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the__prestige
davedx
Some slightly more structural-technical critique I thought of too--
Assumptions that I think warrant closer inspection:
- agents will always win vs antibot firewalls: highly doubtful given my experience with openclaw. Antibot measures are everywhere, they're advanced, and the more agents threaten legacy business models the harder they'll fight to protect them. Think e.g. Uber investing more in anti-bot tech to stop agents turning them into a whitelabel API. Think CloudFlare's recent moves in this area. Think Salesforce reducing access to Slack API. Data moats will be guarded more strongly.
- total cost of inference will be cheaper than the margin destruction caused by agents: inference is currently heavily subsidized. I have serious doubts "on device" inference will ever be reliable and competitive enough to be viable for running high capability agents (will they even be online enough?). What's the real cost of inference? Does Claude Code really cost $200/month at maximum utilization?
It indeed assumes steady state responses from all incumbents and governments while AI agents move at the speed of innovation. Not sure about that.
munksbeer
I don't pretend to know how all of this will unfold but at the very least your argument has more depth and nuance than the average response to all this which is - only a few people will control everything and the rest will scrape around in the dust, if we're allowed to live.
Just no depth of thought to those sort of replies at all, on a site where curiosity and deeper thinking is encouraged.
GeoAtreides
A site with vote ranking or indeed any ranking will never encourage curiosity and deep thinking, just group thinking
adw
> Organizations don't restructure at the speed of a demo.
I imagine I'm not alone in having seen a _big_ secular shift in colleague behavior since Opus 4.5 came out. The organization will lag the behavior, but weird things are happening.
(I'm not speaking to the rest of your points; the crypto-bro stable coin bit was jarring for me too. Europe will just go onto Faster Payments, the US will eventually catch up with FedNow, you don't need crypto).
Rover222
This was a nice, soothing response after having read the entire article.
GeoAtreides
>AI makes everything cheaper, the purchasing power of remaining income rises
hahaha, hilarious, imagine thinking prices will go down instead of companies just pocketing the difference
>People don't optimize purchases like machines
correct, machine optimize purchases like machines. that was the author point
>Regulation would arrive fast.
what regulation? "Stop using AI or you will get fined?" "Extra tax on AI companies"? good luck passing those in today America. also, the author touches on the exact point as well
jonwinstanley
Presumably price would reduce due to the ease of which people can spin up competitors?
nozzlegear
I stan the spirit of the free market as much as any red-blooded American patriot, but we've seen time and again throughout history that competitors just get bought up or regulated out of existence by the established players. They don't actually compete.
GeoAtreides
OP was talking about commodities, not SaaS
krackers
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.
vmg12
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.
krackers
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.
riku_iki
> 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.
vmg12
> 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.
dboreham
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.
jahsome
> 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.
krackers
>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.
lijok
> 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.
GeoAtreides
>, 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.
you have never been poor (enough) and it shows
Tadpole9181
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.
threethirtytwo
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.
krackers
>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?
jjmarr
> > 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.
botusaurus
companies can also have a Claude on the receiving end to sniff if its a poor or rich Claude browsing
nightski
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.
__d
Yes, but.
When you’re broke and hungry, those differences become immaterial compared to the protein-bar/no-protein-bar tradeoff.
rrr_oh_man
Sounds like you’ve never been broke.
jmye
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?
jstummbillig
> 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.
formerly_proven
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.
jstummbillig
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?
malshe
> A competent developer working with Claude Code or Codex could now replicate the core functionality of a mid-market SaaS product in weeks. Not perfectly or with every edge case handled, but well enough that the CIO reviewing a $500k annual renewal started asking the question “what if we just built this ourselves?”
This has been repeated ad nauseam in the media without any bearing to reality. I'm not a software developer but one has to just use any enterprise grade software to develop an appreciation for how difficult it is to maintain it. And that's just from a user's perspective.
harambae
There’s also all sorts of audit logs and legal compliance and iso/nist/etc certifications required when setting that up for use in a large company.
Not sure about a startup, though, maybe they’d roll the dice.
scandox
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...
encomiast
I think domestic servitude is probably an understatement. We are looking at serfdom.
tehjoker
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.
Rover222
I was at a restaurant last night with a group, and it was the first time I heard people actively organizing on how to block new data centers in the area. It felt like being in a scene in a sci-fi movie. I do think if these feedback loops happen too quickly of white collar displacement, there might be some real violence against data centers.
nephihaha
Serfdom is where a lord needs the peasants around. Automation destroys that need.
newguytony
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.
ByThyGrace
Really? Well I stopped reading this piece when the AI generated charts showed up. Come on, that's just in poor taste.
dw_arthur
Citrini charges like $1000/year for a subscription. It's ridiculous he is using AI generated charts.
xenophon
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.
