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Why is this time different? Won't super power AI tools allow companies to do more with the same number of people? Don't you think a smarter way to run a busin

Why is this time different? Won't super power AI tools allow companies to do more with the same number of people? Don't you think a smarter way to run a business is to capture more of the market if you have the resources to do so? If company A decides they just want the same slice of the market they have now and can fire half of their employees and pocket $$$, can't company B hire the same workers and compete harder with these new extra productive workers they hired? Won't the company B tend to capture more of the market and thus survive longer? In nature we say there are no unfilled niches, meaning that if there were space for something to come compete for resources, it would quickly be 'solved' by the motivating factors involved. Not a precise thing, but a good heuristic. US knowledge-worker compensation is around $10T / year. Anthropic and OpenAI have raised (not spent yet, just raised) $317B. That's ~3% of knowledge worker spending in one year alone. What business wouldn't pay 3, 5 or 10% more a year to make their worker productivity increase by larger factors?

worldsayshi 4mo ago
I guess it becomes different if instead of hiring more people to do more - all investment goes into more AI credits. Then again, as long as there is more demand and there's a limited supply of compute you can still continue to hire people as well. If we assume that the market has infinite demand for whatever AI + humans can produce together both will have jobs. If demand is limited and compute is plentiful it should make sense for a company to try to have AI do as much of the work as possible.
xiaoyu2006 4mo ago
It's not about "this time's different" but rather "the recovery will take too long to an individual" if AI is indeed replacing humans as currently hyped by the model companies.
- beepbopboopp 4mo ago
  I mean you could have written this article for mechanization word for word, I think the difference is that its coming for the white collar folks this time, who also are the folks writing the think pieces and media.
  - jonners00 4mo ago
    You couldn't have. Mechanical machines couldn't organise themselves into human-free supply chains that are economically productive for the owners of capital. AIs could.
    - beepbopboopp 4mo ago
      Any machine with an on-off switch is functionally an organized and automated work flow. If I understand correctly youre talking about reactive adjustments, but thats not completely accurate either. There is a lot of projection that this MAY happen, but currently, the capital owner/stewards are going to constantly watch outputs and adjust to them based on the results. You're probably correct in that they will spend far less time doing so, but anyone with a vested outcome is going to have to adjust these things as the responsiblity for the outcome will always land on the owner not the machine.
      - jonners00 4mo ago
        I just meant that if I value, say, the security afforded by land that's been cleared of humans, and between them my owned AIs can deliver this as a 'surplus' outcome, just by processing resources available at low or no cost (sunlight, atmospheric gases, processed carcasses, etc.) then letting them run amuck is still 'economically valuable' to me, but doesn't require any human input, or a human counterparty. Very reductive example, but you can imagine a much more complex economy where a multitude of similar arrangements interact/compete to deliver outcomes of this type.
- zozbot234 4mo ago
  There's no evidence that AI is replacing human jobs to any real extent. We're just seeing AI being blamed for ordinary layoffs that have more to do with broad economic instability.
  - 10xDev 4mo ago
    Actually you can for entry level jobs. You also shouldn't just look at unemployment but underemployment. >Overall, 42% of recent college graduates were classified as underemployed, the highest level since 2020. https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2026/02/23/unemployment-and-underemployment-rates-among-recent-college-graduates/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2026/02/23/unem...
    - zozbot234 4mo ago
      Entry-level jobs are the easiest to get rid of in any layoffs. This doesn't look like anything genuinely new.
      - galangalalgol 4mo ago
        Haven't swe layoffs usually targeted more experienced devs?
