That's already happening to some extent. Consumption in the US is very top heavy right now, and the top 40% of households by income already account for over 60% of all domestic consumption.

Those with >~$350k spend drastically less on consumption, funneling most into wealth generating assets

Those <350k->~$100k spend almost 86% of their income on consumption

Everyone else doesn't have enough purchasing power to matter to the market, spend greater than what they earn and have a dependency on debt.

The economy now is already at the point where it doesn't need the bottom 50% to even participate to continue current growth, outside of providing the labor necessary to fuel the consumption of the middle bracket.

The problem is AI/LLM automation is threatening the exact middle bracket that is sustaining the current consumption based economy. If we automated all the jobs of the bottom half of the economic underclass, the ~$100k+ group could run in a closed loop. Instead, we're trying to automate the labor of the very group thats sustaining the system.

The loss of white collar work is going to cause a huge cascading failure that we aren't ready for.