A few weeks ago I described how copying breaks the economics of expertise and then refused to say what it does to wages. Here’s the payoff, and the important part isn’t that wages fall. It’s that wages don’t fall. They hold roughly steady and then the job stops existing, and understanding why that’s the shape tells you where to look.

A wage lives between two numbers. The ceiling is what you add: nobody pays you more than the value your work creates, not for long. The floor is what you’ll accept, and that floor isn’t a preference, it’s rent, food, transport, and whatever a life costs where you live. Your pay sits somewhere in that band, and where exactly depends on bargaining, which depends on what you can withhold.

For two centuries the ceiling did the interesting work, and it did it in our favor. Better tools meant more value per hour, so the ceiling rose, and wages followed it up. That’s the entire story of industrial prosperity in one sentence, and it’s why the automation panics kept being wrong: machines raised the ceiling for the people working alongside them.

What changes now is where the ceiling comes from. Once a task has a machine substitute, the most anyone will pay a human to do it is the cost of running the substitute, plus whatever premium is worth paying for a person doing it. That’s not an economic theory, it’s just what a buyer does. So the ceiling stops being set by the value of the work and starts being set by the price of the alternative, and the price of the alternative is a compute bill on a downward curve.

Now put the two numbers together, because this is the part that gives the process its shape. Your floor is biological and roughly fixed. The ceiling is falling. They don’t meet gently. Once the ceiling passes below the floor for a given task, there’s no wage that works for both parties: any wage you could live on is more than the task is worth, and any wage the task is worth won’t feed you. Nobody negotiates a lower salary. The role is simply not advertised again, and the people in it are absorbed elsewhere or not.

Which is why the aggregate wage statistics will look fine for a long time and mean very little. This runs task by task and sector by sector, so what you see is not a general decline. You see specific categories going quiet, one at a time, over years, while everyone still employed is paid the same as before, and the average stays respectable because it’s an average of the people who still have jobs.

Now the counterweights, and there are two real ones.

The first is that everything above assumes compute is cheap and abundant. If it’s expensive and scarce, then running a system on your task means not running it on something more valuable, and that cost keeps humans in the market. This is the serious version of the economist’s answer and next Tuesday’s doubt post takes it apart properly, so I’ll leave it standing here. Note only that it’s an argument about scarcity, and the entire industry is a machine for making compute less scarce.

The second is the premium, and it’s larger than technologists tend to admit. Plenty of work is valued precisely because a person is doing it. Care, hospitality, sport, performance, teaching a child, being someone’s representative in a room, any transaction where trust or physical presence or the simple fact of a human having chosen to be there is the product. That premium is real, it’s durable, and it doesn’t scale to everyone. Its problem isn’t legitimacy, it’s arithmetic: those sectors are not large enough to absorb the ones going quiet, and many of them are the worst paid work in the economy today.

What I’d take from this is a change in what to watch. Wage levels are the wrong indicator, because they’ll look stable right up until they’re describing a smaller and smaller group. The number that matters is how many distinct kinds of work exist that a person can do and live on, and nobody publishes that, and it would be straightforward to construct.

Tonight’s exercise, and it’s the practical version of yesterday’s. Work out your own floor: the honest annual number below which your life doesn’t function where you live. Now work out what your work would have to be worth per hour to clear it. Then ask what a machine would have to cost per hour to do a passable version of the same thing, and note that you don’t need a precise answer, only which side of your number it’s on today and which direction it’s moving. That comparison, done for every kind of work in a country, is the whole of this fortnight in one calculation.