        gregorygoc 4mo ago
        No
        fragmede 4mo ago
        Yes they have. They cost more. Why keep the senior curmudgeon employee around when the Jr who costs half as much is deemed sufficiently competent? And the Jr isn't going to quit in solidarity either, they're just happy to have not gotten cut.
        4mo ago
- Root_Denied 4mo ago
  This seems a bit like a corollary to "The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent". On the timescales that matter to an individual it won't matter if the eventual conclusion is that AI can't fully replace workers, because companies are going to do their damnedest to try.
idopmstuff 4mo ago
> Why is this time different? That depends if AI gets to the point where it can fully replace workers, as opposed to just augmenting them. I heard Alex Imas on a podcast recently talking about how a SWE can be running 10 agents to be 10x as productive, then that SWE is more valuable so firms should want to hire more SWEs and pay them more. That works for a while, but what if AI gets to the point where it can manage the 10 agents as well as the SWE? Of course you could say the SWE can now manage 10 agents who each manage 10 agents so he's even more valuable, but that has to break down eventually. You don't need 1,000 SWEs each managing 10,000 agents - you hit a bottleneck in the ability to give them work fast enough (even if you need the SWE at the top at all). I think it's easier to think of from the perspective of blue collar labor. It's further out there time-wise, but let's assume we get a humanoid robot that can do any labor a human can do. It costs $25,000 and maybe a couple grand a year to operate. Works 20 hours a day when it's not charging. The construction worker it replaces isn't going to start managing a team of robots construction robots - there's already a GC doing that, and you can't scale building nearly the way you can scale writing code because of physical constraints. When the robot I've described exists, a huge swathe of the population is going to be unemployed. There's no competitor to hire them because the competitors just get robots too.
- zozbot234 4mo ago
  Someone will always have to prompt the AI, it can't just do that on its own. Or rather, maybe it can (you can just prompt it to "kindly do the needful" in a completely unspecific way) but the results won't be any good.
  - fragmede 4mo ago
    Always? I mean, that's the hope, but they only have to be good enough to be of use for the rest of us to be unneeded.
  - SauntSolaire 4mo ago
    Eventually all prompts distill to "raise the stock price year-over-year". Once we get CEO-bot, that's all we'll have to tell em.
dleslie 4mo ago
> Won't super power AI tools allow companies to do more with the same number of people? Don't you think a smarter way to run a business is to capture more of the market if you have the resources to do so? It is possible to have excess productivity. AI allows an existing labour pool to rapidly surpass necessary productivity levels for the existing demand. IE, let's say I live in a small town and I open a machine shop. Should I hire every mechanic that walks in the door, forever? No, absolutely not; there is an optimal number of mechanics to hire for the demand for services. If somehow a tool comes to exist that doubles the productivity of mechanics then laying off half the mechanics is next.
- Jblx2 4mo ago
  Machinists work at a machine shop.
- zozbot234 4mo ago
  > It is possible to have excess productivity. The most productive places in the world are also those with the highest incomes and wealth generation. "Excess productivity" is either temporary or a sector-specific phenomenon, it doesn't apply to society as a whole.
  - dleslie 4mo ago
    This is true; and in time it's entirely possible that AI makes us an overall wealthier and more productive society. However, from the article: > “Most economists will acknowledge that technological progress can cause some adjustment problems in the short run. What is rarely noted is that the short run can be a lifetime.” The redundant professionals will need to find other ways of generating wealth from their productivity, and that may not be possible in a reasonable amount of time. Not in the scope of their remaining lifetime.
    - zozbot234 4mo ago
      We will most likely redefine what we mean by human "productivity". A plumber might be considered a highly productive worker, whereas many intellectual professions will partially refocus on effectively prompting AI and assessing/revising its output.
