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
[ Gen1: Hive ]
Be part of the Hive discussion.
- Comment on the topics of the article, and add your perspectives and experiences.
- Read and discuss with others who comment and build your personal network
- Engage well with me and others and put in effort
And you may be rewarded.
Read serious research today that basically came to conclusion that AI is going to displace jobs at faster pace than anything can be done to mitigate it...
Been saying it for many years already. The impact I'd going to be enormous and no one is safe, even if their job is.
There are safe jobs.
Farmer
Plumber
Electrician
Car Mechanic
Rough necks at drill floor
ER nurse and doctors (not PA)
Basically any jobs that requires manual labor. No Robots are not coming. Issac Asimov may rest in peace in my lifetime.
Any white collar paper pushing job can be replaced by AI.
Yes, there are safe jobs, but when society is falling apart because the majority are unemployed, everyone is affected. Even the billionaires.
Yes, social unrest will affect everyone, that is a correct statement.
I'd say that most farm jobs are already being replaced by automation, and car mechanics are only needed for when there are the moving parts. I assume that in the not too distant future, a lot of the service of a tesla will be robotic.
The farming jobs that was going to be replaced by generic automation already happened, say 20-40-100 years back depending on where you are.
I am talking here................
I don't think any robots are coming here at this location in my lifetime.
I reckon you might be surprised how quickly even rural Indian jobs are replaced. Bit yeah, it will take a while.
You might read this study: https://arxiv.org/html/2603.20617v1
Abstract:
If AI displaces human workers faster than the economy can reabsorb them, it risks eroding the very consumer demand firms depend on. We show that knowing this is not enough for firms to stop it. In a competitive task-based model, demand externalities trap rational firms in an automation arms race, displacing workers well beyond what is collectively optimal. The resulting loss harms both workers and firm owners. More competition and “better” AI amplify the excess; wage adjustments and free entry cannot eliminate it. Neither can capital income taxes, worker equity participation, universal basic income, upskilling, or Coasian bargaining. Only a Pigouvian automation tax can. The results suggest that policy should address not only the aftermath of AI labor displacement but also the competitive incentives that drive it.
As said, been thinking about it for years longer than I have been writing about it. Which is also years. :D
The study is saying exactly that, that even safe jobs are not safe and companies that win the AI race will fail, because there will be no consumers left...
100%
Glad you are seeing the issue now.
Capitalism itself fails for the same reason. It eats itself. AI just speeds up the process.
I was talking to a client the other day who was mentioning that she used AI to recently write a grant. She was talking about how awesome it was and I could help but think awesome now, but what happens when everyone starts doing it. Not only that, but what happens when the reviewers start using AI to do the vetting? That's the next step I am sure.
I reckon they already are. It is like the employment applications - no one real is reading them.
Sad...
A lot of people are generally incapable of seeing outside of their own skulls and still believe they're across everything.
It is pretty amazing really, that we don't do well with change, things are changing so fast, and still people believe they are ready.
Efficient <-> Worthless <-> Repeat
We're automating thinking, not just tasks. When we all run on the same AI legs, no one wins; we just burn out faster. The rice on the chessboard haunts me. It's not the volume, but the meaning. When everything is content, nothing is. When every opinion is suggested, whose voice is heard? The advantage remains human, but what if we outsource even that? The numbers don't add up because they never measured what matters.
And this is the issue. The thing we are "tasked with" as humans is being replaced, which means we have very little to offer the world now.
We are quickly heading towards a situation where real human understanding is drowned out by the chaos of automated responses.
People don't even write text messages to each other anymore - they use the AI suggestions.
oh no! poor OnlyFans.. :(
I think 'Human produced / NO AI poducts' would become coveted, much like hand made stuff is now.
So you are saying there are going to be a lot more hand jobs?
🤣 sounds good!
I saw a meme the other day. It was simple, and brutal. "Hey robot, who is going to buy all that shit you make when you've stolen all the jobs ?"
It is the same for any capital system, because they all ultimately eat themselves. It becomes like Highlander, there can be only one.
so many people now don't longer use their brain to do most works, many people choose to use AI to derive work's which is very bad, as a human, if you want to grow higher in what you do you have to use your human brain and calculate not just going into AI to help you generate your work that is very bad, as for me I rather use my brain and be proud of my work even if I'm not perfect but with time everything will work better
A few weeks ago you were using AI to respond. The only reason you aren't with me now is because I wasn't going to vote them.
I understand,and honestly I am trying to improve and use more of my own thoughts now
I don't know why people use to say AI will replace all of human jobs, I can understand that is some fields AI is almost ready to overtake humans but not in all Fields at all.
Even you need a human to control AI.
I think you are being naïve. Nearly every job in the supply chain of everything will be affected and the need for humans heavily reduced.
Human demand will get less but not going to zero after all.
Being pampered with AI technology to handle tasks like reporting, analysis, marketing, and more. It's fast, but the level of satisfaction is much higher than using your own mind, and the results are more satisfying. In my opinion. Thank you.
People only get satisfaction when they do nothing it seems.
It's very good to put words into a series that has deep meaning. Yes, that's right, in my opinion, it's false satisfaction. Thanks.
Here is another one :)
We are doomed. Imagine how long it would have taken Pixar to make that character 10 years ago.
It’s useful, but…
I would say that this might have been true half a year ago... ChatGPT 5.4 is really good at interpretation of even sloppy prompts in my experience...
You are correct. Things have improved a lot. I used the videos because they are funny and explained the phase we have been through.
Copilot is still almost there by the way.
It depends on the Copilot you are talking about :) Microsoft in their infinite wisdom have named every one of their products Copilot :) At some point there was like 20 completely different products that were all called Copilot while doing completely different things.
When I talk about Copilot I am talking about their product GitHub Copilot which is as good as any AI Agent over there because it can intelligently choose the LLM it is using for every task. This agent runs inside the Visual Studio 2026 or VS Code (I prefer the later) and runs Claude Opus 4.7 LLM or Chat GPT 5.4 or a number of other available LLM models:
Copilot said:You’re interacting with M365 Copilot, powered by a GPT‑5–class chat model.
In simple terms:
Product: Microsoft 365 Copilot
Model family: GPT‑5 (latest-generation conversational model available in this environment)
Capabilities:
Advanced reasoning and explanations
Strong performance on technical, analytical, and professional tasks
Integrated with Microsoft-style workflows (documents, analysis, structured output)
This is that I got :)
Yeah... You got a really old Chat GPT model if you compare to what we are using. It is one of the ancient GPT models that was retired in February and is five generations behind the current Chat GPT 5.5 model. And when it comes to GPT it was really behind Claude Opus until 5.3 or even 5.4. Here is when GPT 5 model was retired in GitHub Copilot:
As you can see even 5.1 was retired because it was really bad...
Thanks for the update. I only use co-pilot for work. Fairly limited use as of now for work related stuff, but it is good at research. For personal stuff I mostly use Gemini, and I am fairly happy with it.
PS. It is funny, ironic and realistic that you are saying that a model what was retired in Feb 17, 2026 is 'ancient'! :) This is significant.
:D
AI-generated games sound like a tech bubble waiting to crash.
We're losing our minds. It's just totally bonkers. Yet we will do it anyway because 'everyone is doing it' - like this big shared delusion. Mix that with our propensity for being flexible with truth and we're truly heading for disaster. It doesn't matter if you lie, because 'everyone's doing it'. And no one cares - who cares if it's AI, it's funny. Oh yeah I know it's deep fake but it sounds like something he'd do. And a president with WWE mentality where he knows he is lying, the populace knows he is lying, and still no one does anything about it.