creators

David Shapiro: post-labor economics on YouTube

David Shapiro writes and films on post-labor economics for 188K YouTube subscribers, wrote the ACE agent framework paper and crowdfunded the book Labor/Zero.

David Shapiro is a YouTuber and writer whose subject is post-labor economics: how societies should organise as automation takes over paid work. His channel, which has about 188,000 subscribers and more than 670 videos, now introduces him in one line as "the Post-Labor Economics guy", and he publishes several essays a month on Substack, where he reports more than 14,000 subscribers. In AI he is better known for autonomous agents: he is first author of the 2023 paper "Conceptual Framework for Autonomous Cognitive Entities", which set out the open-source ACE architecture, and his GitHub carries the ACE Framework and agent-swarm repositories along with his post-labor research data. In March and April 2026 he ran a Kickstarter for Labor/Zero, a book-length treatise on the subject, raising $43,452 from 1,124 backers against an $8,000 goal, and is building a community around what he calls the Labor/Zero movement.

Specialization

post-labor economics, autonomous agents, cognitive architectures, AI commentary

Country

United States