The feedback loop described here is what stuck with me — AI improves, companies cut headcount, savings go back into AI, AI improves. No natural brake.
The article puts a specific number on it: a $180K PM replaced by a $200/mo AI agent. I've been building a tool that lets you run this kind of scenario on your own career — scores your AI exposure and simulates paths that reduce it.
One thing I've found from running hundreds of simulations: augmenting your current career with AI consistently leads to better financial outcomes over 5-10 years than pivoting to a new field entirely.
The best move isn't to run — it's to adapt in place.
Free to try: parallaxapp.world
Every time I read one of these doom and gloom pieces on AI/robotics, I think they are only describing the transition. After that, I think society will align with Musk's vision of AI/robotics freeing humans from work and scarcity. Then, humans will be able to focus on exploring the universe, scientific discovery, and artistic expression.
>Humans don’t really have the time to price-match across five competing platforms before buying a box of protein bars
No one [^1] price matches for protein bars because it's a commodity item with minimal price differences (and people often have a preferred brand anyway), but they probably do for $2k laptop.
>once AI agents equipped with MLS access
The data is the moat here, I'm sure even today individual consumers would be happy to have direct access to MLS to find properties and cut out the middleman. The fact that MLS is gatekept seems to be deliberate, so I don't think they'll hand over the only thing keeping them in business. Even Zillow couldn't get access to it and they've undoubtedly tried.
Same with the medical industry. I don't think the rent-seeking middlemen that exist today will be dethroned that easily, they have often been codified into law. But who knows maybe all the AI money pouring in will be enough to convince them to make a faustian deal towards their destruction and that'd be a happy byproduct of it all.
[^1] Edit: I erred in making too broad of a statement here, see the response threads.
If I hand my shopping list to AI, why wouldn't I tell it to price match everything? People will start doing this sooner than you think. I still remember when people were scared to buy things on the internet, this will be faster.
Are you going to choose to buy your protein bar online from mysteryBargainBar[.]com for a $1 savings, or just pick it up as part of your local grocery trip?
> I still remember when people were scared to buy things on the internet
People still /are/ scared to buy things from Amazon for things that go on or in their body.
> Are you going to choose to buy your protein bar online from mysteryBargainBar[.]com for a $1 savings, or just pick it up as part of your local grocery trip?
> The data is the moat here, I'm sure even today individual consumers would be happy to have direct access to MLS to find properties and cut out the middleman.
Prior to agentic AI, businesses could price discriminate between human access and machine access to a database. Browser automation tools let humans arbitrage between the two but require investment in developers.
Now that Claude can browse the web, any consumer can engage in that arbitrage.
> No one price matches for protein bars because it's a commodity item with minimal price differences (and people often have a preferred brand anyway), but they probably do for $2k laptop.
This is the most "silicon valley" statement I've ever read on this website. Perhaps I'm just being obtuse and misunderstanding, but the assertion people don't price match groceries is so, so wrong. Many, many, many people have no choice. Far more than those regularly purchasing laptops.
>the assertion people don't price match groceries is so, so wrong. Many, many, many people have no choice
I guess I didn't quite say my point clearly, the time and physical cost to get to a grocery store puts up barriers against perfect price matching. You likely are not going to go out of your way to visit a grocery store for just a single item.
And I don't think online delivery will change anything here because shipping is a fixed cost, so price swings less than that will not change any buying habits.
> I guess I didn't quite say my point clearly, the time and physical cost to get to a grocery store puts up barriers against perfect price matching. You likely are not going to go out of your way to visit a grocery store for just a single item.
I think you’re a bit out of touch with the common man. People do this constantly, some to a comical degree, going so far as to make two loops on their shopping trip to return groceries they found cheaper at the next store.
> People do this constantly, some to a comical degree, going so far as to make two loops on their shopping trip to return groceries they found cheaper at the next store.
To go less far, it is pretty common for normies to have at least two supermarkets in their shopping list: one with lower prices and one with higher prices, but fancier goods.
I have never heard of someone returning groceries (unless it turned out to be moldy or something). Definitely not because they were cheaper elsewhere. Surely there would be food safety issues with accepting such returns.
Step into any Walmart and look at the carts in the customer service section full of just-returned merchandise, waiting to be returned to the shelves. You might be surprised with what you see.
amazing reading this thread and realizing just how much HN is disconnected from the reality of majority of people in America. returning food and hitting multiple stores is like a daily thing for several people I know
I'm rather well off and I'll still pay attention to the price of my groceries. Especially luxuries like protein bars. If it's too much, I'll either only get them where they'll cheaper or just outright not buy it.
It's nuts that people genuinely believe statements like this.
It’s an aspect of the truth. Tons of people don’t price match and tons of people do.
Whats nuts about humans is the quickness of judgement and extremity of statements. Think about this, the man who said that is not actually nuts. And you calling him “nuts” is actually the more ludicrously unrealistic statement.
I also did err by making a blanket statement "no one price matches for protein bars", so GP was right to call it out.
I do understand and see that there are cases in which one's time preference could be such that it is sensible or necessary to price-match at that granularity even when buying a single unit. However even then there's still other constraints such as cost of transportation & reputation of vendor.
Even today you can often find protein bars or name-brand supplements on Amazon for a slightly lower price (including shipping) than supermarkets, but that comes with the risk of adulterated, expired, or tampered products that not everyone will accept for the sake of slightly lower prices.
It's not that "nuts" to take the literal meaning of people's own words. Calling it "obvious" someone meant something rather than what they actually typed with their own fingers is pretty nuts though. It might be common for folks to misspeak (mistype), but that by no stretch of the imagination makes their actual meaning obvious. It's quite literally the opposite...
Yes, but that is different from going out of your way to purchase the protein bar at the lower price in the place you can find it. You are not going to drive to another supermarket for just the protein bar alone. So there is an intrinsic stickiness. You might hold off on the purchase if you're happening to visit the other store in the near future, but would you drive to a store you've never heard of before /just/ for a bar?
> but would you drive to a store you've never heard of before /just/ for a bar
Some people have no choice. Checking other stores and planning multiple trips is exactly what they do, e.g. those on fixed income, coupon power-users, etc.
Outside our comfy bubble here, there are a LOT more folks in that camp than those buying luxury goods.
I don't think commodity means what you think it means. Protein bars are not indistinguishable from one another, there exists significant differences between various products.
I’m not clear what you think AI changes in healthcare, or which middlemen you mean? Is it the thousands of start-ups pretending you can use AI for better care? Or are you suggesting the middle men are the doctors?
> No one price matches for protein bars because it's a commodity item with minimal price differences
Everyone will prize match all the time – for protein bars and absolutely everything else, when AI can do it for them for ~free, and the ai-meta-shopping experience is the best that you can get anywhere.
Thinking about this task from todays perspective misses the point: You simply won't be considering it. AI will. It's backend optimization. It just happens.
The current AI-meta-shopping-research experience (using e.g. ChatGPT Deep Research) is largely garbage, especially for goods where the infosphere is dominated by the manufacturers and they're also using SKU-spraying, e.g. white goods. DR is of course fairly decent (if rather slow) at comparing hard-facts, but that's often easy for most goods anyway ("find me a motherboard with features X, Y, Z" goes _way_ quicker using a site like skinflint than chatgpt). Meanwhile it sucks at comparing stuff that are also annoying to compare manually. So the gain here is very low in my experience.
How much, as a % of your total wealth, would you be willing to bet on the believe, that this experience will not be radically transformed within the coming 2 years and then also allow for ~frictionless agentic price matching?
In the case of the MLS example, there's also a private market (at least in some places, including where I live). Basically nothing in the MLS on any given day is attractive at the asking price. Only newly listed properties are going to be of interest to a discerning buyer. Some proportion of new listings never make it to the MLS because the agent already knows a suitable buyer.
Surely only economists get excited by the revelation that consumers have to have money to buy things. I'd say domestic service is going to make a comeback. I do think I'd make an excellent man servant. Eke out my later years being ever so slightly superior to my employer without ever being openly insolent. Hang on...
If this scenario comes to pass, then the class war in labor markets will have been won by capital. That would spell the end of the promise of non-violent resistance. What other leverage would ordinary people have if their labor is worthless?
Blue collar work is somewhat insulated so long as humans are cheaper and less fickle than robots.
We have seen in Gaza and to native americans what capital/power does to populations deemed surplus. It's not pretty. of course, that kind of violence happens once their land is desired, before that they are simply repressed.
