Comment by ETH_start
2 hours ago
I wonder if labor itself will become an anachronism in the age of AI. Perhaps the future economic landscape will be dominated by capital because everyone will own capital. You will command a small army of agents to do whatever you want. You will no longer need to work for someone. You own small businesses far more than you could possibly operate in the pre-AI era and they will mostly operate autonomously with minimal direction and some guidance from you.
We live in a world with a severe housing crisis - not shortage, as there are usually enough units, people just can't afford them.
One would assume the difficulty of building housing has gone down with the general progress of technology - and if all else fails, you can just do what they did 50, 100 years ago where affordability was far less a struggle - people, who had less income in real terms spent proportionally less on it.
So did society devolve that an unit of industrial output has become more expensive? Or did money and resources just go into a parallel 'rich people economy', that has created a constant drain on the resources of average people?
Housing is exceptionally vulnerable to capture because it is immobile. AI on the otherhand should see its cost continue to plummet due to competition. Per token costs have already fallen exponentially over the last three years.
I'm not sure if this addresses the point you're trying to make though. If not, please clarify your argument for me.
Assuming your labour contribution to these agents is 'minimal':
Why would you own them, instead of some well capitalized billionaire?
To the extent that you do have capital, why do you assume that your 'minimal direction and guidance' would outcompete a full time specialist working for that billionaire?
It's basic economics; larger firms become progressively less efficient for the same reason that communist command economies are inefficient, because there's no internal price signals to guide resource allocation. So there's a natural cap on how big a firm can get (in information theoretic terms, there's a hard limit on the amount of information a centralized structure can process effectively).