10xDev 4mo ago
Does every business scale that way? Sure video games for example have only required more people and resources to develop games as the ability to create larger scale games have increased. But does that really apply to accounting? Not a rhetorical question.
- onlyrealcuzzo 4mo ago
  Does it need to? 99% of people used to work on farms. Now they don't. Maybe ~99% of engineers won't write code in the future. They'll do some other engineering like thing... Maybe ~99% of accountant type people won't do accounting things. They'll do some other financial thing... We haven't even seen a rounding error in total unemployment directly attributed to AI, despite people saying the sky fell 24 months ago, and crying that's it's still falling every day since.
  - 10xDev 4mo ago
    Whether it "needs to" is its own debate. I'm just pointing out that even with mobile phones becoming dramatically better over the past decade, that hasn't really led to the transformation of mobile apps (outside of games) that take advantage of those resources. If anything, developers have arguably become more lazy and we are seeing lower quality software being deployed because people now have enough RAM even for your 500mb static webpage. Do we really believe people will start becoming more ambitious with AI or will most suffer from skill atrophy and less agency?
    - PaulHoule 4mo ago
      The odd thing about games is that there are quite literally a handful that push the envelope (Genshin Impact stands almost alone, a few other Chinese and Korean titles come close) in terms of graphics, art, gameplay and story complexity and then there are thousands and thousands of slop games that you can hardly call "games".
      - hunterpayne 4mo ago
alterom 4mo ago
>Why is this time different? If only someone wrote an entire article about this, huh. Oh well. I guess we'll never know. /s
ekidd 4mo ago
> Why is this time different? If it was just programming being automated, then whatever. Lots of professions have been automated and society adapts. The underlying worry here is that current AI provides a partial automation of intelligence. The endgame for the investors and the corporations using AI is complete automation of intelligence (and manual labor, too). They want a $25,000 robot that works around the clock, and AI models that will do anything a human office worker can do for less money. Now, they don't know how to build either yet. But they'll spend every last dollar on the planet trying. Strictly speaking, they don't even need us as customers. They can just have the robots build them yachts and mansions directly. And act as security guards.
- unsnap_biceps 4mo ago
  > Strictly speaking, they don't even need us as customers. They can just have the robots build them yachts and mansions directly. And act as security guards. That sounds like we'll devolve into wars over resources so houses can build more war-bots and get more resources....
  - smallmancontrov 4mo ago
    Starcraft for Billionaires In the voice of worker-bot: "That's your plan?!?!"
  - D-Machine 4mo ago
    > That sounds like we'll devolve into wars over resources Two astronauts meme: "Wait, it's all been over resources?" "Always has been"
    - galactushonor 4mo ago
      This time the have-nots have a better target to attack. The datacenters. A concentrated physical manifestation of would-be trillionaire superrichs.
      - tasoeur 4mo ago
aleqs 4mo ago
> can't company B hire the same workers and compete harder with these new extra productive workers they hired How much of the current tech world is actually about competing based on innovation/quality/merit? I'd wager not much. The circular big AI deals we're used to seeing now are not a new thing - that shit has been the standard playbook for VCs and their startups for a long time. That being said, I don't see why a bunch of these swampy tech companies could not be easily outcompeted on the tech/product quality side.
asdfman123 4mo ago
Because AI now can do what only humans could do previously: analyze open ended problems and make decisions. There's the horse argument the author touches upon: eventually, technology got to the point where there weren't any profitable reasons to keep a horse.
- red-iron-pine 4mo ago
  "You're on to something! I will decide to delete this entire database, for some reason. Also run this command even through it will brick everything."
  - asdfman123 4mo ago
