The New Economy – What to do with Seven Billion Spare Humans
How AI Reshapes Business, Work, and What It Means to Be HumanBy L. Eric James, JD MS & Zachary Johnson, BSE
Length4h
About this audiobook
What happens when seven billion people are no longer needed to keep the economy running? That's not a dystopian premise. It's a question we'll answer within our lifetimes.
The prevailing narrative says AI will make big companies bigger and everyone else irrelevant. This book argues the opposite.
Written by a business strategist and a technologist, The New Economy examines what AI does to the relationship between scale and capability, and why the implications are more hopeful than headlines suggest.
Part strategy, part philosophy, and part blueprint, this book is for every entrepreneur who senses something fundamental is shifting.
You'll discover why corporate consolidation may be nearing its ceiling, how AI is redistributing power rather than concentrating it, what the "Half-CEO" model means for your business, and why next decade's most successful companies won't be the most automated — they'll be the most human.
The tools are here. The only question is what we build with them.
Audiobook details
GenreBusiness and Economics
Length4 hrs
Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices
FormateBook with Audio
Publish dateMar 19, 2026
LanguageEnglish
Table of contents
1Introduction
2Introduction
3PART I: WHAT THE NEW ECONOMY SHOULDN'T LOOK LIKE
4Chapter 1: The Megacorp Dead End
5The Hollowing Out
Show all chaptersShow less
6The Myth of Benevolent Scale
7When Enough Is Not a Number
8The Consolidation Ceiling
9Chapter 2: The Cracks in the Foundation
10The Speed Problem
11The Optimization Trap
12The Updated Business Equation
13The Coming Inversion
14PART II: POWER DISTRIBUTION — THE TRIBAL ECONOMY
15Chapter 3: The Great Redistribution of Power
16The Democratization Machine
17From Economies of Scale to Economies of Agility
18The Tribal Turn
19More, Not Fewer
20Chapter 4: What Society Actually Needs
21Beyond Employment
22Where AI Belongs (And Where It Doesn't)
23The Value of Imperfection
24What People Actually Want
25The Enjoyment Principle
26PART III: AI AS YOUR OPERATIONS OFFICER
27Chapter 5: The Anatomy of a Small Business in Transition
28Chapter 6: One Agent or Many? Designing Your AI Workforce
29The Tradeoffs.
30The Hybrid Future.
31Chapter 7: Industry-Specific Intelligence
32Chapter 8: A Day in the Life: The Business Owner of Tomorrow
33PART IV: THE TRUST TIMELINE
34Chapter 9: Right Now — The Hallucination Problem
35The Confidence Problem
36Why AI Hallucinates
37The Current State of Play
38Guardrails Are Not Optional
39Human Review Loops
40Verification Protocols
41Scope Limitations
42Feedback systems
43The Temptation of Premature Trust
44The Honest Assessment
45Chapter 10: The Three Horizons of AI in Business
46The Near Future: One to Three Years
47The Interim Future: Three to Seven Years
48The Long Future: Seven to Fifteen Years and Beyond
49Planning for All Three Simultaneously
50Chapter 11: The Case Against Full Automation
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