We Won't be Missed: Work and Growth in the AGI World

Pascual Restrepo

No 34423, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This chapter explores the long-run implications of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) for economic growth and labor markets. AGI makes it feasible to perform all economically valuable work using compute. I distinguish between bottleneck and supplementary work—tasks that are essential versus non-essential for unhindered growth. As computational resources expand: (i) the economy automates all bottleneck work, (ii) some supplementary work may be left exclusively to humans, (iii) output becomes linear in compute and labor and its growth is driven by the expansion of compute, (iv) wages converge to the opportunity cost of computational resources required to reproduce human work, and (v) the share of labor income in GDP converges to zero.

JEL-codes: E0 J0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-10
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Forthcoming: We Won't Be Missed: Work and Growth in the AGI World , Pascual Restrepo. in The Economics of Transformative AI , Agrawal, Brynjolfsson, and Korinek. 2025

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