Emad Mostaque > Quotes

“We are not just facing a more efficient competitor; we are facing a different category of economic life.”
― Emad Mostaque, The Last Economy: A Guide to the Age of Intelligent Economics

“The most profound change is not just that AI replaces the mind.

It is that it introduces a new form of labor into the world with a completely different physical basis.

This is the Metabolic Rift.”
― Emad Mostaque, The Last Economy: A Guide to the Age of Intelligent Economics

“In the long run, we're all alive, but economically irrelevant. Unless we build an economy where relevance is not economic.”
― Emad Mostaque, The Last Economy: A Guide to the Age of Intelligent Economics

“It is not anxiety. It is pattern recognition. Your brain is processing these harbingers even if you lack the vocabulary. That feeling of deep, systemic wrongness? That is your limbic system screaming that the water is about to boil.”
― Emad Mostaque, The Last Economy: A Guide to the Age of Intelligent Economics

“Your economic position is determined less by your talent and more by your network position.”
― Emad Mostaque, The Last Economy: A Guide to the Age of Intelligent Economics

“For the first time in economic history, we face an inversion with no obvious landing place. We are the generation that will live through the discontinuity. The last humans to remember when human thought had economic value. The first to discover what comes after.”
― Emad Mostaque, The Last Economy: A Guide to the Age of Intelligent Economics

“Your economic life expectancy is shrinking.
Not your job. Not your career.
Your relevance as a human being.”
― Emad Mostaque, The Last Economy: A Guide to the Age of Intelligent Economics

“The machines have not just taken our jobs. They have freed us from the lie that we are our jobs.”
― Emad Mostaque

“This reveals the great miscalculation of the modern era. We have been trained to obsess over the opportunity cost of our time, a resource that AI makes infinitely productive, while ignoring the opportunity cost of our attention, the only resource that remains truly finite. In the world after economics, the crucial question is not "What could I be producing?" but "What am I choosing to experience?”
― Emad Mostaque, The Last Economy: A Guide to the Age of Intelligent Economics

“An AI can explore a thousand design variations in the time a human could explore one, making the "cost" of a forgone design negligible.”
― Emad Mostaque, The Last Economy: A Guide to the Age of Intelligent Economics

“The unbundling of work also forces the collapse of its intellectual shadow: the concept of opportunity cost.”
― Emad Mostaque, The Last Economy: A Guide to the Age of Intelligent Economics

“AI makes human labor unnecessary for Income.”
― Emad Mostaque, The Last Economy: A Guide to the Age of Intelligent Economics