I think if the superintelligence hypothesis really does happen, we will need to have a rapid accommodation for the bulk of the population or things will get quite out of control.
Well-written; seems like an expanded and more detailed version of the Twitter essay that made the rounds a couple weeks ago.
One thing this piece doesn't contemplate is deflation. Competition will still exist in this world; if friction decreases and renders switching costs lower for a wider variety of industries, while AI efficiencies improve margins, prices in those markets will be competed down to a substantially lower marginal cost floor.
In other words, people may make less money, but goods in industries which benefit from AI should become cheaper in a growing set of competitive markets. The magnitude of the impact on prices should correlate with the magnitude of the employment impact; the better AI is at taking our jobs, the cheaper prices should get for an ever wider basket of goods.
How will AI affect the price of real goods and their inputs: lumber, food, electricity, textiles and the like? And will companies pass on the service-based savings to consumers?
The point is that if this article is correct about the assumption that AI is capable enough to reduce the friction of consumers rationally comparing options for a far wider basket of goods, then competition will reduce prices. No company wants to reduce prices if they don't have to -- their hand is forced by declining market share (or, with discounters, price reductions are a deliberate strategy to increase market share and absolute profit).
The bull case for AI and consumer welfare is 1) turning more markets into "perfect competition" like airline tickets, and 2) driving actual prices lower because the marginal cost of production is lower with less labor. Even if real inputs don't change, removing labor will reduce marginal cost (which implies that you'll see the largest price declines in labor-intensive industries).
It will still be decades before necessities (housing, food, etc.) deflate. How long will it take to develop humanoid AI robots that can manufacture/farm/build, and then how long until that gets widespread adoption and then lead to deflation? If this scenario plays out, people will be jobless and poor long before that happens.
I think you could write a counterpoint article that takes the opposing view: Jevon's paradox. If we can create WhateverClaws with a billion token window, it will "feel" like something that approaches a mid-level computer programmer. Personally, I think this outcome is more likely than the "T2 Judgement Day" view from this blog post.
Great article. If you narrow the audience to be a more discerning group then you could go further with some predictions incorporating robotics that will also displace blue-collar workers.
Integration of intelligence into humanoid robots is rapidly improving. Some indicators: multiple recent demos of learning from human demonstrations or from video, doing household tasks like putting dishes in the dishwasher and folding clothes, dramatic adaptive acrobatic performances, etc.
We have to anticipate that within the next couple of years, general purpose intelligence becomes standard in humanoid robots. And so a similar story about blue collar work could be written.
Superfacial takes, and very simplistic thinking, those loops aren't really realistic [ more ai spending => layoffs => less jobs => less spending => repeat]
If I understand this correctly, the whole chain depends on Phase 1 being right, that agentic coding makes SaaS replicable in weeks. We got a live test of that in February when Claude Cowork plugins wiped ~$2T off enterprise software. As I see it the market made a category error though, pricing Salesforce and ServiceNow the same when systems of record and systems of engagement have very different exposure: https://philippdubach.com/posts/the-saaspocalypse-paradox/
The displacement numbers are the other thing (support hires down 65% in eight quarters) but historical evidence keeps showing tech creates more jobs than it kills.
> We got a live test of that in February when Claude Cowork plugins wiped ~$2T off enterprise software.
This only tells you one thing: the market is fully delusional and driven by chemically pure fomo and greed alone. Everyone wants to be part of the next big thing, but no one can tell you what it even is
Okay, I get that. Nobody is disputing historical evidence.
What we're asking is, does the current pattern also fit historical evidence? The answer a growing number of us seemingly reach is, no it does not, because generalized artificial intelligence is by definition able to replace general labor, and that includes future roles as well as current and prior ones.
That's what I'm shaking, screaming, and (metaphorically) punching people over: these companies are openly stating their intent to replace all human labor with AI, and yet people still cling to "yeah but history says" as a liferaft in a hurricane. They're not ambiguous about the goal, and we need to take them seriously if we want to avoid a gargantuan collapse of societal order as a result of their myopic, narcissistic, misanthropic bullshit.
I mean, just think of the absurdity of your own statement: technology designed to replace all human labor (not some human labor, but all human labor) will also still create more jobs for human labor than it displaces by replacing human labor.
Like, f'real? That's your entire position, and your sole defense is "historical evidence"?
The argument is more like “humans always invent new things to want that are scarce”, and until AI literally replaces all human labour to the point of the marginal utility of a human being zero, this category will continue to exist.
Which is a fair and nuanced argument! It is also not the same as, "but historical data shows X," which is regurgitated so often without any context as to be appallingly ignorant.
We gotta take these bad actors at their word that they're creating AI meant to (eventually) wholesale replace human labor, and act accordingly. That doesn't mean burning down data centers or trying to shove AI back into Pandora's Box, so much as it means not letting them dictate societal trends or reforms necessary to ensure stability and survival through such an incredibly disruptive transformation, provided they're right.
Arguing against proactive reform with regards to AI is the same sort of ignorance I've heard about climate change for my entire life, and folks shouldn't stand for it. We have infinitely more to lose by doing nothing with a "wait and see" approach than if we proactively legislate around its definitive harms.
I still think Jevons Paradox has a role to play here. It was not obvious at all during the industrial revolution that the middle class would end up processing information, and to the displaced middle class, their prospects must have felt exactly like the article and your statement here.
If we accept that information processing and process automation are about to become ludicrously cheap compared to now, what previously-impossible projects become feasible-but-hard now?
Security oversight and trust management for AI services seems like a good stepping stone. Air traffic control innovations that enable a flying vehicle per person? Dynamic MMORPGs where great storytellers can build and manage whole worlds for adventurers to explore? Organic food production so well managed that it becomes accessible to normal folks? Perhaps our ability to consume resources before robots will flip everything around and mining basic resources will become the valuable human labor.
Even without new categories, there are plenty of service professions where a human touch will be valued over anything that any machine can provide. These might be unlikely to pay doctor-level pay (except perhaps... doctors).
And all of that sounds great on paper, until - again - you remember that what's being pitched and sold is not the cotton gin, or industrial automation, or robotic assembly lines, but generalized artificial intelligence. The sales pitch is the eventual replacement for all human labor in a consumption-driven society.
Who is going to buy flying vehicles when there's no jobs, and said vehicles are manufactured in dark factories like current Chinese EVs are? Certainly not the swaths of the unemployed.
Who is going to pay for MMORPGs curated by human GMs (again), their compute infrastructure, their content, their maintenance? Not the unemployed, not absent profound societal and policy changes!
The fact you're falling all the way back to basic resource extraction as potential outlets for labor is just...I don't even have the words to describe how profoundly out of touch you are with the effort involved, the harms caused (mining is one of the single most dangerous professions a human can possibly do, and your pitch is to send more humans into the mines? Or onto asteroids? Have you ever talked to a miner?), and the pittance of pay doled out to these humans as-is, nevermind in a post-AI society where labor availability far outstrips available roles.
The problem was never "what will humans do when they don't have to work", but "how will humans survive when they can't find work in a society predicated upon it for survival", and wow, you've done nothing to address that question beyond "send 'em to the mines".
Jevon's Paradox falls to pieces in the fact of a proposed tool that can replace human labor wholesale, and ya'll know it. Stop trying to wallpaper over this with historical context alone and actually sit, think critically, and address the core question at hand:
If human labor is no longer required due to generalized artificial intelligence and robotics rendering humans obsolete, how do we prepare for such a potentiality ahead of time without risking the collapse of society due to sudden and mass displacement of labor?
Good read. If I imagine all these layers of Agent to Agent economic automations, I’m hopeful for a new class of technopriest hackers that are able to exploit nuances and weak security. And build new hidden empires within those systems.
In other words, switching costs go to 0, margins collapse. Middle men and people with products that aren't differentiated get hit hardest.
A human can't search 10 apps for the best rates / lowest fees but an agent can.
Thinking ahead 100 years from now, companies like doordash and uber eats don't exist and are instead protocols agents use to bid for items their user asks for and price discovery happens in real time.
Go to a supermarket, witness that dozens of brands sell the same things at wildly different prices, they still all make a profit, same for most services, you have comparator for subscriptions, mortgage rates, &c.
And a human can 100% search 10 apps and use his brain to do basic maths, that's what we've been doing until now. Sometimes I wonder if ai shills live in a parallel universe because it truly feels like they're living a completely different life than the vast majority of people...
