For AI to produce a sustained negative demand shock, the economy must see a material acceleration in adoption, experience near-total labor substitution, no fiscal response, negligible investment absorption, and unconstrained scaling of compute. It is also worth recalling that over the past century, successive waves of technological change have not produced runaway exponential growth, nor have they rendered labor obsolete. Instead, they have been just sufficient to keep long-term trend growth in advanced economies near 2%. Today’s secular forces of ageing populations, climate change and deglobalization exert downward pressure on potential growth and productivity, perhaps AI is just enough to offset these headwinds. The macroeconomy remains governed by substitution elasticities, institutional response, and the persistent elasticity of human wants.