Assuming token costs will be prohibitive assumes:
A) tokens will be really expensive and B) you need to fund tokens before you have revenue.
Your asserting AI makes the economy more capital intensive, when I think you'll see in practice it's the opposite.
You're clinging past: what you is true when human capital counts for something, but what happens when it doesn't? Where the party who can spend the most tokens on the case wins (or has a much greater chance of success)?
Law might not be the best example of that, but (under current trends) a lot of areas will be.
> Your asserting AI makes the economy more capital intensive, when I think you'll see in practice it's the opposite.
You're claiming AI will make the economy more labor intensive? Huh?
It will never happen. Capitalism works when consumers can choose the best service provider. When there is only one universal service provide (AI), behind various "fronts", it would be catastrophic.
And all the consumers lose catastrophically.
So there should be at least some human component to differentiate between the various "AI" providers.
So unless this human element get absorbed widely into literature, then I think the scenario you present is not possible, at least in the context of current LLMs.
May be there will be true AI in future, that can read a fact and grasp it brilliance, like a human do, and use it in answering future questions. Then what you said could be possible.
Mechanism? New Use Cases become viable.
Just like LED lights and Virtual Machines made light-per-watt and workloads-per-server more efficient, what did we do with that efficiency? We didn't pocket the cash, we turned every billboard and many buildings into JumboTrons, and we made millions of new cheap cloud VMs to run hundreds of thousands of new little businesses that never would have happened.
Look at coding now: People are finishing side projects that they never would have, closing out old bugs or test coverage they never would have, starting side businesses they never would have before.
This is new demand being created before our eyes as the cost of knowledge work drops.
"Intellectual" jobs, that require thought were yet spared, as the only way to use capital for that was just to pay for more meat: see Accenture, CapGemini, IBM, etc. You could carve yourself a spot for some people because it was hard for this capital to reach them. Now that AI, a literal machine that automates thought, is here, the costs for reaching bumfuck nowhere to take the clients away from you has dropped drastically for them, but not for you. They get economies of scale, already established patterns, tools, internal databases. You're starting with hopes, dreams and a $20 Claude sub that runs out at 10AM.
There is not infinite need for lawyers, there being more lawyers does not create more legal opportunities and cases past a certain point, and you're then dependent on other things like there being enough judges.
Robots transformed capital into manual actions and killed most manufacturing jobs save for precious few experts or things that are too expensive to automate still. AI will transform that capital into intellectual labor and crush you, take all opportunities away from you.
"Price go down means more demand" applied blindly is a an economic theory so absurdly shit that even the most apeshit libertarians like Ayn Rand know it isn't true. Don't make me defend Ayn Rand.
Of course it is. When someone is thinking of suing someone else the first thing that gives them pause is the potential legal costs.
You. Cannot. Win. Against. Capital.
And then you're going to sue, and realize that the system is so massively overloaded that the next available judge and jury are in 32 years. Also they're lobbying to replace those with AI judges where they entirely removed the concept of nuance.
Could see the future being AI arguments -> AI judgement -> appeal to human judge/jury
With the appeal to humans being expensive (human lawyers required?) or volume-barred in some manner.
Why would there be less demand for contract law or for privacy related law, for example? There is certainly some elasticity in law related things from my own experience.
Where have I applied elasticity blindly?
The “easy stuff” for someone’s job, is now the AI stuff for someone else’s job. Where you would hire an intern, the potential client is using Claude instead.
The issue is that this breaks the talent / growth pipeline. You can’t have experts if they don’t go through the process of getting trained and working on incrementally harder problems.
And what happens when the SQL query has some subtle error or is missing data?
With interns, there’s an implicit understanding that you will spend a bit of extra time reviewing their work and mentoring them. With “just AI it bruh,” there is not.
This goes on in the U.S. too, at least in my state.
But like 80% shuts down before reaching 2 years as they run out of money.
Those people are usually very talented and work 16/7. And they need to convince other similar people to work for them, usually at a lower-than-market rate.
The premise here is "talented humans working hard" will stop being a valuable thing due to AI.
They're similar to IT, in that you can be successful as a one-man business.
I don't necessarily agree with that AI is going to be as super productive as people think but if your assumption it is. It is another tool you'll need to be competitive. That last point just doesn't follow if you believe in AI being powerful
That's what people like Rick Rubin (Iovine, the Medici's, etc), deep down, need us to believe. Probably.
Also... I won't add any details to avoid doxing myself, but trust me on this, Rick is the last person nowadays you'd want to listen to for anything taste-related, unless we're talking about feeding your own ego and carefully curating your own public image, and disappearing for weeks. I'd pay very good money to be around his ghost producers/writers/engineers again, though.
"doing shit fast and good enough" seems to be a much better fitness function here
Ok, so you've secured a future employment for 10,000 asethetes.
Congratulations! Then what about the other 8 billion people? Still unemployement, right?
But a post-competence future is ultimately a good thing for humanity. There is no inherent reason why somebody who is talented or skilled in the specific abilities that society deeems necessary should be privileged if those needs can now be automated. It just sounds more like an arbitary class deemed the "skilled" complaining about the loss of their elite status against another, more entrenched elite class relying on wealth. But as a commoner, why should I favour the meritocrats who look down on me over the wealthy who might be more magnanimous in understanding their privilege?
Thinking that multi-millionaires/billionaires will "understand their privilege" or that they will be "magnanimous" is beyond naivite and goes straight to stupidity. Have you read any news in the past decade‽‽
What makes you think your "cheap or open source model" running on your piddling desktop cluster will be able to complete against a SOTA one running in a billion-dollar datacenter?
It's a cyberpunk fantasy. It won't work out that way.
Maybe? We dont really know this right? People have been saying this for 5 years now and the models are still getting better. The companies running the frontier models have already scraped everything on the web, but the models are still getting better, even if it's only marginally better, with each release. Maybe eventually some company will actually achieve AGI/ASI, who knows..
And then they take that model, put it in a billion-dollar datacenter, and kick your desktop cluster's ass with it.
Of course, who knows. There's always another angle you can look at this from
If enough people are out of work they will obviously band together
Money. They won't have the money to pay for the tokens, or the best models, because they'll be unemployed. They also won't have the connections to get the clients.
When you're playing a game of "who has the best capital," the scrappy underdog worker with vastly less won't win.
The idea that making the economy even more capital intensive will some how equalize things is an insane fantasy only a software engineer could swallow.