Comment by timabdulla | Hacker News Reader

Comment by timabdulla | Hacker News Reader

I don't think the conclusion of this article is controversial if you accept the premise: If a horizontal AI model is able to serve as a "drop-in remote worker" and all you need to do to get it going is give it access to a computer and some software, then of course vertical AI applications are going to have a hard time.

I read "drop-in remote worker" as AGI. You can give it any task and it performs at-or-exceeding human level. The real question to me then becomes the implications for the rest of the economy, not simply a question of what happens to vertical AI companies.

So many B2B tech companies exist to make the work and organization of humans easier. Is Github still as valuable if the vast majority of code is written and reviewed by AI? What about Slack, Linear, or Salesforce? And that's just starting with tech.

If there are relatively few humans in the white-collar workforce, then we are talking about nothing short of a complete remake of the economy.

In my opinion, the article spills a lot of ink trying to prove something that to me feels obvious (given that you accept the premise that one day soon we will have AGI) and very little exploring implications beyond this narrow perspective. Perhaps that is coming in future chapters.

Except we’re probably decades away from reliable open ended agents that can be trusted to perform any task.

There’s a reason why waymo started out in SF and Phoenix, getting to enough 9s to be hands off is really hard and current ML based systems don’t extrapolate well to new environments.

That's certainly possible. I'm not convinced AGI is just around the corner either, but I can't say with a high degree of certainty that it definitely won't arrive in the next few years.

We’ll definitely get above human level performance for a lot of tasks soon. It just won’t be general and reliable enough to do open ended tasks the way competent humans do.

So we’ll have models that can fill out and validate a tax return, and give you reasonable financial advice, but we won’t have an off the shelf general LLM from OpenAI that can replace an accountant at any random business anytime soon.

> I read "drop-in remote worker" as AGI. You can give it any task and it performs at-or-exceeding human level. The real question to me then becomes the implications for the rest of the economy, not simply a question of what happens to vertical AI companies.

> ...

> If there are relatively few humans in the white-collar workforce, then we are talking about nothing short of a complete remake of the economy.

Which is why I hope AGI is a chimera. It will be a very bad thing for nearly all people, and very, very, *VERY* lucrative for an elite few. I'm reminded of this quote:

> ...in these pre-modern, agrarian societies the economic divide between regular people and the wealthy elite was vast and functionally unbridgeable...As a result, often the wealthy landholding elite in these societies had access to entire classes of goods that might simply not be available under almost any circumstances to the commons, because they required quantities of money that might be relatively trivial to the elite but which were unobtainable for the masses. (https://acoup.blog/2025/01/03/collections-coinage-and-the-ty...)

A post-AGI world is almost certainly going to be like that, but worse. At best, most people will lose all economic power be allowed to subsist on a UBI that will provide a tiny living space, some cheap manufactured goods, access to an AI therapist running in the cloud, and no future. In a mideaval feudal society, peasants were at least valuable to their lords. In tech feudalism, they won't even be that.

Not just that but in the medieval world, you needed people to control people. With AGI, you can detect signs of revolt programmatically across the entire population and, well, take care of the "problems".

And I have not seen anybody talk about this at all.

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