you were always able to buy time by hiring people to do things for you. right now it's agents. i think it's an equalizer in that, $200 agent is more accessible than a $10000 human

The other half of this is that, in the past, skill meant that a year of weekends could be turned into a viable business that had skill as a moat.

Now, skill means almost nothing: the fleeting product of a drooling idiot is almost indistinguishable from skill and care as long as that drooling idiot has capital.

No longer will merit be rewarded; it will be exclusively capital that is rewarded.

"drooling idiot" is just a figure of speech, I'm sure. The point is, the moat is now more like a narrow puddle which few will be incapable of jumping over. Even if you make something better, it's going to be very hard to find in the pile of AI-generated slop. Ergo, popularity and success will be decided by money for advertisement, not skill.

Are there important things that can be done with AI - yes. How many of them can provide income for a small but skilled operation - very few to none at all. That's the reality of it, whatever smart thing you do, AI will catch up with it in the next iteration. The current economic arrangement cannot accommodate AI without degenerating into an idiocracy controlled by selected few.

People can differentiate quality from shit.

On the other hand, what I see happening is:

0. corporation use AI plan ultra-X-high-pro-premium-enterprise

1. corporations firing medium-high paid developers with solid experience and experstise because low-medium paid developers are performing well with ultra-X-high-pro-premium-enterprise plan

2. AI models evolves and now there's a 10X ultra-X-high-pro-premium-enterprise that keeps up the pace

3. low to medium paid are now struggling. The company hires low-paid developers to use more the original AI plan

4. refuses to pay best AI or decrease pressure on developers

5. developers are forced to wake up early, work afterhours and these shenanigans so that they keep up with the pressure

6. corporation pays for the 10X ultra-X-high-pro-premium-enterprise

I would never trust someone who lacks the fundamentals to create value even with the most advanced tools.

I’d prefer to pay for the senior and fire the less senior - the implicit premium is to not have to worry about the lack of fundamentals for when problems need to be solved that are nuanced.

Although I feel the value of what you're saying, I don't feel that's the mindset in the whole world.

I live in a LATAM country and I have worked for both EU (which outsourced most of the workforce, usually keeping the architects and rotating the devs (PS: pre-agentic coding)), US and now US with LATAM intermediator.

Every single one of them treated blattantly different less senior and low paid workers. EU treated so well their EU employees that even outsourced workers could actually feel as real human beings.

The US (startup) one was extremely crushing, I feel seniors were rewarded, what I take from your "the implicit premium", true, but with so much damn pressure. The only senior I saw departed was out of exhaustion, a team from 10 engineers reduced to 4 or 5, don't remember exactly.

While LATAM people is just awful. The slavery mindset is always dormant. Keep pushing, replace when exhausted, hire a whole new crew of low-paid people and push them to burn-out, that's true on small businesses and giant banks. I remember I once trained 3 interns in a pre-agentic setting, I had to push for 2 whole years so that one of the well trained, extremely dedicated and intelligent guy got hired. And he was hired only after a YEAR that the other one had been hired by a larger company. After I was gone, they kept me around consulting just some hours a week and refused to replace even the "half" me. And then I was gone. Only after some months of my departure they really hired the intelligent dude I've mentioned before and for at least a year and a half they coudln't find a replacement for the almost-slave as I was because the intelligent dude probably was starting to get used with agentic coding with a fifth of our total salaries. I haven't heard of that so far.

Yeah that’s valid. Would suggest that there will be a divide but perhaps at a lower wealth point.

Nobody pays for time. They are paying for a human form of capital.

I don't think this is a useful model. People struggling to survive have other priorities.

A better model for thinking about this is how cloud opened up opportunities for technical people to ship products cheaply.

Before cloud you had to hire a dedicated server and you were looking at $1000/month (in say 2000).

In 2023 if you were a non-technical person wanting to ship a software product you needed to invest some thousands of dollars to hire a software developer.

Now you can get a long way on a $30/month Codex plan

This was in Stockholm where we have good internet.

Certainly a skilled adult could get away with less than $100 in server costs.

Rather: perhaps 50-100 USD per month got and still gets you a quite good server to start your project. If you were looking for bargains, you could even get a server for less.

For people like scam Altman it’s a difficult paradox: we have a ‘intelligent’ technology box and the world largely… looks the same.

He blames it on inertia lmao - as if firms are not desperately trying to increase profits and getting rid of people without having to reinvest.

Think of the total cost of human development, education, etc. to make them “ready to be hired”.

These efforts drive a host of side industries (teachers, daycare, medical services, etc.)

AI can handle a lot tasks for a tiny fraction of that cost, time, and risk. Now add in the cost of yearly medical insurance, payroll tax, etc.

If AI makes people more efficient, then we don’t need to hire as many people…

Kinda feels like the labor equivalent of “deflation”, perhaps with similar problems…

This assumes the people with the money know what to do with those tokens. But they don't! The people with the money are very good with making more money, but they do not know what to build or how to build it. Which is why they pay other people to do so.

They had the capital needed to pay for everything, however, so they called the shots, and we're used to thinking that's how it will always be. But AI upends things.

Now, there is a future where AI gets powerful enough to essentially become a genie that grants wishes exactly as you imagined them without terrible unintended consequences. At that point, we've basically hit the singularity and (by definition) all bets are off.

The other, currently more realistic, future is where AI gets very good but is still fallible. There will still be a need for highly skilled and creative people to guide AI. That is us. And tokens are incredibly cheap, considering how good even local models are.

We only have to realize the power that is now available to us to reach out and grasp it: the ability to create value without capital.

> Value Is strictly related to scarcity.

Value is extremely subjective. Trivial example, going for a hike in a park is effectively free and unlimited and many people enjoy it.

Monetizing that value may require scarcity though. (There are surely exceptions, but I can't think of any offhand.) To extend the example above, that's when you put a fence and an entry fee around the park.

That's why I said AI lets you create value without capital. Creating wealth out of that value is left as an exercise for the reader ;-)