    I'm just articulating the argument, not saying it's a done deal. AI can actually make decisions based on open ended information, and if it gets good enough it can fully replace humans. Will that happen? I don't know. But I will say there's an AI agent that is doing my job for me right now and it's able to now do complex refactorings, rebasing, etc. with minimal guidance.
    - hunterpayne 4mo ago
      "But I will say there's an AI agent that is doing my job for me right now and it's able to now do complex refactorings, rebasing, etc. with minimal guidance." Right, but doing that is slower and more expensive than just doing it by hand according to independent research. Even weirder, the average perception is that it makes coding 20% faster while at the same time making it 20% slower. And that's not nearly as weird as wanting it to actually work. If you are in that camp, there a basic concepts about society and people that you clearly don't understand.
      - asdfman123 4mo ago
        > And that's not nearly as weird as wanting it to actually work. If you are in that camp, there a basic concepts about society and people that you clearly don't understand. I see you've found a way to speculatively insult me to save time. (You'll be glad to know that I'm not in that camp -- again, articulating an argument.)
deaton 4mo ago
The thing is theres no reason to believe that there will be more market available to capture, certainly not in every industry.
asdff 4mo ago
>Don't you think a smarter way to run a business is to capture more of the market if you have the resources to do so? The market is probably already at the limits of its size in most industries. Great, you can ship app updates faster. Does that get you more customers? Nope. Is there now more money in the pot for everyone who is more productive to also make more money? Hell no. The pie we are competing for is finite.
ReptileMan 4mo ago
>Why is this time different? Because the intelligentsia is being bent over. The people that were jolly of the various rust belts of the world decaying.
the_af 4mo ago
> Why is this time different? I mean, this is a very long article about why, this time, it's qualitatively different...
empath75 4mo ago
> Won't super power AI tools allow companies to do more with the same number of people? I think this is directionally right, but I think there might be a scaling/organization problem for companies, and that the more likely outcome is that _small companies_ are going to start punching way over their weight class.
- confidantlake 4mo ago
  I suspect the opposite. Products don't win because they are better. They win because monopolies control the sales/regulators. Bit occasionally the big companies fucked up the actual product development so badly an upstart could emerge. With ai they will quickly just copy any success and all the other big orgs will just buy the AI ripoff version.
jijijijij 4mo ago
> Won't super power AI tools allow companies to do more with the same number of people? Don't you think a smarter way to run a business is to capture more of the market if you have the resources to do so? For starters, because productivity is already consuming the planet multiple times over. I think there is also indication the human mind is at its limits in terms of consumption and alienation from evolutionary legacy. And the economy seems quite broken due to centralization and wealth distribution. I mean, nobody is arguing that there won't be some sort of "ecological" balance... People are concerned about the nature of that balance and if it's serving humanity.
movpasd 4mo ago
You're assuming that the free market will do what it's meant to do. But there is also a reality that there are plenty of structural market failures in the economy that arise from existing capital endowments, regulatory capture, and just the permanent movement of equilibrium in the social system. The point is that the state of the economy as a whole is path-dependent. The article, in my reading, is a warning that the inertia accumulated from this current AI hype cycle might push us into the watershed of an undesirable steady state, where there simply is no capital available for new entrants.
peder 4mo ago
> Don't you think a smarter way to run a business is to capture more of the market if you have the resources to do so? Because if everyone is doing the same, then it's just brutal competition. Margins will squeeze, and eventually very lean companies will become the norm. In time, this means that the pool of information workers will change tremendously.

