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/

  • 4am@lemmy.zip
    0·
    1 day ago

    This is literally their business plan you are describing.

    1. Hype AI as the literal second coming of Jesus
    2. buy all the electronic components on earth. Make it hard to impossible for most people to buy computer hardware for any purpose unless they’re already rich.
    3. convince enterprise that humans are no longer necessary and that you can just use robots to do all that work and split the same profit between far fewer of you. Middle management and up cum immediately.
    4. offer your cloud services to everyone who can still afford anything. You watch and profile their every move. No one dares to talk shit about you or you debank them, completely cut off from all modern conveniences. They rent this privilege from you.
    5. increase prices until you have all the money.‘you now rule the world. The plebs all starve.

    Of course it’s psychotic shit but that doesn’t mean they don’t believe it

    • eyesaremosaics@lemmy.zip
      0·
      1 day ago

      I think you’re missing an important step 6, take over the businesses using AI, by creating a competing service and/or jacking up the price for each of the businesses. They outsourced their entire operations to you and now you can just take it and own your (former) customers businesses in all kinds of industries around the world

      • 4am@lemmy.zip
        0·
        22 hours ago

        That’s part of step 4, but that’s not really clear as I wrote it.

        Having everything on the cloud means that AI agents can index and summarize it. You can see designs, financials, etc. you can corner markets before someone else does. You can see inside the financials of everyone and everything and move before the market does.

        AI and cloud services combined are the biggest fraudulent action ever taken against humanity as a whole using technology, and if we don’t stop it we will be ushered into an era of techno-feudalism with no clear way out.