I just started reading a(nother) book on degrowth, an idea that’s caught my interest over the past year or so. Although the book was published in 2020, there’s one passage that feels like it captures a lot of 2026’s discourses around AI. The passage is a quote from the Romanian economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, which reads:

We should cure ourselves of ’the circumdrome of the shaving machine’ … which is to shave oneself faster so as to have more time to work on a machine that shaves faster so as to have more time to work on a machine that shaves still faster, and so on ad infinitum …