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/
The goal is the eliminate services and products that regular people need. They don't want to sell things to us. They want to sell things to each other.
Even if they eliminated all the employees or most of them, the problem then becomes, all the infrastructure can't be done by AI or upkept by AI.
People are needed for that. Even if you only use a skeleton crew they need things. And they know the infrastructure too. So that means there's no way to not provide for at least some people because that work is still necessary.
Which means there's still consumers and they require services and products. Necessities at the very least.
It's turtles all the way down. Even if it worked the way it's marketed you create a new problem. People who know how to upkeep these systems who either strike, or mess with the system intentionally because they aren't having their needs met.
Even ignoring the rising cost bait and switch it's a terrible idea.