In When AI Builds a Machine World This Economy Can No Longer Sustain, Adam Tugwell examines the accelerating push toward machine intelligence and the quiet contradiction at the heart of it. The modern world speaks confidently about innovation, disruption, and exponential returns, yet the very technologies being celebrated are designed to remove the human participation the economic system depends on.

Tugwell argues that the machine world now emerging cannot sustain the logic that created it. As he writes, “It’s a contradiction so large it’s almost invisible. A civilisation optimising itself into a corner.” The book explores how automation, optimisation, and AI-driven efficiency gradually erode labour, wages, consumption, and ultimately the idea of profit itself.

Rather than focusing on rogue superintelligence or cinematic catastrophe, Tugwell reveals a quieter, more plausible threat: a system that makes human beings economically irrelevant long before it makes them obsolete. Through nine incisive parts, he traces the economic, cultural, technological, and existential forces reshaping the future – and the moment returns disappear, taking the old world with them.

This is a clear, provocative exploration of a civilisation building a machine world that cannot support its own foundations, and the human future that begins when the economic story finally ends.