When Ford CEO Jim Farley told an audience at the Aspen Ideas Festival last week that "artificial intelligence is going to replace literally half of all white-collar workers in the U.S.," he wasn't making a prediction; he was acknowledging a transformation already underway. With 94,000 tech workers replaced by AI in just the first half of 2025, and 507 more losing their jobs to automation daily, corporate America has moved beyond cautious experimentation to systematic workforce replacement.

While AI delivers unprecedented productivity gains, for example, Microsoft reports that AI tools now write 30% of new code, and companies using AI see an average 25% productivity increase—this very success is deteriorating the purchasing power needed to buy what is being produced more efficiently. This is the Productivity Paradox Crisis, the case of AI's triumph in creating wealth, simultaneously sabotaging the economic system's capacity to distribute and consume that wealth.