Killing Yourself to Live: Massachusetts, Artificial Intelligence, and the Cost of Staying
Scott Jellen · Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 18 Oct 2026
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Where this sits in the debate
- Will AI destroy more jobs than it creates? · its finding: it depends (why studies differ)
- Will AI widen inequality? · its finding: it depends (why studies differ)
Direction of the finding as read from the abstract by an AI model (AI-written).
Abstract
Massachusetts has built an unusually prosperous economy around high household costs, concentrated knowledge-intensive employment, and institutions sustained by substantial recurring economic activity. This paper examines a structural vulnerability in that arrangement: the earning power that justifies the Commonwealth's cost premium may become less reliable even as household commitments, public obligations, and physical infrastructure remain slow to adjust. Artificial intelligence is examined not as a prediction of mass unemployment, but as a potential change in the amount of human labor required to produce knowledge-intensive output. The analysis distinguishes employment, economic value, carrying wage capacity, and household income headroom. Using public economic data, illustrative wage-compression scenarios, demographic trends, fiscal conditions, and the historical transformation of the Route 128 technology corridor, it identifies a conditional feedback mechanism through which declining household margin and rigid institutional obligations could reinforce one another without an immediate collapse in employment, population, or economic output. The paper does not establish that such deterioration is already underway. Instead, it argues that Massachusetts' long-term resilience depends on how technological productivity translates into durable household and fiscal capacity. Its proposed direction combines greater physical anchoring of knowledge-intensive economic activity with reductions in the recurring costs of sustaining ordinary households. The central question is not whether Massachusetts can continue creating extraordinary wealth, but whether that prosperity can continue supporting the population and institutions built around it.
About this publication
Preprint. A preprint — posted publicly before or without journal peer review; findings may still be revised.
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- 2026 (recently)
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