When I was talking to this guy yesterday about using AI for various business tasks, it quickly became apparent that he (like most) see all the efficiency potential (it is cutting heavily into his business), without really thinking through what is happening. For instance, someone creates an AI-generated report based on various numbers from a system and sends it off to whoever says they need the information. And then that person summarises it using AI and asks for suggestions on what to do next. Based on those suggestions that they pass along the line as their own ideas, other people generate more content using AI. This means that very little human thought is going into the eventual output.
Efficient.
However, because all the competitors are doing exactly the same thing, it becomes like nuclear proliferation, so no one really has an advantage. Sure, tasks are getting done faster than they were, but it isn't a competitive advantage because all businesses are seeing the same benefits. For another example, when a salesperson is targeting a prospect, they used to have an advantage when they had additional information that other competitors did not have. However, information is cheap and everyone has the same, so it doesn't provide any edge over competitors - the edge is still in the human.
But it is also interesting to consider "content creators" today when very few are actually producing the content at all, and it is dropping even further. The many feeds are just a glut of AI-generated content that doesn't track with reality. Even before generative AI, all those Instagram models were using filters to make themselves more attractive, fooling the audience into believing they are that. Yep, sure there were lots of "photoshop errors" but they have dwindled now that AI is correcting the errors and on small screens with people spending less than a second on a piece of content, it passes by unnoticed. But also, valueless.
High volume of content lowers the value of content.
We have seen it in the past with photography, where a single photograph could become a powerful symbol, but now with 5 billion photos taken a day, they have become highly disposable. Just imagine the price of gold if for some unbeknownst reason, a hundred volcanoes erupted spewing tens of thousands of tonnes of gold onto the surface. Do you think the price would go up?
Content is the same and the cheaper it becomes to produce, the more that will be produced. And yes, AI makes a lot of things much easier to do, but it also means that there is going to be a glut of all things that AI can generate. For example, thousands of AI generated games are being released each week, because they are so easy to create. AI is being used to write the code and create the assets, and generate the adverts to market them. But there is one problem, there isn't a large enough audience to consume even a small amount of them.
And then there is another issue most don't consider. The guy I was talking to said in reference to "standing out" is that this is why brand recognition is so important. Sure, but brand recognition takes years to build and before that happens, an already branded entity will create something and use their already established channels to drive it into the market. Sure, a company might be bought out, but why buy a company that has created something that can be reengineered by an AI in minutes?
AI makes a lot of things we have done easier to do, but in so doing, it has also devalued all of those things. For instance, the report written at the start should illustrate how useless that busywork report was prior to AI. No one needed to ever create it, because no one is actually reading it now - did they read it before? Maybe the skimmed it.
Content proliferation using AI is a bit like that rice on a chessboard story:
The grain of rice on a chessboard problem illustrates exponential growth, where placing 1 grain on the first square and doubling it for every 64 squares results in 18.4 quintillion grains total. This massive sum, over 500 billion metric tons, would form a pile as big as Mount Everest.
Sure, if possible, the guy who asked the emperor for it would never go hungry, but the majority of it would just go to waste, right? Even if you tried to sell all of that rice, it would require a huge distribution network and of course, storage. And for those interested, currently about 520 million tonnes of rice are eaten each year, which means that supply would last just shy of 1000 years at current consumption.
It is a bit like YouTube, where over 30,000 hours of content are uploaded every hour.
And that is just YouTube. How much time do people have in their lives to consume all of the content that is only going to speed up in volume, because production is so efficient? By the way again, that also means every hour, about three and a half years of content is uploaded.
If we are going to align ourselves to efficiency as the metric of what is valuable, then we are doomed. For a short period companies will save more money and make investors happy, but pretty soon, the law of diminishing returns kicks in on both the value of the next cut, and the value of the potential customer. The more people not working, the less people there are spending. And that means that there isn't enough disposable income to spend on entertainment, because there won't be enough to spend on food and shelter. OnlyFans which is already filled with entertainers who are earning less than slaves on average, can't support anyone.
Who is going to buy your product?
New cars, new apps, new phones, new games.... who is going to buy it when the majority of people have been pushed out of the workplace due to generative efficiencies? And yeah, perhaps there will be a universal basic income to cover some gaps, but where does that come from and, have you ever known a government to provide enough money to people to cover costs of living and still have a lot left over to spend on entertainment?
The numbers keep growing, but don't add up.
As far as our human needs are concerned, we have enough to go around. But, our human needs are now inhuman also, meaning that we are consuming and creating a lot of things that are completely unnecessary to not only our survival, but are counterproductive to our growth also. We keep looking at the numbers, trying to find faster and cheaper ways to create this and that, while society at a global level is failing, and we are increasingly failing at the individual level too. You might believe that you are not, but I would beg to differ, because we are all on this earth together, and it is circling the drain.
We could as a species pull ourselves from the fate of destruction, but it would require a complete rethink and drastic change in the way we manage our resources. But that isn't going to happen, because as long as the profit margins are increasing for the few, it doesn't matter how bad the bottom lines are for the many.
And there is a floor price, where no one survives.
You'd think humanity would want to go in the other direction, but unfortunately to continually improve as a species can't be attached to an arbitrary marker like money. It has to come from practical improvement in the physical world, not the conceptual world of numbers go up.
Do the math.
Taraz
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