I recently walked past an old minicab stand which, during our younger student days, sallied my friends back and forth between the city\u2019s nightlife and our more affordable suburban digs. It is gone now; only a dilapidated and cordoned-off shack remains of a once-thriving minicab empire. Like thousands of others across the western world, the business went into terminal decline the moment Uber appeared in our lives. Yet a simple check of the app today shows the price of an Uber is not substantially less than a minicab ride back then. Uber rocketed to celestial heights because it was heavily subsidized by venture capital \u2013 driving the value through the floor, bankrupting all physical competitors, before it then jacked up the price to create an instant monopoly. And this model, I fear, awaits many of the rest of us in the white-collar world.<\/p>\n
As in the early days of $3 Uber rides, many of us are intoxicated by the promise of generative AI in the form of near-free LLM use; chatbots which offer the service, as one friend of mine recently claimed, of \u201cbeing able to talk to God.\u201d Regardless of the extreme grifting and often explicitly fraudulent nature of much of the AI economy, it is difficult not to feel at least some degree of amazement at the sheer power of this software. It can revolutionize data analysis, generate plausibly written Master\u2019s level academic work in seconds and even schedule complex tasks through agents \u2013 a breakthrough in computational achievement.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s in the tech world that people are living what Thoreau called \u2018lives of quiet desperation\u2019<\/p>\n
Yet these marvels are overshadowed not only by the catastrophic cannons of slop but because almost everyone I know relates to AI with a sense of extreme trepidation. The sense that AI is \u201ccoming to take their jobs\u201d is on almost every working person\u2019s mind these days. Are we right to worry? Will AI act like Uber, do our jobs for next to nothing and, when we\u2019re obsolete, name its price?<\/p>\n
The grotesque amount of hype in the industry sounds a worrying note. The AI economy requires enormous front-loaded capital expenditure on GPUs and data centers, among others, all of which demands galactic levels of fundraising. Justifying these financials only works alongside a bigger cultural narrative that AI will transform not only the economy but almost everything about the modern world \u2013 including the destruction of almost everything done in front of a computer. CEOs such as Sam Altman (OpenAI) and Dario Amodei (Anthropic) are, fundamentally, in the business of fundraising \u2013 and pushing hysterical claims about the end of white-collar work might just convince those with deep enough pockets to keep the gravy train moving.<\/p>\n
They also know from the financial crisis of 2008 that there really is such a thing as being \u201ctoo big to fail\u201d: once a critical amount of the American economy is locked into the AI bubble, the government will just bail tech companies out if things go wrong. The obvious fact is that AI really is already affecting people\u2019s jobs in quite substantial ways. Everyone from copy editors to cartoonists in my network are hemorrhaging business to chatbots which can simulate \u201cgood enough\u201d versions of whatever blog post or image their clients once paid reasonable money for. Yes, ChatGPT-produced writing is awful, and yes, AI-generated images are lame, but for most businesses that simply doesn\u2019t matter \u2013 only cost saving does. There will always be compensation for top-grade artistry, of course, but most creatives pay the bills not with their highest quality output, but the daily rote of their craft. This commercial opportunity is fast disappearing for writers and graphic designers; I can feel it myself.<\/p>\n
Over in startup-land, AI has transformed many well-remunerated roles almost overnight. Anyone working in software engineering has had years or even decades worth of their investment in skills evaporate in an instant with the release of Claude Code<\/a> \u2013 Anthropic\u2019s LLM which can instantly generate almost any piece of software through judicious prompting from its human operators. Many in the industry are apocalyptic about this change and more miserable than I\u2019ve ever seen them.<\/p>\n \u201cDisruption\u201d sounds great in investor decks, but here it means the mental anguish of millions of people fearful they won\u2019t be able to keep a roof above their families\u2019 heads by this time next year. It\u2019s in the tech world today that people are living what Henry David Thoreau called \u201clives of quiet desperation.\u201d<\/p>\n Which takes us back to the specter of Uber. Increasingly, staff at tech companies are being told they must use AI. They are given a set amount of \u201ctokens\u201d \u2013 units of data, approximately parts or whole words of text, used for processing by the models for predictive purposes \u2013 and judged by their managers at the end of the month. They get in trouble if they do not use enough tokens, running the risk of singling themselves out as politically resistant to the \u201cefficiency\u201d and \u201cproductivity\u201d revolution that awaits anyone ambitious enough to use a chatbot to draft much of the busywork that keeps corporate office life ticking along. But many tech workers have even started burning the tokens on pointless tasks, \u201ctokenmaxxing\u201d as it is now called, in order to bump up their \u201cAI adoption\u201d metrics. One friend, a journalist, believes his company is training a model on his writing to eventually replace him. He\u2019s not the only one. Almost everyone being forced to use these products thinks something similar is going on \u2013 and with Uber as a precursor, it\u2019s obvious why.<\/p>\n