worldsayshi 4mo ago

I guess it becomes different if instead of hiring more people to do more - all investment goes into more AI credits. Then again, as long as there is more demand and there's a limited supply of compute you can still continue to hire people as well. If we assume that the market has infinite demand for whatever AI + humans can produce together both will have jobs. If demand is limited and compute is plentiful it should make sense for a company to try to have AI do as much of the work as possible.

xiaoyu2006 4mo ago

It's not about "this time's different" but rather "the recovery will take too long to an individual" if AI is indeed replacing humans as currently hyped by the model companies.

beepbopboopp 4mo ago
I mean you could have written this article for mechanization word for word, I think the difference is that its coming for the white collar folks this time, who also are the folks writing the think pieces and media.
- jonners00 4mo ago
  You couldn't have. Mechanical machines couldn't organise themselves into human-free supply chains that are economically productive for the owners of capital. AIs could.
  - beepbopboopp 4mo ago
    Any machine with an on-off switch is functionally an organized and automated work flow. If I understand correctly youre talking about reactive adjustments, but thats not completely accurate either. There is a lot of projection that this MAY happen, but currently, the capital owner/stewards are going to constantly watch outputs and adjust to them based on the results. You're probably correct in that they will spend far less time doing so, but anyone with a vested outcome is going to have to adjust these things as the responsiblity for the outcome will always land on the owner not the machine.
    - jonners00 4mo ago
      I just meant that if I value, say, the security afforded by land that's been cleared of humans, and between them my owned AIs can deliver this as a 'surplus' outcome, just by processing resources available at low or no cost (sunlight, atmospheric gases, processed carcasses, etc.) then letting them run amuck is still 'economically valuable' to me, but doesn't require any human input, or a human counterparty. Very reductive example, but you can imagine a much more complex economy where a multitude of similar arrangements interact/compete to deliver outcomes of this type.
zozbot234 4mo ago
There's no evidence that AI is replacing human jobs to any real extent. We're just seeing AI being blamed for ordinary layoffs that have more to do with broad economic instability.
- 10xDev 4mo ago
  Actually you can for entry level jobs. You also shouldn't just look at unemployment but underemployment. >Overall, 42% of recent college graduates were classified as underemployed, the highest level since 2020. https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2026/02/23/unemployment-and-underemployment-rates-among-recent-college-graduates/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2026/02/23/unem...
  - zozbot234 4mo ago
    Entry-level jobs are the easiest to get rid of in any layoffs. This doesn't look like anything genuinely new.
    - galangalalgol 4mo ago
      Haven't swe layoffs usually targeted more experienced devs?
      - gregorygoc 4mo ago
        No
        fragmede 4mo ago
        Yes they have. They cost more. Why keep the senior curmudgeon employee around when the Jr who costs half as much is deemed sufficiently competent? And the Jr isn't going to quit in solidarity either, they're just happy to have not gotten cut.
        4mo ago
Root_Denied 4mo ago
This seems a bit like a corollary to "The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent". On the timescales that matter to an individual it won't matter if the eventual conclusion is that AI can't fully replace workers, because companies are going to do their damnedest to try.

idopmstuff 4mo ago

> Why is this time different? That depends if AI gets to the point where it can fully replace workers, as opposed to just augmenting them. I heard Alex Imas on a podcast recently talking about how a SWE can be running 10 agents to be 10x as productive, then that SWE is more valuable so firms should want to hire more SWEs and pay them more. That works for a while, but what if AI gets to the point where it can manage the 10 agents as well as the SWE? Of course you could say the SWE can now manage 10 agents who each manage 10 agents so he's even more valuable, but that has to break down eventually. You don't need 1,000 SWEs each managing 10,000 agents - you hit a bottleneck in the ability to give them work fast enough (even if you need the SWE at the top at all). I think it's easier to think of from the perspective of blue collar labor. It's further out there time-wise, but let's assume we get a humanoid robot that can do any labor a human can do. It costs $25,000 and maybe a couple grand a year to operate. Works 20 hours a day when it's not charging. The construction worker it replaces isn't going to start managing a team of robots construction robots - there's already a GC doing that, and you can't scale building nearly the way you can scale writing code because of physical constraints. When the robot I've described exists, a huge swathe of the population is going to be unemployed. There's no competitor to hire them because the competitors just get robots too.

zozbot234 4mo ago
Someone will always have to prompt the AI, it can't just do that on its own. Or rather, maybe it can (you can just prompt it to "kindly do the needful" in a completely unspecific way) but the results won't be any good.
- fragmede 4mo ago
  Always? I mean, that's the hope, but they only have to be good enough to be of use for the rest of us to be unneeded.
- SauntSolaire 4mo ago
  Eventually all prompts distill to "raise the stock price year-over-year". Once we get CEO-bot, that's all we'll have to tell em.

dleslie 4mo ago

> Won't super power AI tools allow companies to do more with the same number of people? Don't you think a smarter way to run a business is to capture more of the market if you have the resources to do so? It is possible to have excess productivity. AI allows an existing labour pool to rapidly surpass necessary productivity levels for the existing demand. IE, let's say I live in a small town and I open a machine shop. Should I hire every mechanic that walks in the door, forever? No, absolutely not; there is an optimal number of mechanics to hire for the demand for services. If somehow a tool comes to exist that doubles the productivity of mechanics then laying off half the mechanics is next.

