> OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta AI, Microsoft: the combined investment in large-scale AI infrastructure now runs into the hundreds of billions of dollars, with projections into the trillions over the next decade. These numbers need an addressable market large enough to justify them. There is only one market that large: the global labor market.
It's getting tiring hearing this alarmist view unchallenged honestly. What if instead of replacing a market, it's augmenting a market?
When it becomes cheaper to produce things, we tend to consume more. That is, our consumption is endless. If one day everyone can afford a yacht because automation has reduced the production cost to next to nothing, we'll all be buying yachts. Then it will become who owns the nicer yacht, the branded limited edition yacht. The goal posts will simply shift.
Meanwhile, businesses still need to compete. If they're all using the same AI models to replace labor, AI is no longer their competitive advantage. It's simply a baseline necessity of production.
There will be pain in the jobs market, yes, as old ways of doing things are replaced by new ways with AI. But humans will continue to be the ones consuming endlessly and businesses will continue to need humans to differentiate. It's a relationship that has survived all other times automation has changed how we work.
> businesses will continue to need humans to differentiate.
Honestly, why? If AI actually becomes capable of replacing large sections of the workforce, why wouldn’t a business composed entirely of AI “employees” outcompete their rivals?
Because they would all be using the same AI model (in reality a fixed set of them, but let’s say it’s just one for the sake of argument). That isn’t differentiation [0]
It’s like if every company hired the same guy named Karl. If everyone is relying on Karl, and Karl is making the same stuff for all these businesses, how is one business going to outcompete another?
At that point you need something else to drive differentiation. Branding, strategic partnerships, patents, IP, influencer endorsements, real estate, government licensing, etc. These are either influenced, controlled, or regulated by humans at the end of the day. At the very least you’ll need humans aligning the models for human needs. Humans are the ones being served, they’re the taste makers
0. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/quantumblack/our-insig...
> would all be using the same AI model
i think this is a very large assumption.
What if in the future, AI models are as guarded as nuclear weapons? Because why doesn't this argument apply for nuclear weapons, but does for AI?
Because AI models can create other ones and the weights/training data is what models. So you can hoard data, but not the models.
Hence the drive to control the compute hardware. If your competitors can't run inference at competitive scale and cost, they can't challenge you.
I don’t see this happening at all. Even today, a person + AI is vastly better than just an AI. Context is really important.
and why would they need human customers to thrive? They have other machine customers! This is the even more dystopian step two that the essay doesn't explore...
If they (AI) able to compete with even 30% of workforce, that alone is a big enough leverage over the already powerful companies. At minimum it will cause another phase of wealth inequality, which is already a big problem atm.
Open model with affortable computing power can be the alternative, but we don't see it soon.
It kinda seems like you are just stating the implied argument this article is targeted towards? Or something else? Do you disagree with, e.g., Daron Acemoglu's position here? Or is there some truism somewhere we are all missing?
Not the OP but I think there is something to the notion that whatever is scarce but in demand is what will be expensive and of course the inverse would be true as well. What this means is humans however they do get resources will be able to put those resources to use abundantly frankly nearly for free on things like digital intelligence but other things will become scarce.. one could speculate about what those things are but even if they're not scarce today they could become scarce in a relative sense where they become relatively valuable and that's what people will be getting selling to each other