HEAVY COPE
This interview features Gillian Hadfield discussing an 'economy of AI agents' with genuine sophistication about governance failures and structural economic change, but it ultimately COPES by framing AI displacement as a regulatory problem requiring infrastructure fixes rather than a structural termination of human labor demand. The most revealing cope: 'we're going to need humans to be fully engaged and maybe now it will be possible for more humans to be engaged in that' — this augmentation fantasy treats structural exclusion as a choice about participation rather than an economic outcome. The interview ends with 'What else can I become?' — positioning this as an individual identity question rather than a collective structural collapse. Hadfield excels at describing the technical problems (alignment, liability, registration) but never engages with who captures the productivity gains or that aggregate demand for human labor is being structurally eliminated. The regulatory focus provides sophisticated cover for avoiding the harder questions about rentier dynamics and mass economic exclusion.