From what I can tell, all scalable automated work falls in value towards zero over time.
For example, a person could write a shareware game over a few weeks or months, sell it for $10, buy advertising at a $0.25 customer acquisition cost (CAC) and scale to make a healthy income in 1994. A person could drop ship commodities like music CDs and scale through advertising with a CAC of perhaps $2.50 and still make enough to survive in 2004. A person could sell airtime and make speaking appearances as an influencer with a CAC of $25 and have a good chance of affording an apartment in 2014. A person can network and be part of inside deals and make a million dollars yearly by being already wealthy in a major metropolitan city with a CAC of $250 in 2024.
The trend is that work gets harder and harder for the same pay, while scalable returns go mainly to people who already have money. AI will just hasten the endgame of late stage capitalism.
Note that not all economic systems work this way. Isn't it odd how tech that should be simplifying our lives and decreasing the cost of living is just devaluing our labor to make things like rent more expensive?
It's only odd if you model economics as a cooperative venture between a society trying to build better collective outcomes, and not as a competitive system. Additional capability and information can never hurt a single actor taken in isolation. But added capability and information given to multiple actors in a competitive game can make them all worse off.
As a simple example, imagine a Prisoner's Dilemma, except neither side knows defecting is an option (so in effect both players are playing a single-move game where "cooperate" is the only option). Landing on cooperate-cooperate in this case is easy (indeed, it's the only possible outcome). But as soon as you reveal the ability to defect to both players, the defect-defect equilibrium becomes available.
If you read the Black Swan by Taleb, it stops being weird. He points this out and dubs it Extremistan, where small advantages accrue to oversized returns.
We will need humane solutions to this, because the non humane ones are starting to become visible (armed drone swarms driven by AI).
For example, a person could write a shareware game over a few weeks or months, sell it for $10, buy advertising at a $0.25 customer acquisition cost (CAC) and scale to make a healthy income in 1994. A person could drop ship commodities like music CDs and scale through advertising with a CAC of perhaps $2.50 and still make enough to survive in 2004. A person could sell airtime and make speaking appearances as an influencer with a CAC of $25 and have a good chance of affording an apartment in 2014. A person can network and be part of inside deals and make a million dollars yearly by being already wealthy in a major metropolitan city with a CAC of $250 in 2024.
The trend is that work gets harder and harder for the same pay, while scalable returns go mainly to people who already have money. AI will just hasten the endgame of late stage capitalism.
Note that not all economic systems work this way. Isn't it odd how tech that should be simplifying our lives and decreasing the cost of living is just devaluing our labor to make things like rent more expensive?