Imagine we were on the verge of producing a Star Trek replicator, a device that could produce any physical good practically for free. How would you feel? Well, from a world-of-atoms perspective, it would be a great thing - a huge increase in wealth that should make you, personally, better off. Even if you can’t afford a replicator yourself, all you need is a share or two of ReplicatorCorp and you’ll get a share of the most important boost to human prosperity in history. You might be worried about social effects of the end of work, but this “end of work” will look more like a cushy retirement with an ample pension fund, and the most effective thing to do is to turn towards community and hobbies and other sources of meaning, rather than fighting ReplicatorCorp head on.

We’re currently in a period of hype about AI, something promising to be a sort of replicator for intelligence. And just like a replicator, AI is promising to produce a great deal of value by allowing cheap intelligence to transform whole sectors of the economy to be more efficient. But remarkably, none of the thinkpieces about AI seem to treat it as an economic windfall. Instead, all anyone cares about is losing their job.

If AI were really about to unlock a ton of value that could disrupt the economy, all you need is a few shares of GOOG and you, too, could get a cut of all the awesomeness about to come. (Back of envelope sketch, Google’s annual revenue for 2015 was about $70B. Revenues for the US trucking industry alone, the most trivial low hanging fruit for self-driving technology, was over $700B.)

And yet, what we’re getting isn’t about how to cash in on this imminent windfall. We’re not even getting pessimistic thinkpieces about how retail investors might get locked out of investing in the really cool companies since IPOs are coming later in tech companies’ lifecycles. All we’re getting is fear.

Smarter people than me have argued both sides of whether AI hype is for real. But what a close read of the thinkpieces tells me is that nobody in the punditry actually believes in revolutionary AI. If AI throws millions out of a job, that’s because it’s unlocking tons of value - value that it should be straightforward for your typical investor to cash in on. If we want to talk about how to deal with the social disruption, we should be treating it as a conversation among (mostly) rich retirees about how they should best spend their leisure.

AI talk isn’t about a rapid pace of technological change. Rather, I think, the deep insecurity these pundits are betraying is actually a reflection of the stagnation of the economy, resulting in fewer jobs to go around and greater economic uncertainty. All contemporary discourse about AI is actually about lack of AI.