AI Futures
[1]
D. Kokotajlo, S. Alexander, et al., "AI 2027," 2025.
Narrates the progression from unreliable agents to superintelligent AI researchers by late 2027. Focuses on the technical control problem: alignment, deception, and oversight failure.
[2]
Citrini Research, "The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis," 2025.
A fictional macro memo from June 2028 in which AI-driven white-collar displacement cascades into credit defaults, mortgage stress, and a 38% market drawdown. Models the negative feedback loop of automation and consumer spending collapse.
[3]
M. Bloch, "The 2028 Global Intelligence Boom," 2025.
A counterpoint to Citrini using the same framing device. AI abundance creates deflationary prosperity, purchasing power gains, and an entrepreneurial surge. "The intelligence premium didn't unwind. It was democratized."
Economic History
[4]
R. C. Allen, "Engels' pause: Technical change, capital accumulation, and inequality in the British Industrial Revolution," Explorations in Economic History, vol. 46, no. 4, pp. 418-435, 2009.
Coined "Engels' Pause" to describe the 60-year gap between rising productivity and rising wages (1780-1840). Output per worker rose 46% while real wages rose only 12%.
[5]
C. B. Frey, The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation, Princeton University Press, 2019.
Documents that the benefits of mechanization didn't reach ordinary workers for approximately three generations (60-80 years). Provides the historical framework for understanding technology-driven inequality.
[6]
E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, Victor Gollancz, 1963.
Documents the human cost of industrialization: handloom weavers' wages fell from 21 shillings/week in 1802 to under 9 by 1817. Shows how industrialization transformed work from craft autonomy to factory discipline.
[7]
J. Mokyr, The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain, 1700-1850, Yale University Press, 2012.
Argues that institutional agility, the speed at which governance, education, and labor protections adapted, was the critical variable determining whether societies navigated the Industrial Revolution or were consumed by it.
Labor, Institutions & Equity
[8]
D. Autor, C. Chin, A. M. Salomons & B. Seegmiller, "New Frontiers: The Origins and Content of New Work, 1940-2018," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 139, no. 3, pp. 1399-1465, 2024.
Demonstrates that approximately 60% of employment in 2018 is in occupations that didn't exist in 1940. New work gets created in volumes impossible to predict in advance.
[9]
D. Acemoglu & S. Johnson, Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity, PublicAffairs, 2023.
"There is nothing automatic about new technologies bringing widespread prosperity. Whether they do or not is an economic, social, and political choice."
[10]
J. Humphries, Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution, Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Research on child labor during the Industrial Revolution showing that even after the Factory Acts (1833), enforcement was weak and education provisions were widely evaded.
Automation & Future of Employment
[11]
C. B. Frey & M. A. Osborne, "The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation?" Oxford Martin Programme on Technology and Employment, 2013.
Identified the skills most resistant to automation: creative intelligence, social intelligence, and working in unstructured environments.