It kind of reads like the author hasn’t actually tried living on microwave-only cooking, just visited it as a charming art installation.
I’m skeptical a 1900–present alternate timeline converges on “mostly microwave” for very mundane reasons. Microwave cooking punishes vibes-based seasoning; in normal cooking you can course-correct using browning, smell, sizzling sounds, or by poking the food. In a microwave, the feedback loop is basically “looks damp” → “still damp” → “suddenly lava.”
You’re also required to think about rotational symmetry before dinner. The “many potato problem” is not a thing in pan-world. And rearranging food mid-cook involves oven mitts, steam burns, and a small ritual with the double-glass-bowl setup (you want a reservoir of water to not touch the food).
I agree with the Coasean observation about firm boundaries under AGI. Mainstream economics has not addressed this issue. But:
Author is critiquing macroeconomics 101, not advanced institutional economics. The Chicago School Law and Economics, scholars like Harold Demsetz have long modeled property rights as endogenous. Demsetz famously argued that property rights emerge precisely when the economic benefits of internalizing externalities outweigh the costs of enforcement. If AGI radically lowers the cost of cognitive monitoring, tracking, and enforcement, price theory predicts that property rights would actually become more granular and fiercely defended, not less.
If an AGI manipulates humans, it is effectively changing the informational cost of certain choices. From a market perspective, an AGI acting as an ultra-persuasive marketer just alters the constraints under which humans maximize their utility. Furthermore, if AGI itself acts as a market participant, its own utility function (its alignment target or instrumental goals) becomes the driving force of market demand, acting perfectly rationally within price theory frameworks.
There is a persistent but unstated implication throughout the piece that because standard economic assumptions break down, markets as a coordination mechanism are inadequate post-AGI. These are separate questions. Prices aggregate dispersed information; that function doesn’t obviously disappear just because AGIs can own capital, copy themselves, or have mutable preferences.