Economics 101, right? Since developing software, writing the technical documentation, and exercising QA became all of the sudden 1000x cheaper than it was a year ago, how come we don't see the substantial increase in demand of software/QA/doc engineers then? I see the opposite happening right now, e.g. many people losing their jobs to $30/month AI model.
Not really a contradiction, since the entire point of jobs and the economy at all is to serve the specific needs of humanity and not to maximize paper clip production. If we should be learning anything from the modern era it's something that should have always been obvious: the Luddites were not the bad guys. The truth is you've fallen for centuries old propaganda. Hopefully someday you'll evolve into someone who doesn't carry water for paperclip maximizers.
Zero labor cost should see the number of engineers trend towards infinity. The earlier comment suggested the opposite — that it would fall to just 1000 engineers. That would indicate that the cost of labor has skyrocketed.
What difference does that make? If the cost of an engineer is zero, they can work on all kinds of nonsensical things that will never be used/consumed. It doesn't really matter as it doesn't cost anything.
> That's just not how people or organizations run by people operate.
Au contraire. It's not very often that the cost of labor actually drops to anywhere close to zero, but we have some examples. The elevator operator is a prime example. When it was costly to hire an operator we could only hire a few of them. Nowadays anyone who is willing to operate an elevator just has to show up and they automatically get the job.
If 1,000 engineers are worth having around, why not an infinite number of them, just like those working as elevator operators? Again, there is no cost in this hypothetical scenario.
> Cost is not the only driver to demand.
Technically true, but we're not talking about garbage here. Humans are always valuable to some degree, just not necessarily valuable enough when there is a cost to balance. But, again, we're talking about zero cost. I expect you are getting caught up in thinking about scenarios where labor still has a cost, perhaps confusing zero cost with zero payroll?
Do you not see the logic?