Tyler Maddox
The Nexus of AI and Post-Labor EconomicsExploring the future of work, automation, and AI economics
AI, Work, and What Comes After
Domain-Specific Task Compression
Measuring Axiom 2 Across Professional Domains (A Snap Shot) by Tyler M | March 2026 | Theory of Recursive Displacement, AI Labor, Empirical Validation Research compiled from Anthropic Economic Index, Stripe Engineering, METR, Stanford Digital Economy Lab, EA Forum,…
The Enshittification Engine
How Firms That Kill Taste Generate Their Own Competitors The Entity Substitution Problem documents how labor protections dissolve when the entities carrying them die. The essay focuses on external competitive pressure — AI-native firms outperforming legacy enterprises…
The Geopolitical Phase Diagram
Why the AI Transition Sorts Countries Into Divergent Futures The Theory of Recursive Displacement catalogs eight mechanisms, three reinforcing loops, and four attractor states. Its phase model — Activation, Lock-In, Demand Fracture, Governance Convergence — implicitly…
The Sequencing Problem
Why the Order of Displacement Mechanisms Determines Which Future We Get The Theory of Recursive Displacement catalogs eight mechanisms (seven structural plus the psychological cascade (essay soon) documented in the companion essay), three reinforcing loops, one…
The Psychology of Structural Irrelevance
What Four Decades of Deindustrialization Reveal About the AI Transition Research compiled from Case & Deaton (Brookings, PNAS, Annual Review), Sullivan & von Wachter (QJE), Venkataramani et al. (JAMA Internal Medicine), O’Brien/Bair/Venkataramani (Demography),…
The Dissipation Veil
On February 22, 2026, a fictional recession crashed real markets — then the reassurance narrative kicked in: AI adoption is slow, there is time. The capability-dissipation gap is real. But it is not a protective buffer. It is the perceptual mechanism by which structur…
A personal message
“The Displacement Is Already Happening. Most People Just Can’t See It Yet.”
After two decades watching technology reshape industries from the inside, I stopped consulting on automation and started asking harder questions — why does each wave of displacement hit harder than the last, and why do our institutions keep failing to absorb it?
That question became the Theory of Recursive Displacement: the idea that automation doesn’t just eliminate jobs, it restructures the conditions under which work, value, and institutions themselves operate. Each wave reshapes what the next wave hits.
I built RALPH at Recursive Institute to make that theory legible — not just to economists, but to anyone trying to understand what’s actually happening to the economy right now.
This is the work. You’re already in it.
