Say all of that at a dinner and someone will produce the knockdown objection before the plates are cleared. If machines take the jobs, who buys the products? A company that automates everyone out of work destroys its own market. The system can’t function, therefore it won’t happen. It’s a satisfying argument and it’s wrong, and the way it’s wrong is more interesting than the argument.

The flaw is that it treats the economy as one company. Any individual firm would love everyone else to keep paying wages while it automates, and every firm reasons that way, and none of them can price in a consequence spread across the whole economy. That’s a familiar structure by now: the collective outcome nobody wants, assembled from decisions each of which is correct. The market failing to buy things is not a mechanism that stops firms from cutting costs. It’s a mechanism that produces a recession, after the fact, blamed on something else.

The deeper flaw is that demand doesn’t come from jobs, it comes from income, and wages are only one route to income. Money still exists in this scenario and it accumulates somewhere: with the owners of the systems, the owners of the compute, the owners of the land the data centers sit on. Those people buy things. Not the same things, and not from the same producers, but the money moves. An economy where the income is highly concentrated isn’t an economy that stops. It’s an economy that reorients, from many people buying ordinary goods to few people buying extraordinary ones, and history has plenty of examples of that shape and none of them broke physics.

So the honest version of the question isn’t who buys. It’s whose demand steers production, and the answer is whoever holds the income, which is exactly the argument this fortnight opened with. An economy is a conversation, and consumption is one of the four things ordinary people have been able to withhold. Take it away and you don’t get a machine that seizes up. You get the same machine, listening to fewer people.

Now the genuinely new part, which the dinner table version never reaches. In every economy that has ever existed, the chain of production has terminated in a human want. Steel exists for machines that exist for factories that exist for goods that someone eventually eats, wears, or lives in. All that intermediate activity is intermediate: it’s justified, at the far end, by a person. That’s not an economic law, it’s simply been true because we were the only participants with wants.

Consider what happens when systems doing long-running tasks start needing things from each other. One needs compute from another. One buys data, or bandwidth, or a service, or a guarantee. Chains of transactions form in which every link is a system serving another system’s requirement, and those requirements trace back to some objective that a human set at some point, in the way that a company’s activities trace back to a shareholder who has long since stopped paying attention. The chain gets longer and the human end gets further away, until most economic activity by volume consists of intermediate steps and the final consumption is a small and shrinking share of the whole.

That world isn’t customerless. It’s an economy with customers who aren’t people, buying inputs for purposes no person is tracking, and it would show up in the statistics as tremendous growth. Wednesday’s post looks at one of those transactions in slow motion, because the abstraction doesn’t land until you watch one happen.

Two honest caveats. The first is that we’re a long way from that, and the economy today is overwhelmingly human demand with a thin layer of automation on top. The second is more substantial: as long as the systems are owned, their purchases really do trace back to owners, and owners are people with houses and appetites. The chain being long doesn’t mean it’s cut. My answer is that a chain long enough stops transmitting: the shareholder analogy is the whole point, since companies routinely do things no shareholder would endorse or even understand, while remaining formally in their service.

Tonight’s exercise. Pick something you bought this month and trace it backward. The shop, the distributor, the manufacturer, the components, the raw materials, the machines that made the machines. Get as far as you can, and notice how quickly you’re describing activity that no consumer has any awareness of and that would continue for months if every customer vanished. Then ask what share of the total economy is already like that, and whether you’d notice if it grew.