AI is not replacing people, but businesses

  A short opinion on what AI is actually replacing. Fears are that AI is replacing people, because so many companies are firing people and implementing artificial intelligence alternatives. But the person is still there, the "person" role was never supplanted. Instead, it's the business role of that person that is.

  I see you rolling your eyes at me because it's all semantics and it boils down to the same thing. No, that's incorrect. It does so NOW, but not for long. Companies are already rehiring people back because they realized the business flows they use cannot fully integrate machines instead of people. The flows, the orgs, the hierarchies are people centric. But you know what's not coming back? Third parties that have been replaced by AI.

  You see, the state of AI is pretty basic even now. Even the smartest models act like idiot savants: genius spurts of activity mingled with mostly unexplainable stupidity. The solution to that is guardrails, harnesses, defensive prompts, permissions, roll back mechanisms. But since most work we want to do is... none, we want to replace all of these with AI, too. And the natural way of doing that is the mixture of experts or council of experts approach. You compensate for the failures of one agent with yet another agent. Fucking turtles, man!

  It's the same thing as with people. Imagine you would have a company made of the same exact person, cloned many times. The manager, the workers, HR, drivers, everybody is the copy of the exact same person. But because they are smart enough to do all and any of these jobs, you must pay each one for the totality of every role they can embody. Obviously you won't do that and instead fire the clones and hire an expert for each of the jobs. That's what is happening now with AI agents. Even if it is the same brain, it's only activating parts of it based on what the agent's role is, but I suspect this too is on the way out.

  The end result is you will have a different agent for each job. A bunch of software developer agents, a manager agent, a security agent, a DevOps agent and so on. Together, they will make up a complete... company. Yes, a full business, all of it. It will start with departments, but soon enough it will expand to full companies.

  But isn't it an issue of trust? Who controls these agents and who will be responsible for their mistakes? That problem has been solved already when the cheap labor from overseas flooded the remote work market. They were culturally aliens, practically black boxes that had brilliant spurts of activity punctuating unfathomable behavior. Sounds familiar? The solution was a harness, an entire industry of resellers and management that would organize masses of uneducated people to work within the constraints of the culture of the rich. I might venture to say this is a really old problem that has been solved, in similar ways, throughout human history.

  The result is the rise of the automated AI remote work company. Maybe there are people managing the interface with other companies, but they are logically redundant. These dark factories will be contracted to do jobs fitting their level of expertise. And if you are thinking that level is pretty low, it doesn't matter. There are companies with abhorrent business practices, competence and historical results that are being continuously contracted to do work because of a single reason: low price.

  And the expertise will grow. It will grow faster than any human company can grow it because it is not constrained by history, it has no emotional or cultural baggage, it can be restarted at any time from scratch, extended, cloned. It doesn't feel pain and it never ever stops.

  Yes, one might say people have been replaced, because people trying to get work cannot find companies that will employ them, but only because there will be a lot less companies that employ anyone. It boils down to the same thing, but the heat source is very different. Instead of people getting fired in droves, what will happen is that companies will just stop finding contracts. They will cling to their human centric organization and get almost suddenly replaced in bulk by a completely automated thing that will do the same bad job, only consistently and cheaply.

  The funny thing is that these virtual employees will repeat the patterns we've seen in humans. They will be lazy, they will cut corners, they will cheat, they will go on tangents, they will make mistakes. I am sure the logs of their interactions will be amazingly interesting and perhaps even entertaining. Imagine watching an entire company - actions and thoughts - from above like a god. But even so, they will do it cheap, so they will get the job.

  What does this mean for the AI industry? I suspect it will focus on performance rather than growth. Experts on specific domains, perhaps running on very custom hardware, will pop up, advertise their expertise and sell it. Will it be "a box" that will completely hide the underlying mechanisms and be sold for on prem use? Will it be "expertise as a service" from small datacenters squeezing the most out of their hyper efficient chips? I don't know the details. But I am sure the models themselves will not be the bottleneck (they never were, in fact) and everybody will scramble to build the cheapest chassis and interlinking between them.

  What about the regular people? Here I am at a loss. People have historically been unreasonable. Whenever there is the opportunity for evolution, growth, general good, they go the opposite direction and then destructively blame the result on others. Rationally, people would gather around human only interests, like culture, entertainment, sex, community, family and let machines do the rest. But I am pretty sure someone somewhere will decide people who don't give them stuff and enjoy rather than hating themselves are the enemy...

  Well, if you thought human CEOs were psychopaths, brace yourselves. Anyway, that's my prediction. We live in interesting times.