[throwaway0123_5]

In terms of quality of life, much/most of the value of intelligence is in how it lets you affect the physical world. For most knowledge workers, that takes the form of using intelligence to increase how productively some physical asset can be exploited. The owner of the asset gives some of the money/surplus earned to the knowledge worker, and they can use the money to affect change in the physical world by paying for food, labor, shelter, etc.

If the physical asset owner can replace me with a brain in a jar, it doesn't really help me that I have my own brain in a jar. It can't think food/shelter into existence for me.

If AI gets to the point where human knowledge is obsolete, and if politics don't shift to protect the former workers, I don't think widespread availability of AI is saving those who don't have control over substantial physical assets.

[skybrian]

What are the barriers to entry? Seems like there are lots of AI startups out there?

There is a rush to build data centers so it seems that hardware is a bottleneck and maybe that will remain the trend, but another scenario is that it stops abruptly when capacity catches up? I'm wondering why this doesn't this become a race to the bottom?

[throwaway0123_5]

Is the suggestion that AGI (or even current AI) lowers the barrier of entry to making a company so much that regular people can just create a company in order to make money (and then buy food/shelter)? If so, I think there's a lot of problems with that:

1) It doesn't solve the problem of obtaining physical capital. So you're basically limited to just software companies.

2) If the barrier to entry to creating a software product that can form the basis of a company is so low that a single person can do it, why would other companies (the ones with money and physical capital) buy your product instead of just telling their GPT-N to create them the same software?

3) Every other newly-unemployed person is going to have the same idea. Having everyone be a solo-founder of a software company really doesn't seem viable, even if we grant that it could be viable for a single person in a world where everyone has a GPT-N that can easily replicate the company's software.

On a side note, one niche where I think a relatively small number of AI-enabled solo founders will do exceptionally well is in video games. How well a video game will do depends a lot on how fun it is to humans and the taste of the designer. I'm suspicious that AIs will have good taste in video game design and even if they do I think it would be tough for them to evaluate how fun mechanics would be for a person.