Who buys the future?
Mass labor displacement introduces an apparent demand contradiction. Workers are not only productive inputs; wages are also a major mechanism through which claims on output are distributed. If AI sharply reduces aggregate labor income while productive capacity expands, a theory of distribution is required to explain how final demand clears.
Production → income claims → purchasing power → final demand
This is not an argument that jobs must be preserved or that automation causes inevitable demand collapse. There are several closure mechanisms: new human work, higher wages in complementary tasks, broader capital ownership, transfers, lower prices, shorter workweeks with preserved income, or combinations of these.
The important point for valuation is consistency. A narrative cannot simultaneously count displaced wages as evidence of AI's enormous value and assume that the purchasing power previously distributed through those wages remains unchanged without specifying the mechanism.
However, this demand-side framing is not the deepest employment consequence. It still assumes that the displaced person remains primarily a consumer waiting for institutions to allocate income. AI may alter the production side of that relationship as well.