Except fewer of your users will have jobs because the AI multiplier means smaller teams. So your addressable matter will shrink. So another race to the bottom?
I'm sure we'll work it out right..
Except more of your users will have jobs because the AI multiplier means new opportunities to provide cheaper services available to more businesses, new companies that weren't economical before will be founded, entire new markets and whole new professions will be created. So your addressable market will exponentially grow. So another bull run?
I'm sure we will work it out right.
I understand theirs optimism (and pessimism), but optimism in and of itself doesn't make something true.
The products of these new vendors are now available to many big customers in a major city (a single one where we are doing a pilot), and the vendors are reporting they are already getting 2 times the volume of orders they used to get. They didn't even have the means to deliver that much product before - now they are able to do it because their logistics are handled for them by my client (economy-of-scale advantages) instead of them DIYing it, and they use the freed time to do more of their main business.
The customers are super happy because now they're getting fresh food produce from local farmers just days after it's been actually produced, which increases the quality of their products (food in restaurants/catering, usually) and they are already getting significantly more positive reviews thanks to that, which brings them even more new business of higher value. And funnily enough, the products they are getting are cheaper than what they got before, even though the quality is incomparable.
AI is a huge win for everybody involved:
- My client is no longer forced to deal only with the biggest vendors.
- The employees who used to do sales/onboarding, vendor/customer support and product catalog management are still doing it, only now they're handling 10 times more products from 3 times more vendors, and focus on special and more interesting cases instead of doing grunt work.
- The vendors have gained more customers than they ever dreamed of, make more money per unit and have much cheaper logistics that they don't need to think about nor spend their time on (we're talking about guys who used to hop in a truck themselves to deliver their stuff).
- The customers are getting much better quality for lower price per unit. There's also much more product categories they can choose from now.
- It's more environmentally friendly and supports the local economy.
Reminds me of the Mass Effect games, where AI is essentially outlawed (because they revolted against the humans of course, but I can picture less scifi-ish reasons in the real world). I'm sure they're still allowed to use pathfinding algorithms and such, so they probably defined a level of net negative (to society) AI and just regulated that. Starships for example are manually piloted (surely with intelligent support systems and basic auto pilots) IIRC.
Or let me raise a The Culture argument, where computers/AI is hyper-advanced, AIs are friends, and no regulation whatsoever is needed.
I mean real, observable things, not theories.
Human attention span is a finite resource (we can only do so much in one life), and tech startups can consume a lot of that for relatively little payoff. Building a successful startup is like solving the bitcoin hash on your first few cycles. The barrier for entry is low, but you can hit it big (and consume a lot of cheap, finite* power too).
The payoff is worth the risk since our communication technology is nascent and underexplored. We have an abundance of time right now because of what tech has done for us, but the cultural and environmental costs of growing tech are not well understood.
Use of attention span is difficult to measure right now, but that could change in the coming decades. That said, parent comment seems to use "tragedy of the commons" as a stand in for "human nature."