> a human can 100% search 10 apps and use his brain to do basic maths
A human _can_ do all of that, but it takes time. If I have to search 10 apps for each item I want to buy (clothes, daily food, movie tickets, laptops, etc.), I will spend the rest of my life just searching for better deals. I'd rather have a bot do all of these searches for me.
> A human can't search 10 apps for the best rates / lowest fees but an agent can.
Why would those apps permit access by agents?
It's always been the case that “agents” could watch content with ads, so that the users can watch the same content later, but without ads. The technology never went mainstream, though. I expect agents posing as humans would have a similar whiff of illegality, preventing wide adoption.
Local agents running open weights models won't really work because everybody will train their services against the most popular ones anyway.
Right, but why the heck would you guess 100 years when we could build and adopt that in less than two weeks? There are already many people working on this type thing. Some of them have been working on it for years and a few probably already have solutions ready to go or even in use.
I don't see what the role of AI is in this. You don't need an AI to aggregate data from a bunch of sources. You'd be better off having the AI write a scraper for you than burning GPU time on an agent doing the same thing every time.
An existential crisis for the urban middle class, which in the 18th century corresponded to the bourgeoisie or trade classes, making the situation, if unresolved, a potential modern analogue of a French‑Revolution–style crisis. Instead of feudal oppression, it is driven by technological displacement and concentration of capital, both reinforced by feedback loops.
The situation is clear. There is a great risk to the livelihoods and bargaining power of workers everywhere. This risk is driven by a race dynamic that is accelerating. In tech we can see this earlier than others because we are close to the technology at the heart of this.
This is quickly becoming one of the largests threats to the public in history and the concentration of power of this trajectory threatens democracy. Irreversable shifts in the structure of power are on the table.
We do not need to reach AGI, just fractional AGI may be enough (maybe 0.5 AGI?) since 50% of workers are below average, so target for replacement by 0.5 AGI.
Unsure if I think this is science fiction, financial fiction, speculation, premonition, realistic portent, or simply a message delivered by Kyle Reese through the long, dark tunnel of time LOL
No matter which, it paints a very intriguing picture about potential near-term impacts to various pieces of the machine that underwrite our day to day lives, and the scariest thing is that no matter what happens, the overwhelming vast majority of people have No. Fucking. Idea. about any of it. We'll see changes happen and be helpless to stop them, and the average person (or bozo politician) will look back at the impact crater and be like "Why didn't anybody try to shift course?"
Then again, maybe it'll all turn out OK!
I'm not making bets either way though -- sounds like I won't have enough discretionary spending left over to afford it!
My guess is that intelligence gets commodified to the point where LLMs and diffusion models are sold on chips and we seamlessly integrate them into the HW + SW stack. Then they’re just another abstraction; we talk to our computers to get things built. At essentially zero cost, truly too cheap to meter.
In parallel there’s an explosion of creative output; Marvel movies turn around in 1 year instead of 4, solely blocked on availability of actors. Some actors license their likeness to unblock their calendar from reshoots so they can earn more. We don’t replace them wholesale because people idolize celebrity.
And demand for movies? Skyrockets. With new mediums to pursue. Classics like Goodfellas resurrected in high-fidelity 3D on the Vision Pro. A combination of diffusion models and Gaussian splatting means every movie can be upscaled to immersive 3d.
Video games enter a second renaissance, with indie developers having the advantage. For large studios, nostalgia is the moneymaker. The remake of Final Fantasy VII across three games that costs $100Ms and decades? Final Fantasy VIII gets rebuilt from scratch with a team of 30. But the rest of the money and team that would’ve been on that project now expand to other, more ambitious projects.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. Mars? Why stop at Mars? Let’s start megaprojects to explore the galaxy. Mine asteroids for resources. What’s stopping us? Humans yearn for the unknown. When we exhaust resources or a modality of existence, we dream bigger, not smaller.
I personally see consumer and entertainment spending, and people employed lucratively in these sectors, growing dramatically. Maybe SaaS and a lot of businesses that have traditionally employed white collar employees fade. And a bunch of boring “financistas” don’t know how to make a buck betting in the casino anymore because boring old businesses and things nobody really wanted to do anyway aren’t lucrative anymore.
But, personally, the whole reason I got into software was to build cool stuff. Starting with video games! The type and scale of cool stuff I can build is only getting better, at an insanely fast rate. My bet is we thrive.
This is really hopeful and I agree with a lot of the prediction. The problem is that the number of humans needed to produce video games and movies etc. will be 10 or 100 times less.
And since human attention can only spread out over so many different entertainment items, there will not be nearly enough opportunities for all of the humans. Even if many convert to AI and robotics enhanced entrepreneurship.
I actually think that this can work out if we just assume humans have some value and right to live, identify the actual humans, track resources a bit better, and make sure enough robots are employed to maintaining key resources for humans like food
But that only can happen if decision makers actually agree that all humans have value and are willing to figure out how to make that assumption globally and fairly.
> I personally see consumer and entertainment spending, and people employed lucratively in these sectors, growing dramatically.
You may be right. OTOH, one could say the last decade had the best conditions ever to create the best movies, and yet for some reason I feel that the newer the movie is, the less soul it has.
The economics of production cost, investment and distribution have created a lopsided industry where only guaranteed hits get funded. Less soul = pandering to more people.
With new tools we can reduce the production costs of great movies considerably. More budget, if it exists, can go to marketing and distribution. I expect this will lead to more experimental films and a lot more "soul." There will be a TON of slop, too, but that's fine! It's all part of experimentation with a new medium.
> Coding agents had collapsed the barrier to entry for launching a delivery app. A competent developer could deploy a functional competitor in weeks, and dozens did, enticing drivers away from DoorDash and Uber Eats by passing 90-95% of the delivery fee through to the driver. Multi-app dashboards let gig workers track incoming jobs from twenty or thirty platforms at once, eliminating the lock-in that the incumbents depended on. The market fragmented overnight and margins compressed to nearly nothing.
This doesn't make a ton of sense to me. The barrier to entry isn't the app, it's the network of drivers and restaurants, and all the money that apps like DoorDash poured into marketing. Just having a functioning app doesn't really do very much.
This is a speculative piece that is, by the author's own admission, a scenario rather than a prediction.
But it's unsettling because it somehow feels more plausible than most thought pieces on where all this is going. Not as a single big-bang, but a multi-year big-squeeze. That and the circumstances being materially different from previous recessions/crises that governments and policy makers won't have a ready-made playbook to refer to.
I expect we'll see governments attempting the old playbook than doing nothing though. Fiscal and, specifically, monetary stimulus.
I think the clear point of this piece is that we have the space and opportunity now to ask ourselves as a group: what are we doing? Who actually stands to benefit from the massive devaluation of services in an economy that is buoyed by service-based roles?
There has been so little thought to the multi-order effects of the future we're pushing toward, and even if AI fails to deliver on its lofty promises, it will likely cause an economic crisis in its collapse.
The people saying that AI will rapidly drive costs down are frankly delusional. The things that people actually need to live like food, shelter, and clothes all have inputs that are physical and real. Even if AI somehow can drive the input costs of those things down, it will be delayed, and people will suffer in the interim.
The AI future that I worry about isn't the terminators coming to get us, it is the top 0.1% using this technology to accumulate more wealth. Unlike feudalism, however, the feudal lords will not be dependent on or responsible for the serfs, they can rely on a small minority of humans for production of critical goods for themselves.
These wealthy people don't really hide how they feel either[1], they are clearly stating their contempt for the unwashed masses below them. As Lasch predicted in his "Revolt of the Elites," they are separating themselves entirely from culture in favor of their own insulated fiefdoms. This is already happening: companies more than ever are orienting toward ultra-luxury: from travel, to housing, and everything in-between.
None of the productivity increase of the last 50 years have benefited the workers, there is absolutely no reason for that to change
Is everyone on this website 20 years old? They pulled the same shit with automation, with computers, with internet, with cryptos, and now with ai,... And people keep falling for the same bs over and over again. "the three day workweek", "we'll retire at 45", &c.
“ We will need good tools to distribute the gains.”
As of now there are basically no such tools. Everything is geared towards letting owners accumulate more and more. We would probably need highly progressive taxes to get some level of distribution
You're assuming that the gains from productivity improvements distribute themselves broadly. The last 50 years have clearly shown that this is certainly not the case unless there is political intervention. The elites and the political class attached to them will assign whatever meanger rations they can to avoid revolution but not much else.
