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The AI Economy's Two Roads to Nowhere

The quiet collapse everyone's pretending not to see

BILL ANASTAS NOV 16, 2025

Hey there,

Here's what caught my attention this week:

Articles Worth Your Time

Genius Exec Says There Are Only Two Possibilities for AI: It'll Collapse the Economy, or Make Everyone's Job Obsolete

futurism.com

Keith Riegert just said the quiet part out loud - the entire AI economy is betting $550B a year on two different versions of collapse, either we automate so much we kill demand or we hit technical limits and can't scale. Both paths end the same way, which makes you wonder what the hell everyone thinks they're actually building here.

The State of AI: Energy is king, and the US is falling behind

technologyreview.com

China added 6x more power capacity than the US last year because they figured out energy is the actual constraint for winning AI, not some side infrastructure issue. We're still running aging coal plants at 42% capacity while they're treating this like the bottleneck that determines who controls the next decade.

The 'Toy Story' You Remember

animationobsessive.substack.com

Toy Story had to be rendered digitally but then transferred to physical film stock to actually screen in theaters - the tech wasn't there yet for full digital projection. Worth remembering when people act like animation tech just magically flipped overnight instead of this messy hybrid workflow that nobody talks about.

OpenAI Is Reportedly Burning a Ludicrous Amount of Cash on Sora

futurism.com

OpenAI's burning $15M a day on Sora while losing $12B a quarter, and even their lead engineer admitted the economics are "completely unsustainable." At some point the board has to decide if they're actually building a business or just running an expensive research lab on someone else's dime.