Cheap, Fallible Cognition and the Political Economy of Expertise

The question of whether artificial intelligence will "destroy jobs" is too coarse to guide economic analysis or institutional design. A job is not an indivisible object, and machine cognition is not a uniform substitute for human labor. This paper develops a task-based and institutionally grounded framework for analyzing generative AI as cheap, scalable, and fallible cognition. The relevant margins are exposure, adoption, verification, question selection, workflow redesign, demand elasticity, ap

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ethics.ai (11 August 2026), “Cheap, Fallible Cognition and the Political Economy of Expertise,” evidence record 18803, https://ethics.ai/record/18803 (originally published by arXiv).

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