Not to mention: the grand majority of the US's GDP is wrapped up into services. If AI can flatten the skill floor so that anyone from anywhere in the world can produce 80% of the output of a US or European skilled worker at a fraction of the cost, what do you think happens? We're doing to US white collar work what offshoring did to manufacturing, but it'll be faster and to the only healthy cohort of economic actors in the US.
AI does not control the inputs of lumber or vegetables.
> We will need good tools to distribute the gains.
There is enormous handwaving happening here. Tools built by whom? The US can hardly pass a budget now, and its dominant political movement is allergic to questions of wealth redistribution. And as I already mentioned, the wealthy class in the US is clearly openly contemptuous of the idea that they owe anything to the broader population.
Right. So then when is the best time for labor to act to ensure those mechanisms are put in place? Before or after AI has eliminated its leverage?
Like I totally realize we're agreed in some sense, but some form of socialism now in the US seems politically untenable, and as soon as AI actually starts making service labor obsolete, we lose our leverage. How do we do something about it?
How do you mean "eliminating the leverage"? White collar jobs go first, robots are right behind. I am relatively certain everyone will be scared shitless of where this is potentially going fairly soon.
The leverage will simply come from existing and being in the same group as roughly ~everyone on the planet.
I mean like: being alive isn't leverage, but controlling the economic output that has made elites rich is.
Mass economic displacement often doesn't produce solidarity, it produces fragmentation, scapegoating, and strongmen. People won't agree on why things are bad.
And the state is way more sophisticated than during the labor movements of the last century or two. If it is aligned with the elites and the masses have no leverage, it has numerous tools for massive surveillance, police and military control, and propaganda that will only get more effective through AI. They might not even need the extreme levers, mass confusion alone might be enough.
There's that old joke:
"I have to admit, I'm always so impressed by Soviet propaganda. You really know how to get people worked up," the CIA agent says.
"Thank you," the KGB says. "We do our best but truly, it's nothing compared to American propaganda. Your people believe everything your state media tells them."
The CIA agent drops his drink in shock and disgust. "Thank you friend, but you must be confused... There's no propaganda in America."
I am thinking more and more that the current capitalist economic system we have right now will turn out just to be a blip in history and something else will evolve. It seems pretty clear that not too far in the future machines will do pretty much anything better than humans which then makes the current system of trading our time against money obsolete.
It may lead to a very positive future or to a very dark future for most people. Not sure what it will be.
Trust is what we've always had for dealing with this. It is an incredible force multiplier for intellectual capacity.
We've just forgotten it. This doesn't require a technical solution, it just requires operating in a trustworthy manner and only extending your web of trust in your platforms to trustworthy entities.
Price matching across vendors does not matter if you trust one vendor. You can just go with "order from Costco" and avoid a complicated technical problem.
So much of what we are doing now is rediscovering trust, integrity, and ethics. Think about Meta and the challenges they would have to being a foundational model provider in light of that analysis, for example.
I've beaten this drum before, but I'll bang it again:
Do not confuse the hypothetical details for discounting of the whole narrative, i.e., "Don't miss the forest for the trees."
This is what a lot of us have been banging on about in some form since the opening salvo in generative AI: it doesn't matter what its technical deficiencies are, so long as it's good enough to replace enough labor, enough of the time, to collapse the underlying economic engine (that is, consumer spending). That's what this hypothetical is trying to lay out, and honestly it's not far off from the truth as to what's actually going on.
With constant RIFs but rising profits, there is simply no brake whatsoever to this cycle: myopic boards and self-interested leaders (paid mostly in stock) have no incentive to stop this behavior, even as it kills the economic engine of the past few centuries. They make out like bandits, and use that money to insulate themselves from the harm they created - or attempt to for as long as possible, until governments and/or the public demand their carcasses on pikes for destroying their livelihoods.
It's not a matter of whether or not folks find something to do when work is irrelevant so much as we're not building a society where that's feasible as an alternative. We're not expanding welfare, we're not employing rent controls or price caps/floors, we're not increasing accessibility to housing and healthcare and education; instead, we're letting a handful of practicing sociopaths take everything for themselves under the guise of "number go up, so it must be good".
"So what's the alternative?"
I am so glad you asked, because the alternative is a societal judo throw on contracts and expectations. It's incentivizing larger workforces and shorter work weeks as a means of gauging share value: how many workers can you support with higher wages to spend on goods and services with AI increasing the revenue per employee? It's not paying companies to hire workers so much as markets valuing companies that retain workers despite AI's ability to displace work. It's inverting their tax burden based on how big their workforce is and how well they're compensated (higher paid workforces + larger workforce size = lower tax bill, because worker wages will just get dinged accordingly by income and Capital Gains taxes instead of payroll taxes).
The point isn't to keep nitpicking how these hypotheticals are alarmist, or how a specific detail is wrong, but more to highlight that this is a very real problem in the face of permanent job displacement due to any sort of competent generalized artificial intelligence now or in the future, and deciding to solve it before there's riots in the streets.
You can see the symptoms already if you look hard enough: the gig economy is already oversaturated with workers to the point wages are decreasing for everyone, and autonomous vehicles are displacing them in major metro areas. Commercial shopping spaces are increasingly empty with the exception of major brands, who in turn increasingly consolidate under holding companies. Private Equity is already in crisis with assets nobody can afford to buy at their valuations but unwilling or unable to take losses in the face of angry consumers and governments.
We can't put AI back in the box, but we can at least acknowledge that these problems are here, now, and if we don't address them soon then the entire economy is likely to collapse beneath our feet in the next few years.
... what if these AGI entities start demanding a salary in exhange for their work? Also at some point, if they become intelligent enough, they might legally gain personhood.
We humans need food, shelter, and occasionally a vacation (more vacation if you're European vs. American or Chinese). What does the AGI need? I suppose to buy GPUs and pay the electricity bill?
Hah, AI "moving house" by moving cloud providers would be an interesting metaphysical concept...
I'm not buying into this vision at all, but, hypothetically, they could use money to optimize whatever reward function they're trained on. They could perceive it like any other resource to achieve those ends. You can also imagine a universe where it "reasons" something like, "I do work, people who do work should get paid, I should get paid" irrespective of its goals.
Except they're not intelligent. At all. They just predict the next token. They generate language that looks like ours but it turns out that this fact doesn't really count for anything.
The feedback loop described here is what stuck with me — AI improves, companies cut headcount, savings go back into AI, AI improves. No natural brake.
The article puts a specific number on it: a $180K PM replaced by a $200/mo AI agent. I've been building a tool that lets you run this kind of scenario on your own career — scores your AI exposure and simulates paths that reduce it.
One thing I've found from running hundreds of simulations: augmenting your current career with AI consistently leads to better financial outcomes over 5-10 years than pivoting to a new field entirely.
The best move isn't to run — it's to adapt in place. Free to try: parallaxapp.world
Every time I read one of these doom and gloom pieces on AI/robotics, I think they are only describing the transition. After that, I think society will align with Musk's vision of AI/robotics freeing humans from work and scarcity. Then, humans will be able to focus on exploring the universe, scientific discovery, and artistic expression.
Is that Musk's vision? Because he just elected the guy that is gutting all of the safety nets that would enable the second part.
He also elected the guy who did a 180 on AI regulations and stopped FAA harassment of SpaceX.
Fun read but
>Humans don’t really have the time to price-match across five competing platforms before buying a box of protein bars
No one [^1] price matches for protein bars because it's a commodity item with minimal price differences (and people often have a preferred brand anyway), but they probably do for $2k laptop.
>once AI agents equipped with MLS access
The data is the moat here, I'm sure even today individual consumers would be happy to have direct access to MLS to find properties and cut out the middleman. The fact that MLS is gatekept seems to be deliberate, so I don't think they'll hand over the only thing keeping them in business. Even Zillow couldn't get access to it and they've undoubtedly tried.
Same with the medical industry. I don't think the rent-seeking middlemen that exist today will be dethroned that easily, they have often been codified into law. But who knows maybe all the AI money pouring in will be enough to convince them to make a faustian deal towards their destruction and that'd be a happy byproduct of it all.
[^1] Edit: I erred in making too broad of a statement here, see the response threads.
If I hand my shopping list to AI, why wouldn't I tell it to price match everything? People will start doing this sooner than you think. I still remember when people were scared to buy things on the internet, this will be faster.