Jblx2 4mo ago
Machinists work at a machine shop.
zozbot234 4mo ago
> It is possible to have excess productivity. The most productive places in the world are also those with the highest incomes and wealth generation. "Excess productivity" is either temporary or a sector-specific phenomenon, it doesn't apply to society as a whole.
- dleslie 4mo ago
  This is true; and in time it's entirely possible that AI makes us an overall wealthier and more productive society. However, from the article: > “Most economists will acknowledge that technological progress can cause some adjustment problems in the short run. What is rarely noted is that the short run can be a lifetime.” The redundant professionals will need to find other ways of generating wealth from their productivity, and that may not be possible in a reasonable amount of time. Not in the scope of their remaining lifetime.
  - zozbot234 4mo ago
    We will most likely redefine what we mean by human "productivity". A plumber might be considered a highly productive worker, whereas many intellectual professions will partially refocus on effectively prompting AI and assessing/revising its output.

10xDev 4mo ago

Does every business scale that way? Sure video games for example have only required more people and resources to develop games as the ability to create larger scale games have increased. But does that really apply to accounting? Not a rhetorical question.

onlyrealcuzzo 4mo ago
Does it need to? 99% of people used to work on farms. Now they don't. Maybe ~99% of engineers won't write code in the future. They'll do some other engineering like thing... Maybe ~99% of accountant type people won't do accounting things. They'll do some other financial thing... We haven't even seen a rounding error in total unemployment directly attributed to AI, despite people saying the sky fell 24 months ago, and crying that's it's still falling every day since.
- 10xDev 4mo ago
  Whether it "needs to" is its own debate. I'm just pointing out that even with mobile phones becoming dramatically better over the past decade, that hasn't really led to the transformation of mobile apps (outside of games) that take advantage of those resources. If anything, developers have arguably become more lazy and we are seeing lower quality software being deployed because people now have enough RAM even for your 500mb static webpage. Do we really believe people will start becoming more ambitious with AI or will most suffer from skill atrophy and less agency?
  - PaulHoule 4mo ago
    The odd thing about games is that there are quite literally a handful that push the envelope (Genshin Impact stands almost alone, a few other Chinese and Korean titles come close) in terms of graphics, art, gameplay and story complexity and then there are thousands and thousands of slop games that you can hardly call "games".
    - hunterpayne 4mo ago

alterom 4mo ago

>Why is this time different? If only someone wrote an entire article about this, huh. Oh well. I guess we'll never know. /s

ekidd 4mo ago

> Why is this time different? If it was just programming being automated, then whatever. Lots of professions have been automated and society adapts. The underlying worry here is that current AI provides a partial automation of intelligence. The endgame for the investors and the corporations using AI is complete automation of intelligence (and manual labor, too). They want a $25,000 robot that works around the clock, and AI models that will do anything a human office worker can do for less money. Now, they don't know how to build either yet. But they'll spend every last dollar on the planet trying. Strictly speaking, they don't even need us as customers. They can just have the robots build them yachts and mansions directly. And act as security guards.

unsnap_biceps 4mo ago
> Strictly speaking, they don't even need us as customers. They can just have the robots build them yachts and mansions directly. And act as security guards. That sounds like we'll devolve into wars over resources so houses can build more war-bots and get more resources....
- smallmancontrov 4mo ago
  Starcraft for Billionaires In the voice of worker-bot: "That's your plan?!?!"
- D-Machine 4mo ago
  > That sounds like we'll devolve into wars over resources Two astronauts meme: "Wait, it's all been over resources?" "Always has been"
  - galactushonor 4mo ago
    This time the have-nots have a better target to attack. The datacenters. A concentrated physical manifestation of would-be trillionaire superrichs.
    - tasoeur 4mo ago

aleqs 4mo ago

> can't company B hire the same workers and compete harder with these new extra productive workers they hired How much of the current tech world is actually about competing based on innovation/quality/merit? I'd wager not much. The circular big AI deals we're used to seeing now are not a new thing - that shit has been the standard playbook for VCs and their startups for a long time. That being said, I don't see why a bunch of these swampy tech companies could not be easily outcompeted on the tech/product quality side.

