The Slow Way

Maybe it’s all bullshit. ChatGPT 5 was a dud. Meta is already downsizing its AI division, just after poaching top AI researchers from competitors with quarter billion dollar pay packages. A new MIT study shows that 95% of companies investing in AI have gotten no return on their investments. Maybe it’s all just an eye-poppingly massive AI hype bubble.

Or maybe it’s not. Maybe the backlash to the hype will be over in a news cycle. Maybe the next breakthrough is right around the corner. There’s no way to know. Depending on who you ask, we’re either decades out from achieving Artificial Super Intelligence, or just a few years. I personally hope we never get there. In the meantime, the world is changing. AI is driving people into psychosis. North Korea is developing an AI army. It’s not crazy to contemplate worst case scenarios.

A few weeks ago, I reported for the Times of London on the possibility that Artificial Intelligence could lead to human extinction as AI becomes smarter than humans while also developing interests that are incompatible with our own. There are other forecasters who envision a different but equally catastrophic trajectory, leading ultimately to the same outcome.

“If AI gets capable enough, there won’t be anything that only humans can do,” Raymond Douglas, co-author of Gradual Disempowerment, a paper on the social risks of AI, told me. “If that does happen, then a lot of the things we take for granted about what makes civilization work and what makes civilization good for people go completely out the window.”

“We just need to stop,” said University of Montreal Assistant Professor David Kreuger, another of the paper’s co-authors. “We’re not on track to solve it.”

Agentic AI

Tech companies are already selling “AI agents,” which are AI systems that can reason, remember, plan, and act autonomously. Soon those agents may be fully capable of replacing an entry-level employee. Companies like Duolingo have already started replacing contract labor with AI agents.

If and when we get to that point, it will become very difficult for humans to compete with AIs on the labor market, because even if each AI agent is no more cognitively gifted than your average human being, they will have vast advantages over us. To begin with, they’ll have instantaneous access to more or less all of human knowledge. They won’t need to sleep, eat, take vacations, spend time with family, exercise, pursue hobbies, or engage in any other activity that competes with the work that’s assigned to them. They won’t need to spend years in school to achieve their expertise. They won’t get sick or die. And they’ll be able to replicate themselves and merge with one another.

As AI agents advance, those advantages will compound. If an individual AI becomes as capable as, say, the world’s best rocket scientist at designing rockets, it will be able to make infinite copies of itself, and put each clone on a different task simultaneously. You could have the world’s best rocket scientist effectively working on every single problem involved in building a rocket at the same time.

If you had another AI reach Mozart-level proficiency at composing music, you could merge it with the rocket scientist AI. Now you have an AI system that can build rockets better and faster than any team of human beings on earth while also composing concertos that make you weep, along with any number of other genius-level skills. At this point, one could reasonably argue we have achieved ASI, though others may insist that ASI is a still higher bar.

Pyramidal Replacement

In such a world, obviously, your job is in trouble. If you work in a profession that’s primarily physical, you’ll have a bit more time, as the field of robotics catches up to the progress of AI. It’s hard to see robots replacing carpenters, beauticians, dentists, or line cooks any time soon. That will change, but it might take a decade, maybe longer.

If you work in a white collar job that’s principally cognitive, it’s hard to think of a job that’s safe. Not long ago “learn to code” was an admonishment to pick up a practical skill suited for the information age. Now coders are among the first jobs to be lost to AI.

The lowest tier jobs will likely be replaced first, both because they’re the least challenging for AIs to do, and because firms value those workers the least. An essay series called The Intelligence Curse describes a process of “pyramid replacement.” Under this model, entry-level jobs are the first to be replaced by AI, either through layoffs or attrition or both. Some entry-level workers are promoted to junior-level employees, but soon they find those jobs being replaced as well, as the firm learns to integrate AI and as AI agents become more and more reliable. Soon it becomes clear that middle management can’t keep up with the pace at which the AI agents beneath them, which don’t sleep and which process information much faster than humans, work. They’re replaced by AI managers that are far more efficient at supervising AI workers. The same happens with senior management, until the company is entirely AI except for the C-Suite executives. Then, the board of directors decides they need to go, too. “CEOs are forgetful, and they don’t have total insight into everything their company is doing — but their AI systems do,” the authors of The Intelligence Curse explain.

The Machine Economy

At this point, we will have arrived at a balance of power between labor and capital that humanity has never seen before: one in which labor has no bargaining power whatsoever.

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