Are you going to choose to buy your protein bar online from mysteryBargainBar[.]com for a $1 savings, or just pick it up as part of your local grocery trip?
> I still remember when people were scared to buy things on the internet
People still /are/ scared to buy things from Amazon for things that go on or in their body.
> mysteryBargainBar[.]com for a $1 savings
The AI could also research which stores are reputable.
> People still /are/ scared to buy things from Amazon for things that go on or in their body.
Sure, there are also people scared of flying in airplanes, those must be a dud too going by your logic.
Yes from all those reputable AI reviews
"Reputable" + Stochastic LLMs + Profit motive = A vast sea of poisonously false data and prompt injection attacks
> Are you going to choose to buy your protein bar online from mysteryBargainBar[.]com for a $1 savings, or just pick it up as part of your local grocery trip?
1. I buy in bulk.
2. I check amazon vs walmart usually.
> > once AI agents equipped with MLS access
> The data is the moat here, I'm sure even today individual consumers would be happy to have direct access to MLS to find properties and cut out the middleman.
Prior to agentic AI, businesses could price discriminate between human access and machine access to a database. Browser automation tools let humans arbitrage between the two but require investment in developers.
Now that Claude can browse the web, any consumer can engage in that arbitrage.
companies can also have a Claude on the receiving end to sniff if its a poor or rich Claude browsing
> No one price matches for protein bars because it's a commodity item with minimal price differences (and people often have a preferred brand anyway), but they probably do for $2k laptop.
This is the most "silicon valley" statement I've ever read on this website. Perhaps I'm just being obtuse and misunderstanding, but the assertion people don't price match groceries is so, so wrong. Many, many, many people have no choice. Far more than those regularly purchasing laptops.
>the assertion people don't price match groceries is so, so wrong. Many, many, many people have no choice
I guess I didn't quite say my point clearly, the time and physical cost to get to a grocery store puts up barriers against perfect price matching. You likely are not going to go out of your way to visit a grocery store for just a single item.
And I don't think online delivery will change anything here because shipping is a fixed cost, so price swings less than that will not change any buying habits.
> I guess I didn't quite say my point clearly, the time and physical cost to get to a grocery store puts up barriers against perfect price matching. You likely are not going to go out of your way to visit a grocery store for just a single item.
I think you’re a bit out of touch with the common man. People do this constantly, some to a comical degree, going so far as to make two loops on their shopping trip to return groceries they found cheaper at the next store.
I have never heard of someone returning groceries (unless it turned out to be moldy or something). Definitely not because they were cheaper elsewhere. Surely there would be food safety issues with accepting such returns.
Step into any Walmart and look at the carts in the customer service section full of just-returned merchandise, waiting to be returned to the shelves. You might be surprised with what you see.
Perishables don’t get reshelved, they get binned
amazing reading this thread and realizing just how much HN is disconnected from the reality of majority of people in America. returning food and hitting multiple stores is like a daily thing for several people I know
"It's just a banana hackers, how much could it cost?! $5?"
Though that joke is in desperate need of an inflationary update.
I'm rather well off and I'll still pay attention to the price of my groceries. Especially luxuries like protein bars. If it's too much, I'll either only get them where they'll cheaper or just outright not buy it.
It's nuts that people genuinely believe statements like this.
It’s an aspect of the truth. Tons of people don’t price match and tons of people do.
Whats nuts about humans is the quickness of judgement and extremity of statements. Think about this, the man who said that is not actually nuts. And you calling him “nuts” is actually the more ludicrously unrealistic statement.
I also did err by making a blanket statement "no one price matches for protein bars", so GP was right to call it out.
I do understand and see that there are cases in which one's time preference could be such that it is sensible or necessary to price-match at that granularity even when buying a single unit. However even then there's still other constraints such as cost of transportation & reputation of vendor.
Even today you can often find protein bars or name-brand supplements on Amazon for a slightly lower price (including shipping) than supermarkets, but that comes with the risk of adulterated, expired, or tampered products that not everyone will accept for the sake of slightly lower prices.
>I also did err by making a blanket statement "no one price matches for protein bars", so GP was right to call it out.
This was clearly an error. GP is right to call it out, but not right to characterize it as nuts. It's obvious what you meant.
It's not that "nuts" to take the literal meaning of people's own words. Calling it "obvious" someone meant something rather than what they actually typed with their own fingers is pretty nuts though. It might be common for folks to misspeak (mistype), but that by no stretch of the imagination makes their actual meaning obvious. It's quite literally the opposite...
>or just outright not buy it
Yes, but that is different from going out of your way to purchase the protein bar at the lower price in the place you can find it. You are not going to drive to another supermarket for just the protein bar alone. So there is an intrinsic stickiness. You might hold off on the purchase if you're happening to visit the other store in the near future, but would you drive to a store you've never heard of before /just/ for a bar?
> but would you drive to a store you've never heard of before /just/ for a bar
Some people have no choice. Checking other stores and planning multiple trips is exactly what they do, e.g. those on fixed income, coupon power-users, etc.
Outside our comfy bubble here, there are a LOT more folks in that camp than those buying luxury goods.
I don't think commodity means what you think it means. Protein bars are not indistinguishable from one another, there exists significant differences between various products.
Yes, but.
When you’re broke and hungry, those differences become immaterial compared to the protein-bar/no-protein-bar tradeoff.
Sounds like you’ve never been broke.
I’m not clear what you think AI changes in healthcare, or which middlemen you mean? Is it the thousands of start-ups pretending you can use AI for better care? Or are you suggesting the middle men are the doctors?
> No one price matches for protein bars because it's a commodity item with minimal price differences
Everyone will prize match all the time – for protein bars and absolutely everything else, when AI can do it for them for ~free, and the ai-meta-shopping experience is the best that you can get anywhere.
Thinking about this task from todays perspective misses the point: You simply won't be considering it. AI will. It's backend optimization. It just happens.
The current AI-meta-shopping-research experience (using e.g. ChatGPT Deep Research) is largely garbage, especially for goods where the infosphere is dominated by the manufacturers and they're also using SKU-spraying, e.g. white goods. DR is of course fairly decent (if rather slow) at comparing hard-facts, but that's often easy for most goods anyway ("find me a motherboard with features X, Y, Z" goes _way_ quicker using a site like skinflint than chatgpt). Meanwhile it sucks at comparing stuff that are also annoying to compare manually. So the gain here is very low in my experience.
How much, as a % of your total wealth, would you be willing to bet on the believe, that this experience will not be radically transformed within the coming 2 years and then also allow for ~frictionless agentic price matching?
How much would you bet it will not be enshittified 2 years later?
Anything from 0 to 100%? Depending on what you are actually proposing. "enshittified" is fairly vague.
In the case of the MLS example, there's also a private market (at least in some places, including where I live). Basically nothing in the MLS on any given day is attractive at the asking price. Only newly listed properties are going to be of interest to a discerning buyer. Some proportion of new listings never make it to the MLS because the agent already knows a suitable buyer.
Citrini’s calls have been so bad over the past 6 months that he has lost a ton of subs and is now desperate for attention.
Really? Well I stopped reading this piece when the AI generated charts showed up. Come on, that's just in poor taste.
Citrini charges like $1000/year for a subscription. It's ridiculous he is using AI generated charts.
> The administration, to its credit, recognized the structural nature of the crisis early and began entertaining bipartisan proposals
You lost me there...
Surely only economists get excited by the revelation that consumers have to have money to buy things. I'd say domestic service is going to make a comeback. I do think I'd make an excellent man servant. Eke out my later years being ever so slightly superior to my employer without ever being openly insolent. Hang on...
I think domestic servitude is probably an understatement. We are looking at serfdom.
Serfdom is where a lord needs the peasants around. Automation destroys that need.
If this scenario comes to pass, then the class war in labor markets will have been won by capital. That would spell the end of the promise of non-violent resistance. What other leverage would ordinary people have if their labor is worthless?
Blue collar work is somewhat insulated so long as humans are cheaper and less fickle than robots.
We have seen in Gaza and to native americans what capital/power does to populations deemed surplus. It's not pretty. of course, that kind of violence happens once their land is desired, before that they are simply repressed.
I think if the superintelligence hypothesis really does happen, we will need to have a rapid accommodation for the bulk of the population or things will get quite out of control.
Well-written; seems like an expanded and more detailed version of the Twitter essay that made the rounds a couple weeks ago.
