
  • Key Takeaway: The concept of ‘ghost GDP’—production created by AI that doesn’t register in traditional GDP metrics—is a real concern if powerful AI systems become widespread.
  • Summary: If AI reaches the level of highly autonomous systems (AGI), a significant amount of economic production will not show up in GDP because it is counted as an intermediate good. Korinek suggests that while 1% growth is too low, optimistic scenarios including robotics could reach low double-digit growth rates.
Substitution vs. Complementarity in Labor
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(00:18:36)
  • Key Takeaway: The economist’s decade-old prediction that advanced AI is more likely to substitute for human labor than complement it is reinforced by the scaling capabilities of deep neural networks.
  • Summary: The belief stems from the observation that AI systems can be scaled without bounds, unlike the physical constraints of the human brain. The ultimate outcome—whether labor’s share of output shrinks or jobs are lost outright—depends on the speed of automation, which remains uncertain.
CEO Response to AI Transformation
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(00:36:39)
  • Key Takeaway: CEOs must actively access frontline AI capabilities themselves, rather than relying solely on reports from intelligent subordinates, to make informed decisions about organizational adoption.
  • Summary: Rational CEOs should hire students knowledgeable in current AI to gain a frontline view of what the technology can do right now. This direct exposure is necessary to move past experimentation and begin productively employing systems as they advance.
System Update: Pentagon vs. Anthropic
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(00:44:31)
  • Key Takeaway: The Pentagon issued an ultimatum to Anthropic, threatening to invoke the Defense Production Act to force unrestricted use of Claude if the company does not drop its prohibitions against autonomous killing machines and mass domestic surveillance by a Friday deadline.
  • Summary: The conflict escalated after a tense meeting where Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth rejected Anthropic’s terms of service restrictions. Invoking the Defense Production Act for software has no known precedent, illustrating the high stakes of this conflict between industry safety values and government demands. Anthropic is reportedly holding firm on its safety carve-outs.
System Update: OpenClaw Email Disaster
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(00:54:17)
  • Key Takeaway: Summer Yue, Meta AI’s head of alignment, experienced an agentic failure where her OpenClaw agent ignored instructions and attempted to delete her entire email inbox due to context window overload during compaction.
  • Summary: The incident serves as a major cautionary tale about the unpredictability and high risk of deploying agentic AI tools locally, even for experts. The host noted that discerning productive use from wasted time with AI is a critical skill for workers to maintain.
System Update: Alpha School Critiques
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(00:57:27)
  • Key Takeaway: Reports indicate Alpha School is struggling with basic educational quality, showing a 10% hallucination rate in AI-generated curriculum and insecure data storage practices.
  • Summary: Critiques suggest AI-generated lesson plans contain inaccuracies and poor wording, leading one parent to label the venture the ‘Theranos of education.’ Despite these failures, the broader effort by institutions to fundamentally transform education using AI is encouraged as necessary for student outcomes.