4 articles
China's controls on rare earth expertise target the operators and engineers required to bring Western separation and magnet plants to commercial yield. Tacit process knowledge is the binding constraint on replication.
Economic AGI is not a singularity or an ontological state — it is a factor-substitution threshold. Frontier models have crossed expert parity on standardized professional work at a fraction of human cost, and the threshold has been crossed for low-tail functions like customer support and content production. The remaining gap is autonomy, reliability, integration, and liability — not raw reasoning.
U.S. interceptor consumption exceeds industrial output. This analysis maps the six physical constraints between appropriations and finished missiles, separating real capacity expansion from nominal demand.
The U.S. unemployment rate sits at 4.1% while AI automates knowledge work. The actual friction is concentrated in entry-level hiring freezes, quiet attrition, and task reallocation — not mass layoffs. A structural framework for tracking AI-driven labor market transition.