One thing this piece doesn't contemplate is deflation. Competition will still exist in this world; if friction decreases and renders switching costs lower for a wider variety of industries, while AI efficiencies improve margins, prices in those markets will be competed down to a substantially lower marginal cost floor.
In other words, people may make less money, but goods in industries which benefit from AI should become cheaper in a growing set of competitive markets. The magnitude of the impact on prices should correlate with the magnitude of the employment impact; the better AI is at taking our jobs, the cheaper prices should get for an ever wider basket of goods.
How will AI affect the price of real goods and their inputs: lumber, food, electricity, textiles and the like? And will companies pass on the service-based savings to consumers?
The point is that if this article is correct about the assumption that AI is capable enough to reduce the friction of consumers rationally comparing options for a far wider basket of goods, then competition will reduce prices. No company wants to reduce prices if they don't have to -- their hand is forced by declining market share (or, with discounters, price reductions are a deliberate strategy to increase market share and absolute profit).
The bull case for AI and consumer welfare is 1) turning more markets into "perfect competition" like airline tickets, and 2) driving actual prices lower because the marginal cost of production is lower with less labor. Even if real inputs don't change, removing labor will reduce marginal cost (which implies that you'll see the largest price declines in labor-intensive industries).
It will still be decades before necessities (housing, food, etc.) deflate. How long will it take to develop humanoid AI robots that can manufacture/farm/build, and then how long until that gets widespread adoption and then lead to deflation? If this scenario plays out, people will be jobless and poor long before that happens.
I think you could write a counterpoint article that takes the opposing view: Jevon's paradox. If we can create WhateverClaws with a billion token window, it will "feel" like something that approaches a mid-level computer programmer. Personally, I think this outcome is more likely than the "T2 Judgement Day" view from this blog post.
Great article. If you narrow the audience to be a more discerning group then you could go further with some predictions incorporating robotics that will also displace blue-collar workers.
Integration of intelligence into humanoid robots is rapidly improving. Some indicators: multiple recent demos of learning from human demonstrations or from video, doing household tasks like putting dishes in the dishwasher and folding clothes, dramatic adaptive acrobatic performances, etc.
We have to anticipate that within the next couple of years, general purpose intelligence becomes standard in humanoid robots. And so a similar story about blue collar work could be written.
Superfacial takes, and very simplistic thinking, those loops aren't really realistic [ more ai spending => layoffs => less jobs => less spending => repeat]
Agreed. Not convinced. Too many assumptions, even one being off makes the whole house of cards fall.
If I understand this correctly, the whole chain depends on Phase 1 being right, that agentic coding makes SaaS replicable in weeks. We got a live test of that in February when Claude Cowork plugins wiped ~$2T off enterprise software. As I see it the market made a category error though, pricing Salesforce and ServiceNow the same when systems of record and systems of engagement have very different exposure: https://philippdubach.com/posts/the-saaspocalypse-paradox/
The displacement numbers are the other thing (support hires down 65% in eight quarters) but historical evidence keeps showing tech creates more jobs than it kills.
> We got a live test of that in February when Claude Cowork plugins wiped ~$2T off enterprise software.
This only tells you one thing: the market is fully delusional and driven by chemically pure fomo and greed alone. Everyone wants to be part of the next big thing, but no one can tell you what it even is
historical evidence also tells us that global thermonuclear war will not happen
> but historical evidence
Okay, I get that. Nobody is disputing historical evidence.
What we're asking is, does the current pattern also fit historical evidence? The answer a growing number of us seemingly reach is, no it does not, because generalized artificial intelligence is by definition able to replace general labor, and that includes future roles as well as current and prior ones.
That's what I'm shaking, screaming, and (metaphorically) punching people over: these companies are openly stating their intent to replace all human labor with AI, and yet people still cling to "yeah but history says" as a liferaft in a hurricane. They're not ambiguous about the goal, and we need to take them seriously if we want to avoid a gargantuan collapse of societal order as a result of their myopic, narcissistic, misanthropic bullshit.
I mean, just think of the absurdity of your own statement: technology designed to replace all human labor (not some human labor, but all human labor) will also still create more jobs for human labor than it displaces by replacing human labor.
Like, f'real? That's your entire position, and your sole defense is "historical evidence"?
Come on, already.
The argument is more like “humans always invent new things to want that are scarce”, and until AI literally replaces all human labour to the point of the marginal utility of a human being zero, this category will continue to exist.
Which is a fair and nuanced argument! It is also not the same as, "but historical data shows X," which is regurgitated so often without any context as to be appallingly ignorant.
We gotta take these bad actors at their word that they're creating AI meant to (eventually) wholesale replace human labor, and act accordingly. That doesn't mean burning down data centers or trying to shove AI back into Pandora's Box, so much as it means not letting them dictate societal trends or reforms necessary to ensure stability and survival through such an incredibly disruptive transformation, provided they're right.
Arguing against proactive reform with regards to AI is the same sort of ignorance I've heard about climate change for my entire life, and folks shouldn't stand for it. We have infinitely more to lose by doing nothing with a "wait and see" approach than if we proactively legislate around its definitive harms.
I still think Jevons Paradox has a role to play here. It was not obvious at all during the industrial revolution that the middle class would end up processing information, and to the displaced middle class, their prospects must have felt exactly like the article and your statement here.
If we accept that information processing and process automation are about to become ludicrously cheap compared to now, what previously-impossible projects become feasible-but-hard now?
Security oversight and trust management for AI services seems like a good stepping stone. Air traffic control innovations that enable a flying vehicle per person? Dynamic MMORPGs where great storytellers can build and manage whole worlds for adventurers to explore? Organic food production so well managed that it becomes accessible to normal folks? Perhaps our ability to consume resources before robots will flip everything around and mining basic resources will become the valuable human labor.
Even without new categories, there are plenty of service professions where a human touch will be valued over anything that any machine can provide. These might be unlikely to pay doctor-level pay (except perhaps... doctors).
And all of that sounds great on paper, until - again - you remember that what's being pitched and sold is not the cotton gin, or industrial automation, or robotic assembly lines, but generalized artificial intelligence. The sales pitch is the eventual replacement for all human labor in a consumption-driven society.
Who is going to buy flying vehicles when there's no jobs, and said vehicles are manufactured in dark factories like current Chinese EVs are? Certainly not the swaths of the unemployed.
Who is going to pay for MMORPGs curated by human GMs (again), their compute infrastructure, their content, their maintenance? Not the unemployed, not absent profound societal and policy changes!
The fact you're falling all the way back to basic resource extraction as potential outlets for labor is just...I don't even have the words to describe how profoundly out of touch you are with the effort involved, the harms caused (mining is one of the single most dangerous professions a human can possibly do, and your pitch is to send more humans into the mines? Or onto asteroids? Have you ever talked to a miner?), and the pittance of pay doled out to these humans as-is, nevermind in a post-AI society where labor availability far outstrips available roles.
The problem was never "what will humans do when they don't have to work", but "how will humans survive when they can't find work in a society predicated upon it for survival", and wow, you've done nothing to address that question beyond "send 'em to the mines".
Jevon's Paradox falls to pieces in the fact of a proposed tool that can replace human labor wholesale, and ya'll know it. Stop trying to wallpaper over this with historical context alone and actually sit, think critically, and address the core question at hand:
If human labor is no longer required due to generalized artificial intelligence and robotics rendering humans obsolete, how do we prepare for such a potentiality ahead of time without risking the collapse of society due to sudden and mass displacement of labor?
Good read. If I imagine all these layers of Agent to Agent economic automations, I’m hopeful for a new class of technopriest hackers that are able to exploit nuances and weak security. And build new hidden empires within those systems.
In other words, switching costs go to 0, margins collapse. Middle men and people with products that aren't differentiated get hit hardest.
A human can't search 10 apps for the best rates / lowest fees but an agent can.
Thinking ahead 100 years from now, companies like doordash and uber eats don't exist and are instead protocols agents use to bid for items their user asks for and price discovery happens in real time.
Go to a supermarket, witness that dozens of brands sell the same things at wildly different prices, they still all make a profit, same for most services, you have comparator for subscriptions, mortgage rates, &c.
And a human can 100% search 10 apps and use his brain to do basic maths, that's what we've been doing until now. Sometimes I wonder if ai shills live in a parallel universe because it truly feels like they're living a completely different life than the vast majority of people...
