Last weekend I found myself sitting in a hotel restaurant facing a surprisingly difficult decision. The breakfast buffet cost $34. Coffee was additional. Juice was extra. Alternatively, I could order à la carte. Eggs were $27. Add coffee, perhaps some fruit, maybe juice, and suddenly the economics became unclear. Was the buffet better value? How much breakfast was I actually planning to consume? At what point did the all inclusive offer become the rational choice? And perhaps most importantly, how much mental effort was I willing to spend answering these questions before I had even had my first coffee? The irony was hard to miss. In an age of AI, I was performing an optimization exercise that felt better suited to an algorithm than a human brain.

The latest twist in the AI job replacement debate is not that machines are coming for everyone’s work. It is that, in a growing number of cases, the machines may not be cheaper. That is an awkward development for some. For the past two years, many executives have been encouraged to imagine digital labor as a form of near-frictionless substitution: fewer people, lower costs, faster output. Replace the call-center agent. Replace the analyst. Replace the junior engineer. Replace the back office. But the economics are becoming more complicated.

For most of modern knowledge work, the defining anxiety has been simple and persistent: am I doing enough? Enough hours, enough output, enough visible effort to justify my role and my compensation. Performance was measured in activity, and productivity was largely a function of how effectively human effort could be applied to a problem. But what changes when effort is no longer the constraint? When intelligence itself becomes elastic, abundant, and on demand, the question shifts. The rise of the token economy is often treated as a technical or financial detail, but it is something more revealing. It is emerging as a new measure of productivity, not in terms of effort, but in terms of leverage.

A dangerous new market narrative is spreading through boardrooms and earnings calls: artificial intelligence has made companies so productive that they can slash their workforce and barely notice the difference. Analysts applaud, the stock jumps, and executives describe a future where digital labor replaces the old human-heavy operating model. Unfortunately, the economy is rarely that tidy.

There is, perhaps, a small silver lining in the current wave of AI anxiety. Not long ago, the dominant fears revolved around killer robots, runaway superintelligence, and apocalyptic scenarios that ended with data centers being nuked from space. Today the panic is more grounded, and in many ways more sophisticated. We are no longer imagining machines conquering humanity; we are worrying about white-collar unemployment ticking above 10%, mortgage books wobbling in San Francisco, and private credit portfolios unraveling because software agents can write code faster than junior analysts. The monsters have moved from science fiction to the balance sheet.