SirensOfTitan
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?
xenophon
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).
cal_dent
but doesn't this implicitly assuming the reduction in labour cost and household income is like for like price reduction. When there's probably just as likely (& if not more) that the reduction in household income is lopsided so overall ability to purchase is reduced. You'll then need fewer people to buy more to make up for the loss of some buyers which is unlikely for many goods.
I do think the idea that AI is good for economic growth is for the fairies personally under the current model. I cant square the circle of a consumer based economic model will see higher growth by the apparently significant reduction in said consumers income.
PakistaniDenzel
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.
padjo
> The administration, to its credit, recognized the structural nature of the crisis early and began entertaining bipartisan proposals
You lost me there...
drivebyhooting
Did you miss the part where this is a scenario written for two years in the future?
padjo
When the current administration is still in power?
apical_dendrite
> 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.
7777777phil
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.
stego-tech
> 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.
nojs
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.
stego-tech
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.
largbae
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).
stego-tech
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?
flux3125
>(not some human labor, but all human labor)
I mean... I wouldn't exactly pay to have sex with Claude Code
Other than that, good points.
lm28469
> 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
botusaurus
historical evidence also tells us that global thermonuclear war will not happen
joshuaheard
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.
some_random
I'm kind of tired of the assumption that a post-scarcity world will without a doubt look like Famous Science Fiction Television Show "Star Trek".
lossyalgo
> freeing humans from work and scarcity
How will that be possible if all wealth is held by a small group of ultra-rich individuals? Or do you think they will all simultaneously opt to distribute their wealth to everyone in some form of UBI?
adithyareddy
He said humans. He didn't say all of them, or specify which ones, but I think we can guess.
D-Coder
All it takes is one ultra-rich individual to say, "I'm having my bots build a bot-building factory and giving them to everyone who wants a bot. For free (after all, bots are doing all the work!) Or a hundred bots, who cares. They're free, bots are doing all the work anyway."
xg15
Those will be the only humans left.
munksbeer
I'm not an economist but you're just echoing a trivially shallow meme.
Research:
- Where does most money come from?
- What are these gazillion AI agents creating if no-one has any money to buy anything?
- What is this "wealth" of this small group of ultra-rich individuals? Who is buying the shares of their companies to make them wealthy? Who is buying their products?
franktankbank
This is the dumb meme. Those who own the automation don't have any non-moral non-ethical reason to feed and house the masses. Money is a proxy for power.
outside1234
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.
pirate787
He also elected the guy who did a 180 on AI regulations and stopped FAA harassment of SpaceX.
outside1234
“Harassment” = following rules and laws?
For the 180 on AI regulations you are going to have to explain that to me because as far as I can see there wasn’t any regulation under Biden of AI
rramadass
This will never happen. I think you need to re-read Orwell's 1984 and understand the Nature of Power. Our current Technologies have made it orders of magnitude easier to gain/amass/seize/monopolize and hold "absolute power".
As Lord Acton said - “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority; still more when you superadd the tendency of the certainty of corruption by authority.”
O'Brien from 1984;
'Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?'
oncelearner
Superfacial takes, and very simplistic thinking, those loops aren't really realistic [ more ai spending => layoffs => less jobs => less spending => repeat]
nubg
Agreed. Not convinced. Too many assumptions, even one being off makes the whole house of cards fall.
ongytenes
Reminds me of the story of Henry Ford, then an elderly man proudly showing off the first two robots on the assembly line to the representative of the automotive union.
To which the representative asked how many cars the robots will buy.
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Where do I even begin?
Speed is unrealistic. It compresses a decade of enterprise adoption into 18 months. Organizations don't restructure at the speed of a demo. And if it were true, companies would also stop buying AI once their customers are broke and revenue is falling. The "rational firm" logic cuts both ways.
"No new jobs" is asserted, not argued. It dismisses 200 years of counter-evidence in two sentences and treats intelligence as one thing when it's really a bundle of very different skills.
Ignores the deflationary benefit. If AI makes everything cheaper, the purchasing power of remaining income rises. The article only looks at the income side and never the cost side.
Consumption collapse is too fast. It ignores savings buffers, severance, spousal income, and automatic stabilizers. Even 2008 took years to fully hit spending.
"Ghost GDP" is wrong. Corporate profits don't vanish. They flow out as dividends, buybacks, investment, and taxes. The distribution changes, but money doesn't disappear from the economy.
Overstates the intermediation collapse. People don't optimize purchases like machines. Brand loyalty, identity, and experience aren't just "friction."
Stablecoin disruption is fantasy. It ignores KYC/AML rules, consumer protection laws, chargebacks, and the reality of merchant adoption.
Assumes zero regulatory response. Governments moved in weeks during COVID. White-collar professionals are politically powerful and vocal. Regulation would arrive fast.