>Humans don’t really have the time to price-match across five competing platforms before buying a box of protein bars
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.
>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.
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.
> 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'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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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?
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...
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.
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.
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 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"?
> 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
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.
Superfacial takes, and very simplistic thinking, those loops aren't really realistic [ more ai spending => layoffs => less jobs => less spending => repeat]
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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 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.
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?
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 gobbled 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...
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.
>Humans don’t really have the time to price-match across five competing platforms before buying a box of protein bars
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.
>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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
It's nuts that people genuinely believe statements like this.
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 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.
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?
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.
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.
When you’re broke and hungry, those differences become immaterial compared to the protein-bar/no-protein-bar tradeoff.
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.
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.
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 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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!
This is also why AI companies are not tackling robotics yet. Because doing so will make it painfully clear what is about to happen.
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...
Everyone, if it comes with productivity gains. We will need good tools to distribute the gains.
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.
No, I am assuming the opposite. I agree: We do need political intervention.
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?
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.
Nah it totally is.
Lol that's set by law. This guy doesn't have a clue. Nice sci-fi, I guess.
A very simplistic take
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 gobbled 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.
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...