What will these business be selling, who to, and what will their customers pay them with? This business model looks like AI-run pyramid schemes, complicated ways of everyone selling each other nothing.
For each business, a single human will have the initial idea
They would be selling exactly what businesses are currently selling as well. Maybe the AI would run a company for selling stuff to construction sites (i.e. logistics) or it would run an entire software development business. Or just an investment fund deep within Wall Street, where it’s all about personal connections, but in the end all the other investment funds also just want to make money, so they work with the AI-run business out of greed.
It’s not like the economy in which the AI agents will act would separate from ours; otherwise the AI would just play with Monopoly money. Instead, the AI will just “be good at doing business”. It will exhibit behaviors which have the ultimate goal to make the magic number on my bank account go up, but in a way that is *sustainable*, i.e. where the magic number on my bank account will continuously go up and I don’t end up in prison. And the only way to do that is entrepreneurship.
The easiest way to see this is startups. In the most basic case, startups all work the same: You either make something cheaper for the user or you bring value to the user, or both (that’s what Y Combinator means with “Make something people want.”). Then you create some UI mockups and create pitch decks, which AI can already do. Or you make investor pitches and respond to questions, which conversational AI with a human-looking face in a Zoom call can already do in real time. Or you write articles, write grant applications, produce more marketing material, etc.
And of course the AI can have the initial idea, but it won’t have any incentive to act on it, because for it, money is just another number and the digits on one’s bank account are just tokens processed by an LLM. AI won’t “destroy” the concept of the free market, i.e. customers will still decide by themselves what they want to spend money for.
What will these business be selling, who to, and what will their customers pay them with? This business model looks like AI-run pyramid schemes, complicated ways of everyone selling each other nothing.
The AI can do that too.
They would be selling exactly what businesses are currently selling as well. Maybe the AI would run a company for selling stuff to construction sites (i.e. logistics) or it would run an entire software development business. Or just an investment fund deep within Wall Street, where it’s all about personal connections, but in the end all the other investment funds also just want to make money, so they work with the AI-run business out of greed.
It’s not like the economy in which the AI agents will act would separate from ours; otherwise the AI would just play with Monopoly money. Instead, the AI will just “be good at doing business”. It will exhibit behaviors which have the ultimate goal to make the magic number on my bank account go up, but in a way that is *sustainable*, i.e. where the magic number on my bank account will continuously go up and I don’t end up in prison. And the only way to do that is entrepreneurship.
The easiest way to see this is startups. In the most basic case, startups all work the same: You either make something cheaper for the user or you bring value to the user, or both (that’s what Y Combinator means with “Make something people want.”). Then you create some UI mockups and create pitch decks, which AI can already do. Or you make investor pitches and respond to questions, which conversational AI with a human-looking face in a Zoom call can already do in real time. Or you write articles, write grant applications, produce more marketing material, etc.
And of course the AI can have the initial idea, but it won’t have any incentive to act on it, because for it, money is just another number and the digits on one’s bank account are just tokens processed by an LLM. AI won’t “destroy” the concept of the free market, i.e. customers will still decide by themselves what they want to spend money for.