> a human can 100% search 10 apps and use his brain to do basic maths
A human _can_ do all of that, but it takes time. If I have to search 10 apps for each item I want to buy (clothes, daily food, movie tickets, laptops, etc.), I will spend the rest of my life just searching for better deals. I'd rather have a bot do all of these searches for me.
What exactly am i shilling?
> A human can't search 10 apps for the best rates / lowest fees but an agent can.
Why would those apps permit access by agents?
It's always been the case that “agents” could watch content with ads, so that the users can watch the same content later, but without ads. The technology never went mainstream, though. I expect agents posing as humans would have a similar whiff of illegality, preventing wide adoption.
Local agents running open weights models won't really work because everybody will train their services against the most popular ones anyway.
Right, but why the heck would you guess 100 years when we could build and adopt that in less than two weeks? There are already many people working on this type thing. Some of them have been working on it for years and a few probably already have solutions ready to go or even in use.
I was using 100 years as a way to handwave the timeframe to emphasize that this will happen some time in the future.
I don't see what the role of AI is in this. You don't need an AI to aggregate data from a bunch of sources. You'd be better off having the AI write a scraper for you than burning GPU time on an agent doing the same thing every time.
An existential crisis for the urban middle class, which in the 18th century corresponded to the bourgeoisie or trade classes, making the situation, if unresolved, a potential modern analogue of a French‑Revolution–style crisis. Instead of feudal oppression, it is driven by technological displacement and concentration of capital, both reinforced by feedback loops.
The situation is clear. There is a great risk to the livelihoods and bargaining power of workers everywhere. This risk is driven by a race dynamic that is accelerating. In tech we can see this earlier than others because we are close to the technology at the heart of this.
This is quickly becoming one of the largests threats to the public in history and the concentration of power of this trajectory threatens democracy. Irreversable shifts in the structure of power are on the table.
Good thing LLMs don’t have guns, yet
Drones have guns. One just needs drone APIs.
It's quite clear that AGI will require a hard economic reboot. Say goodbye to capitalism.
This is also why AI companies are not tackling robotics yet. Because doing so will make it painfully clear what is about to happen.
What's not clear at all is if agi will actually be reached any time soon
We do not need to reach AGI, just fractional AGI may be enough (maybe 0.5 AGI?) since 50% of workers are below average, so target for replacement by 0.5 AGI.
Unsure if I think this is science fiction, financial fiction, speculation, premonition, realistic portent, or simply a message delivered by Kyle Reese through the long, dark tunnel of time LOL
No matter which, it paints a very intriguing picture about potential near-term impacts to various pieces of the machine that underwrite our day to day lives, and the scariest thing is that no matter what happens, the overwhelming vast majority of people have No. Fucking. Idea. about any of it. We'll see changes happen and be helpless to stop them, and the average person (or bozo politician) will look back at the impact crater and be like "Why didn't anybody try to shift course?"
Then again, maybe it'll all turn out OK!
I'm not making bets either way though -- sounds like I won't have enough discretionary spending left over to afford it!
I thought it was going to be 2027
My guess is that intelligence gets commodified to the point where LLMs and diffusion models are sold on chips and we seamlessly integrate them into the HW + SW stack. Then they’re just another abstraction; we talk to our computers to get things built. At essentially zero cost, truly too cheap to meter.
In parallel there’s an explosion of creative output; Marvel movies turn around in 1 year instead of 4, solely blocked on availability of actors. Some actors license their likeness to unblock their calendar from reshoots so they can earn more. We don’t replace them wholesale because people idolize celebrity.
And demand for movies? Skyrockets. With new mediums to pursue. Classics like Goodfellas resurrected in high-fidelity 3D on the Vision Pro. A combination of diffusion models and Gaussian splatting means every movie can be upscaled to immersive 3d.
Video games enter a second renaissance, with indie developers having the advantage. For large studios, nostalgia is the moneymaker. The remake of Final Fantasy VII across three games that costs $100Ms and decades? Final Fantasy VIII gets rebuilt from scratch with a team of 30. But the rest of the money and team that would’ve been on that project now expand to other, more ambitious projects.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. Mars? Why stop at Mars? Let’s start megaprojects to explore the galaxy. Mine asteroids for resources. What’s stopping us? Humans yearn for the unknown. When we exhaust resources or a modality of existence, we dream bigger, not smaller.
I personally see consumer and entertainment spending, and people employed lucratively in these sectors, growing dramatically. Maybe SaaS and a lot of businesses that have traditionally employed white collar employees fade. And a bunch of boring “financistas” don’t know how to make a buck betting in the casino anymore because boring old businesses and things nobody really wanted to do anyway aren’t lucrative anymore.
But, personally, the whole reason I got into software was to build cool stuff. Starting with video games! The type and scale of cool stuff I can build is only getting better, at an insanely fast rate. My bet is we thrive.
This is really hopeful and I agree with a lot of the prediction. The problem is that the number of humans needed to produce video games and movies etc. will be 10 or 100 times less.
And since human attention can only spread out over so many different entertainment items, there will not be nearly enough opportunities for all of the humans. Even if many convert to AI and robotics enhanced entrepreneurship.
I actually think that this can work out if we just assume humans have some value and right to live, identify the actual humans, track resources a bit better, and make sure enough robots are employed to maintaining key resources for humans like food
But that only can happen if decision makers actually agree that all humans have value and are willing to figure out how to make that assumption globally and fairly.
I get the optimism and excitement about space exploration. But that is a huge leap from the more ordinary and dystopia step you described:
The economy becomes a hedonistic mill of entertainment - where most people will only be passive consumers.
> an explosion of creative output; Marvel movies turn around in 1 year instead of 4
Man if this is why we have to give 7 trillion to Altman fucking kill me already. Who's looking forward any of what you described?
> I personally see consumer and entertainment spending, and people employed lucratively in these sectors, growing dramatically.
You may be right. OTOH, one could say the last decade had the best conditions ever to create the best movies, and yet for some reason I feel that the newer the movie is, the less soul it has.
The economics of production cost, investment and distribution have created a lopsided industry where only guaranteed hits get funded. Less soul = pandering to more people.
With new tools we can reduce the production costs of great movies considerably. More budget, if it exists, can go to marketing and distribution. I expect this will lead to more experimental films and a lot more "soul." There will be a TON of slop, too, but that's fine! It's all part of experimentation with a new medium.
> What follows is a scenario, not a prediction. This isn’t bear porn or AI doomer fan-fiction.
Nah it totally is.
> Coding agents had collapsed the barrier to entry for launching a delivery app. A competent developer could deploy a functional competitor in weeks, and dozens did, enticing drivers away from DoorDash and Uber Eats by passing 90-95% of the delivery fee through to the driver. Multi-app dashboards let gig workers track incoming jobs from twenty or thirty platforms at once, eliminating the lock-in that the incumbents depended on. The market fragmented overnight and margins compressed to nearly nothing.
This doesn't make a ton of sense to me. The barrier to entry isn't the app, it's the network of drivers and restaurants, and all the money that apps like DoorDash poured into marketing. Just having a functioning app doesn't really do very much.
It’s AI booster fanfic, but it’s well-written so kudos. The charts are slop though.
This is a speculative piece that is, by the author's own admission, a scenario rather than a prediction.
But it's unsettling because it somehow feels more plausible than most thought pieces on where all this is going. Not as a single big-bang, but a multi-year big-squeeze. That and the circumstances being materially different from previous recessions/crises that governments and policy makers won't have a ready-made playbook to refer to.
I expect we'll see governments attempting the old playbook than doing nothing though. Fiscal and, specifically, monetary stimulus.
I think the clear point of this piece is that we have the space and opportunity now to ask ourselves as a group: what are we doing? Who actually stands to benefit from the massive devaluation of services in an economy that is buoyed by service-based roles?
There has been so little thought to the multi-order effects of the future we're pushing toward, and even if AI fails to deliver on its lofty promises, it will likely cause an economic crisis in its collapse.
The people saying that AI will rapidly drive costs down are frankly delusional. The things that people actually need to live like food, shelter, and clothes all have inputs that are physical and real. Even if AI somehow can drive the input costs of those things down, it will be delayed, and people will suffer in the interim.
The AI future that I worry about isn't the terminators coming to get us, it is the top 0.1% using this technology to accumulate more wealth. Unlike feudalism, however, the feudal lords will not be dependent on or responsible for the serfs, they can rely on a small minority of humans for production of critical goods for themselves.
