Say I’m a company with 1000 employees. A company like anthropic is offering to replace each employee with some sort of agent. Suppose the agents cost roughly $80k, where an employee costs $100k. I take that deal because it saves real money and replace, say, 500 employees with agents.
Now let’s assume just for the sake of argument that these AI agents do exactly as promised and truly do replace those workers and all of their responsibilities. Things seem great, I decreased my costs a lot and my business is buzzing along.
Now anthropic comes to me and says they’re going to increase their prices to $100k/agent. What now?
Since you’re trading individual employees for a company that’s providing the service at a cost, it’s effectively like these agents are unionized, in a way. They ask for a raise and you don’t comply? Okay fine. No work for you. Nothing you can say or do will get these agents back
Not only that, anthropic can leverage the absolutely insane amount of data they have to squeeze you for everything you’re worth. They probably have actuaries on staff who can figure out the maximum possible amount they can charge you before you leave.
Going to a competitor is easier said than done. There’s a lot of underlying infrastructure with AI that needs to be changed and adjusted to make it work. Each model has its own strengths and weaknesses. So maybe, you go to a competitor and it’s back to 80k/year, but now, code has a 10% higher error rate and you start losing money
idk. it just seems like this desire to get rid of labor entirely can only backfire. This is one way, but there are so many others too.
Duplicated from source: https://www.reddit.com/r/trueantiAI/comments/1wj748w/wouldnt_using_replacing_employees_with_ai/
Also, you are destroying the market: these 500 people will not afford to buy your products anymore and AI will not replace them as customers. Multiply that for every company in the planet: who is going to buy anything anymore?
Billionaires want a mass die off. A ton of less people is easier to manage, use less resources and will have a lots less strength to resist. Whoever is left will be their workers.
Wouldn’t that backfire though? If there are fewer workers, wouldn’t they have more wage negotiation leverage?
Also, if masses of people lack something, and have nothing to do, it tends to lead to certain type of things happening, way before the people die.
It definitely and most likely would. These numpties are surrounded by “yes men” and are constantly enabled by said yes men.
Just a late weekend nights theory babble after being in my cups.
It depends, but it’s anyway worse for employees as for the company.
The idea AI companies could have so much leverage is why investors value them so highly
I don’t see it though, for the simple reason that open source models are only months behind
I expect to see commodity pricing in the long term
Not thinking big or evil enough.
You’re a company with 1000 employees. A company like anthropic is offering to replace each employee with some sort of agent. You accept and let them train models on your processes. They launch a competitor company and put you out of business. End of story.
Or they buy your company up, perhaps after some nice enshittification or their models and terms to devalue your company.
I think an even bigger problem here is - what are you bringing to the market, and why should you be making any money? Your AI provider has perfect knowledge of how your “organization” works, but they are far better equipped to optimize it, while you’re just using their API as a black box.
I’ve tried to make the same argument understood with cloud services and vendor lock-in generally. It’s crazy how companies find a few percent pay increase for employees onerous, but are perfectly willing to give the life-blood of their services to a vendor who can arbitrarily raise prices down the road. Lots of companies are seeing this already with Broadcom and VMWare
Those are great points. The equation is more complicated though. Agents can work 7x24x365, never needing vacations or time off. Never getting sick. You can scale up or scale down instantaneously without having to fire anyone or hire recruiters or temp agencies. They never sue you for sexual harassment. They never complain. You don’t need office space for them, or parking, or coffee. You don’t have to take mamby-pamby management classes to learn how to boost you DEI or “EQ”. These things are a real capitalist wet dream. Especially when there are interchangeable vendors with no clear differentiators. Even more so if you don’t care about “customers” either. If you sell to the government or other businesses or even just to other divisions in your own company, the customer is irrelevant. Only the bottom line matters.
This is literally their business plan you are describing.
- Hype AI as the literal second coming of Jesus
- buy all the electronic components on earth. Make it hard to impossible for most people to buy computer hardware for any purpose unless they’re already rich.
- convince enterprise that humans are no longer necessary and that you can just use robots to do all that work and split the same profit between far fewer of you. Middle management and up cum immediately.
- offer your cloud services to everyone who can still afford anything. You watch and profile their every move. No one dares to talk shit about you or you debank them, completely cut off from all modern conveniences. They rent this privilege from you.
- increase prices until you have all the money.‘you now rule the world. The plebs all starve.
Of course it’s psychotic shit but that doesn’t mean they don’t believe it
