Road to Salvation: AI is Not the Breakdown, But the Reprieve
Chris Rea didn’t have artificial intelligence in mind when he wrote his 1989 hit The Road to Hell, but his warning, “This ain’t no technological breakdown. Oh no, this is the road to hell", has found new resonance in the age of generative AI. The latest employment data seems to vindicate the pessimists: Challenger, Gray & Christmas reported more than 153,000 job cuts in October, the highest for that month since 2003. Companies are restructuring at speed, with AI adoption frequently cited as the cause. The image of automation devouring jobs fits neatly into a familiar narrative of economic collapse, where technology hollows out livelihoods and destabilises society.
Yet that view is dangerously incomplete. The anxiety over shrinking pay packets captures only one side of the ledger, ignoring the countervailing force that will shape the century: the collapsing cost of living driven by demographics and AI-powered deflation.
Across the developed world, fertility rates have fallen below replacement levels, and workforces are shrinking. Without a productivity shock, this demographic implosion would mean chronic shortages, rising costs and a slow-burn inflation trap. The real “road to hell” would be a world short not of jobs, but of workers.
AI’s arrival therefore marks not an existential threat to labour but a reprieve from demographic gravity. Automation has appeared at the moment it was needed, not to replace a surplus of people, but to substitute for their absence. As ageing populations drain the supply of human labour, intelligent systems and robotics are taking up the slack, allowing economies to sustain output and living standards.
The result is a new, structural form of deflation—not the demand-crushing kind of recessions, but cost-deflation born of efficiency. AI drives the marginal cost of producing complex goods and services ever closer to zero. Nominal wages may stagnate as human output becomes replicable, but the price of what those wages buy collapses in tandem.
For most consumers, wealth is better measured by purchasing power than by salary size. When the price of core goods and services plunges, a modest pay cheque can still buy more comfort and convenience than at any point in history. Even those outside the AI capital elite stand to gain from the abundance it unleashes and the erosion of scarcity in many sectors.
The politics of this transition will be turbulent. Redundant job titles make headlines; invisible price declines do not. Yet, in time, AI’s deflationary engine may prove the most benign disruption of all, rescuing ageing economies from inflationary paralysis and transforming scarcity into surplus.
This ain’t no technological breakdown, nor the road to hell, this is the road to salvation.
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