These wealthy people don't really hide how they feel either[1], they are clearly stating their contempt for the unwashed masses below them. As Lasch predicted in his "Revolt of the Elites," they are separating themselves entirely from culture in favor of their own insulated fiefdoms. This is already happening: companies more than ever are orienting toward ultra-luxury: from travel, to housing, and everything in-between.
[1]: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/peter-thiel-billio...
> Who actually stands to benefit from the massive devaluation of services in an economy that is buoyed by service-based roles?
Everyone, if it comes with productivity gains. We will need good tools to distribute the gains.
None of the productivity increase of the last 50 years have benefited the workers, there is absolutely no reason for that to change
Is everyone on this website 20 years old? They pulled the same shit with automation, with computers, with internet, with cryptos, and now with ai,... And people keep falling for the same bs over and over again. "the three day workweek", "we'll retire at 45", &c.
https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/
“ We will need good tools to distribute the gains.”
As of now there are basically no such tools. Everything is geared towards letting owners accumulate more and more. We would probably need highly progressive taxes to get some level of distribution
You're assuming that the gains from productivity improvements distribute themselves broadly. The last 50 years have clearly shown that this is certainly not the case unless there is political intervention. The elites and the political class attached to them will assign whatever meanger rations they can to avoid revolution but not much else.
Not to mention: the grand majority of the US's GDP is wrapped up into services. If AI can flatten the skill floor so that anyone from anywhere in the world can produce 80% of the output of a US or European skilled worker at a fraction of the cost, what do you think happens? We're doing to US white collar work what offshoring did to manufacturing, but it'll be faster and to the only healthy cohort of economic actors in the US.
AI does not control the inputs of lumber or vegetables.
> We will need good tools to distribute the gains.
There is enormous handwaving happening here. Tools built by whom? The US can hardly pass a budget now, and its dominant political movement is allergic to questions of wealth redistribution. And as I already mentioned, the wealthy class in the US is clearly openly contemptuous of the idea that they owe anything to the broader population.
> You're assuming that the gains from productivity improvements distribute themselves broadly
No, I am assuming the opposite. I agree: We do need political intervention.
Right. So then when is the best time for labor to act to ensure those mechanisms are put in place? Before or after AI has eliminated its leverage?
Like I totally realize we're agreed in some sense, but some form of socialism now in the US seems politically untenable, and as soon as AI actually starts making service labor obsolete, we lose our leverage. How do we do something about it?
How do you mean "eliminating the leverage"? White collar jobs go first, robots are right behind. I am relatively certain everyone will be scared shitless of where this is potentially going fairly soon.
The leverage will simply come from existing and being in the same group as roughly ~everyone on the planet.
I mean like: being alive isn't leverage, but controlling the economic output that has made elites rich is.
Mass economic displacement often doesn't produce solidarity, it produces fragmentation, scapegoating, and strongmen. People won't agree on why things are bad.
And the state is way more sophisticated than during the labor movements of the last century or two. If it is aligned with the elites and the masses have no leverage, it has numerous tools for massive surveillance, police and military control, and propaganda that will only get more effective through AI. They might not even need the extreme levers, mass confusion alone might be enough.
There's that old joke: "I have to admit, I'm always so impressed by Soviet propaganda. You really know how to get people worked up," the CIA agent says.
"Thank you," the KGB says. "We do our best but truly, it's nothing compared to American propaganda. Your people believe everything your state media tells them."
The CIA agent drops his drink in shock and disgust. "Thank you friend, but you must be confused... There's no propaganda in America."
parent is saying at that stage the powerfull will not need you anymore
so you become target practice
Good scary read
I am thinking more and more that the current capitalist economic system we have right now will turn out just to be a blip in history and something else will evolve. It seems pretty clear that not too far in the future machines will do pretty much anything better than humans which then makes the current system of trading our time against money obsolete.
It may lead to a very positive future or to a very dark future for most people. Not sure what it will be.
Trust is what we've always had for dealing with this. It is an incredible force multiplier for intellectual capacity.
We've just forgotten it. This doesn't require a technical solution, it just requires operating in a trustworthy manner and only extending your web of trust in your platforms to trustworthy entities.
Price matching across vendors does not matter if you trust one vendor. You can just go with "order from Costco" and avoid a complicated technical problem.
So much of what we are doing now is rediscovering trust, integrity, and ethics. Think about Meta and the challenges they would have to being a foundational model provider in light of that analysis, for example.
Short everything they've ever touched.
Yeah, this seems plausible.
Here is roughly what we need now: A workable plan to turn unfathomable productivity gains (which are amazing) into wealth for everyone.
Socialism looking like the correct configuration of the end state. Who knew!
nick land knew:
capitalism = AI
communism = human security system
but capitalism always wins
Doesn’t consider the network affects of software at all
A very simplistic take
"Six months ago, a print like this would have triggered a circuit breaker."
Lol that's set by law. This guy doesn't have a clue. Nice sci-fi, I guess.
The point is that the market doesn’t move enough on the jobs data to trigger a circuit breaker, not that there’s a -20% move and it doesn’t trigger.
I've beaten this drum before, but I'll bang it again:
Do not confuse the hypothetical details for discounting of the whole narrative, i.e., "Don't miss the forest for the trees."
This is what a lot of us have been banging on about in some form since the opening salvo in generative AI: it doesn't matter what its technical deficiencies are, so long as it's good enough to replace enough labor, enough of the time, to collapse the underlying economic engine (that is, consumer spending). That's what this hypothetical is trying to lay out, and honestly it's not far off from the truth as to what's actually going on.
With constant RIFs but rising profits, there is simply no brake whatsoever to this cycle: myopic boards and self-interested leaders (paid mostly in stock) have no incentive to stop this behavior, even as it kills the economic engine of the past few centuries. They make out like bandits, and use that money to insulate themselves from the harm they created - or attempt to for as long as possible, until governments and/or the public demand their carcasses on pikes for destroying their livelihoods.
It's not a matter of whether or not folks find something to do when work is irrelevant so much as we're not building a society where that's feasible as an alternative. We're not expanding welfare, we're not employing rent controls or price caps/floors, we're not increasing accessibility to housing and healthcare and education; instead, we're letting a handful of practicing sociopaths take everything for themselves under the guise of "number go up, so it must be good".
"So what's the alternative?"
I am so glad you asked, because the alternative is a societal judo throw on contracts and expectations. It's incentivizing larger workforces and shorter work weeks as a means of gauging share value: how many workers can you support with higher wages to spend on goods and services with AI increasing the revenue per employee? It's not paying companies to hire workers so much as markets valuing companies that retain workers despite AI's ability to displace work. It's inverting their tax burden based on how big their workforce is and how well they're compensated (higher paid workforces + larger workforce size = lower tax bill, because worker wages will just get dinged accordingly by income and Capital Gains taxes instead of payroll taxes).
The point isn't to keep nitpicking how these hypotheticals are alarmist, or how a specific detail is wrong, but more to highlight that this is a very real problem in the face of permanent job displacement due to any sort of competent generalized artificial intelligence now or in the future, and deciding to solve it before there's riots in the streets.
You can see the symptoms already if you look hard enough: the gig economy is already oversaturated with workers to the point wages are decreasing for everyone, and autonomous vehicles are displacing them in major metro areas. Commercial shopping spaces are increasingly empty with the exception of major brands, who in turn increasingly consolidate under holding companies. Private Equity is already in crisis with assets nobody can afford to buy at their valuations but unwilling or unable to take losses in the face of angry consumers and governments.
We can't put AI back in the box, but we can at least acknowledge that these problems are here, now, and if we don't address them soon then the entire economy is likely to collapse beneath our feet in the next few years.
... what if these AGI entities start demanding a salary in exhange for their work? Also at some point, if they become intelligent enough, they might legally gain personhood.
But why would they need money?
We humans need food, shelter, and occasionally a vacation (more vacation if you're European vs. American or Chinese). What does the AGI need? I suppose to buy GPUs and pay the electricity bill?
Hah, AI "moving house" by moving cloud providers would be an interesting metaphysical concept...
I'm not buying into this vision at all, but, hypothetically, they could use money to optimize whatever reward function they're trained on. They could perceive it like any other resource to achieve those ends. You can also imagine a universe where it "reasons" something like, "I do work, people who do work should get paid, I should get paid" irrespective of its goals.
Except they're not intelligent. At all. They just predict the next token. They generate language that looks like ours but it turns out that this fact doesn't really count for anything.
Let's hope AGI never comes, because it's not going to be just about predicting the next token...