CONCEPT
Exit
The individual's departure from a deteriorating system — information-poor, irreversible, and, for the AI transition, concentrated among the most knowledgeable practitioners whose departure the system can least afford.
Exit is the economist's preferred response to deterioration: the consumer switches brands, the employee resigns, the citizen emigrates. Its beauty is its simplicity — no institutional receptivity is required, no persuasion, no collective action. Its limitation is the information cost it imposes on the system: the signal that something is wrong without the diagnosis of what is wrong. In the AI transition, exit takes an unusually destructive form — senior practitioners departing not to competitors but to the margins, in a flight to the woods that removes the system's most diagnostically valuable members while offering no alternative institution capable of absorbing their knowledge.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Exit works as a corrective mechanism when two conditions hold: there is a credible alternative the exiter moves to, and the system losing the member notices the departure as diagnostic rather than as irrelevance. Classical markets satisfy both conditions; the firm loses a customer to a competitor, observes the shift, studies the rival, adapts. The AI transition satisfies