asdfman123 4mo ago

Because AI now can do what only humans could do previously: analyze open ended problems and make decisions. There's the horse argument the author touches upon: eventually, technology got to the point where there weren't any profitable reasons to keep a horse.

red-iron-pine 4mo ago
"You're on to something! I will decide to delete this entire database, for some reason. Also run this command even through it will brick everything."
- asdfman123 4mo ago
  I'm just articulating the argument, not saying it's a done deal. AI can actually make decisions based on open ended information, and if it gets good enough it can fully replace humans. Will that happen? I don't know. But I will say there's an AI agent that is doing my job for me right now and it's able to now do complex refactorings, rebasing, etc. with minimal guidance.
  - hunterpayne 4mo ago
    "But I will say there's an AI agent that is doing my job for me right now and it's able to now do complex refactorings, rebasing, etc. with minimal guidance." Right, but doing that is slower and more expensive than just doing it by hand according to independent research. Even weirder, the average perception is that it makes coding 20% faster while at the same time making it 20% slower. And that's not nearly as weird as wanting it to actually work. If you are in that camp, there a basic concepts about society and people that you clearly don't understand.
    - asdfman123 4mo ago
      > And that's not nearly as weird as wanting it to actually work. If you are in that camp, there a basic concepts about society and people that you clearly don't understand. I see you've found a way to speculatively insult me to save time. (You'll be glad to know that I'm not in that camp -- again, articulating an argument.)

deaton 4mo ago

The thing is theres no reason to believe that there will be more market available to capture, certainly not in every industry.

asdff 4mo ago

>Don't you think a smarter way to run a business is to capture more of the market if you have the resources to do so? The market is probably already at the limits of its size in most industries. Great, you can ship app updates faster. Does that get you more customers? Nope. Is there now more money in the pot for everyone who is more productive to also make more money? Hell no. The pie we are competing for is finite.

ReptileMan 4mo ago

>Why is this time different? Because the intelligentsia is being bent over. The people that were jolly of the various rust belts of the world decaying.

the_af 4mo ago

> Why is this time different? I mean, this is a very long article about why, this time, it's qualitatively different...

empath75 4mo ago

> Won't super power AI tools allow companies to do more with the same number of people? I think this is directionally right, but I think there might be a scaling/organization problem for companies, and that the more likely outcome is that _small companies_ are going to start punching way over their weight class.

confidantlake 4mo ago
I suspect the opposite. Products don't win because they are better. They win because monopolies control the sales/regulators. Bit occasionally the big companies fucked up the actual product development so badly an upstart could emerge. With ai they will quickly just copy any success and all the other big orgs will just buy the AI ripoff version.

jijijijij 4mo ago

> Won't super power AI tools allow companies to do more with the same number of people? Don't you think a smarter way to run a business is to capture more of the market if you have the resources to do so? For starters, because productivity is already consuming the planet multiple times over. I think there is also indication the human mind is at its limits in terms of consumption and alienation from evolutionary legacy. And the economy seems quite broken due to centralization and wealth distribution. I mean, nobody is arguing that there won't be some sort of "ecological" balance... People are concerned about the nature of that balance and if it's serving humanity.

movpasd 4mo ago

You're assuming that the free market will do what it's meant to do. But there is also a reality that there are plenty of structural market failures in the economy that arise from existing capital endowments, regulatory capture, and just the permanent movement of equilibrium in the social system. The point is that the state of the economy as a whole is path-dependent. The article, in my reading, is a warning that the inertia accumulated from this current AI hype cycle might push us into the watershed of an undesirable steady state, where there simply is no capital available for new entrants.

peder 4mo ago

> Don't you think a smarter way to run a business is to capture more of the market if you have the resources to do so? Because if everyone is doing the same, then it's just brutal competition. Margins will squeeze, and eventually very lean companies will become the norm. In time, this means that the pool of information workers will change tremendously.