In The Last Economy, Emad Mostaque—hedge fund veteran and founder of Stability AI, the company behind Stable Diffusion—presents a provocative and unsettling vision of the near future. His central claim is that within the next 1,000 days, artificial intelligence will not merely disrupt industries but will render the entire structure of the global economy obsolete. Unlike earlier industrial or technological revolutions, this is not a matter of machines replacing muscle or automating repetitive tasks. Mostaque argues we are entering a “cognition transition”: the first time in history that machines will surpass human beings in intelligence, decision-making, and even creativity. The result, he suggests, is nothing less than the end of the economy as we know it.

Mostaque anchors his thesis in the idea of the “last economy,” the final stage of human-driven economics before AI takes full control. The present frameworks—GDP, productivity metrics, supply-and-demand markets—are ill-suited to measure value in a post-scarcity world. When machines can generate wealth, art, science, and engineering without human labor, GDP becomes a relic of a bygone era. In its place, Mostaque envisions a new system where value is measured less by production and more by creativity, well-being, and emotional fulfillment. It is a strikingly utopian turn, though grounded in the dystopian recognition that human work will soon carry negative value compared to machine output.

The book grapples with the existential consequences of this shift. What role will human beings play when their economic contributions are outclassed on every front? Mostaque warns of mass unemployment and a collapse of meaning, as jobs have long been the cornerstone not only of financial security but of identity and dignity. Yet he remains cautiously optimistic: humans can still thrive financially and emotionally if transitions are managed wisely. This requires, however, a radical rethinking of capital distribution, ownership, and the nature of money itself. Without intervention, AI’s efficiency will funnel wealth into ever-fewer hands, accelerating inequality to destabilizing levels. With intervention, it could herald a more equitable, post-scarcity society.

One of Mostaque’s greatest strengths lies in the clarity and urgency of his thesis. His background in both finance and AI allows him to straddle disciplines that are rarely integrated with such force. By tying technical developments in machine learning to the structural underpinnings of global economics, he paints a picture that is both accessible to general readers and challenging for specialists. The boldness of his prediction—that everything will collapse in less than three years—makes the book difficult to ignore.

At the same time, the work is not without weaknesses. Its speculative nature is both its greatest asset and its chief liability. Predictions of this magnitude inevitably outrun available evidence, and Mostaque’s 1,000-day timeline may be more rhetorical device than realistic forecast. The solutions he gestures toward—rethinking wealth distribution, developing new metrics of value, cultivating emotional and creative fulfillment—are underdeveloped compared to the problems he diagnoses. There is also a tendency to understate human adaptability: societies have repeatedly restructured labor, value, and meaning in response to disruptive technologies, even if not on this scale.

Still, the implications of The Last Economy are profound. Economists will find in it a direct challenge to their reliance on GDP and labor-driven frameworks. Policymakers will face urgent questions about redistribution, ownership, and governance. Investors and workers alike will be forced to confront their financial security in a world where the traditional link between labor and income has been severed. For general readers, the book offers a vision that is both frightening and exhilarating: frightening in its portrayal of near-total economic displacement, and exhilarating in its call to imagine a world where human worth is decoupled from work.

Ultimately, The Last Economy is less a manual of solutions than a manifesto of disruption. It is an invitation to rethink what wealth, work, and human flourishing mean in a world dominated by artificial intelligence. Whether or not Mostaque’s timeline proves accurate, his questions strike at the heart of the twenty-first century: what becomes of us when machines no longer need us? The book’s value lies not in providing final answers but in insisting that the time to wrestle with these questions is now.

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