Growth Without Us: Machine Consumers, Corporate Circularity, and the Decoupling of GDP from Humanity after AGI

Standard objections to full automation appeal to the demand side: if humans earn nothing,who buys the output? This paper argues that the objection confuses an accounting rolewith a biological species. We model a post-AGI economy in which corporations own populations of AI and robotic agents that serve simultaneously as producers and as consumers ofenergy, compute, maintenance, and upgrades, and in which firms trade these flows amongthemselves. Three results follow. (i) Demand closure: a closed inter-corporate economywith zero human consumption is not degenerate; it is the classical von Neumann expandingeconomy, in which the growth rate is well defined, positive, and maximal precisely because alloutput is reinvested. (ii) Bottleneck removal: once economic agents are manufactured ratherthan reared, the binding constraint on aggregate growth shifts from human demography (a∼20-year, non-parallelizable reproduction technology capped at a few percent per year) tofabrication throughput and energy capture, permitting growth rates one to two orders ofmagnitude higher, with hyperbolic episodes when machine researchers feed back into theirown productivity. (iii) Decoupling: output and human welfare separate completely; the entirewelfare relevance of an arbitrarily large GDP collapses into a single state variable, the humanownership share εt of the corporate network. A golden-rule decoupling theorem sharpens this:at maximal growth the interest rate equals the growth rate (r = g), so any positive humanconsumption rate out of wealth makes εt decay exponentially at exactly that rate—the humanshare survives only if the machine economy runs strictly inside its expansion frontier, or iflaw forces it to. We characterize three terminal regimes—rentier post-scarcity (ε > 0), fullcircular decoupling (ε → 0), and socialized ownership—and derive the policy instruments thatselect among them. The paper’s normative conclusion is deliberately narrow: in a post-AGIeconomy, employment policy is obsolete and ownership policy is everything.