Yes, human economy is about the exchange of value between humans – a cheap tautology from Carmack. Money is indeed irrelevant to a snail, as opposed to a would-be SW engineer.

But Nature is about making better use of energy gradients, always doing more with less, the principle of least action. Using any surplus to do it again (i.e. evolved life). That's the properly grounded perspective. In that sense "Get skills to satisfy humans and you'll probably be fine!" sounds super myopic.

The anxiety we humans feel when confronted with AI is not only that we'll be out of our job as a programmer, or doctor, or driver, or teacher, or whatever.

It's the broader sense of unease that humanity's gradient-razing days, spectacular as they were all the way to nuclear fission and fusion, may soon be over. And "economy" as a useful tool advancing that Nature's mission will have evolved beyond us.

"Making humans satisfied" is not terribly relevant from that perspective. Vast swathes of the human economy are just scaffolding to support the rest: humans reproducing to keep the optimization machine going. The overhead is tremendous. Once Nature finds a way to do more with less, I have zero doubt much of that scaffolding will be optimized away. That's some definition of "fine".

Or maybe I misunderstood and Carmack is merely suggesting individuals try to adapt and hope for the best. What else can you do anyway? That would be the honest answer. Rather than bloviating about "Guide AI with your product skills to deliver value to humans" – an embarrassing category error.