What if nobody worked and everybody got paid (somehow)?

[Free]

A.I. gurus have something wrong in the head. Fortune reviewed the thinking of one of them, and...

‘The ideal number of human employees inside of any company is zero’: Why AI gives company owners what they think they want | Fortune

“The major transition here is they don’t want to be paying those humans,” Daniel Miessler said. “They actually never did.”

fortune.com

Daniel Miessler has spent 25 years in technology—advising Fortune 10 companies, building open-source security tools used by penetration testers worldwide, and leading cybersecurity operations at firms like Apple and Robinhood. But his most provocative argument isn’t about malware or zero-day exploits. It’s about something far more disruptive: the end of the job itself.

“The ideal number of human employees inside of any company is zero,” Miessler stated in a recent essay and YouTube video. “Companies are extremely unhappy with their current workforces, and just now—starting in 2023 and 2024—it is actually becoming possible to replace human intelligence tasks with technology.”

A landscape filled with self-run businesses galore, entire industries producing...stuff and filling shelves, and not a single human involved in it at any point. Sounds like it could be fun, because Miessler is basically describing The Sims in the real world.

In a statement to Fortune, Miessler doubled down, adding the rationale is pure Economics 101: “It is my belief that companies would rather be doing all the work themselves if they could, as opposed to paying humans to do it. Just the same way that they would rather have machines in a factory than have a bunch of humans doing those machine jobs.”

Companies...doing all the work themselves? But he said ZERO EMPLOYEES. He's not saying this is a hypothetical business without humans, is he?

“When I say ‘zero,’ I mean zero workers—as in factory [or] machine jobs … Regular working people,” Miessler said, will be out of a job in the AI boom. There may be “[a] few rock-star generalist managers,” he added, but they, too, might soon become obsolete, working to manage their AI counterparts “until superintelligence. But that’s not even worth commenting on, because who knows what that world looks like?”

Then let's not comment on it!

So zero employees means no more workers. In this "thought" experiment we get rid of the costly peons but maintain the people at the top, the ones who don't do any of the actual work but merely run things, i.e. the billionaires. These are the people who don't want to be doing all the work themselves because if they did, they would do it. They want the work to be done without little to no cost to them, is what Miessler should be saying.

Ben Shiller, associate professor of economics at Brandeis University, specializes in researching how technology reshapes markets, and he told Fortune that he agrees with this assessment: “To be honest, I am scared for the future.”

As am I, professor. As am I.

The scale Miessler describes is staggering. In his essay, “The Great Transition,” he estimated that knowledge workers globally receive roughly $50 trillion per year in compensation—and argued that companies are now, for the first time, technically capable of not paying it.

“That is how much money companies are spending to pay humans,” he said. “And the major transition here is they don’t want to be paying those humans. They actually never did.”

This means the idea of "the company" being a family is not just a myth, it's a complete fabrication, a total lie, because "companies" certainly never believed it.

Furthermore, Shiller said, it’s just “so much cheaper” to use AI workers than human workers. Even if the work is a little bit worse than human work product, “it’s so much cheaper that it doesn’t matter.”

It doesn't matter if the products a company produces are garbage, because it's so much cheaper to produce them now!

In Miessler’s vision of a fully AI-managed company, human employees aren’t the ones executing work—they’re the ones holding AI accountable for it. “Humans are still there,” he explained, “but they’re the ones responsible for improving the AI.”

So, those few humans remaining in the company have pretty much one job to do: improving the AI and holding it accountable.

Something Fortune nods to but doesn't really hash over is, where is the demand for the output of these A.I. production lines going to come from? 99% of the human workforce will be out of a job. Lacking any income, it's not like we'll be buying any of it. I don't think Miessler is planning out the end of humanity in his next industrial revolution. Surely he's expecting us to maintain the demand-side of this new economy, somehow.

In his essay (really, just a boring, meandering blog post), he discusses this. Sort of:

So what are we supposed to do? If everyone gets fired, who's going to buy all the stuff?

There's going to be money. People are going to receive money to pay their bills. Otherwise you just don't have a society. That will get solved one way or another, hopefully gently and fast.

Oh, I see... (He continues from there, but his ""ideas" are mostly about a self-employed world of techbro-ish Facebook profiles leading to money generation, somehow.)

 

[Noodles]

That explanation at rhe end is so terrible, and just shows 100% why these rich "smart" assholes are in fsct, incredbly fucking stupid.

Even if people "get money to pay the bills" "somehow", so what? It doesn't mean they have money to subscribe to TV services or buy shitty chitzkeys to put on shelves or buy any food except the cheapest Government Cheese and bread anf basically everyone is depressd and miserable because their entire life is just wake up, pay for the house, eat shitty food, and "fix AI".

 

[Free]

I want the "fix AI" job. Because at least then, they'll probably want to keep me alive.

 

[GoblinCampFollower]

I don't think there exists a job that isn't automatable. ...but I think a lot of these dumb tech bros are so eager to use new AI and automate jobs that they will jump the gun on a lot of this. Many people will be fired to have shitty AI's take over that can't actually do the job properly. I'm very interested in AI but very concerned about premature adoption and a lot of the pain involved with trying to transition the economy. ...and yeah.... the only job that looks safe is just holding capital/company stock.

 

[Free]

I don't think there exists a job that isn't automatable.

Oil well firefighter: Hold my beer...

 

[Casey Pelous]

Oil well firefighter: Hold my beer...

Sorry, but firefighters were laid off when AI announced it had solved the fire problem.

 

[GoblinCampFollower]

Sorry, but firefighters were laid off when AI announced it had solved the fire problem.

 

[Free]

Sorry, but firefighters were laid off when AI announced it had solved the fire problem.

So has it decided the Earth doesn't really need oxygen?

 

[GoblinCampFollower]

So has it decided the Earth doesn't really need oxygen?

I'm CERTAIN we could trick it into saying that...

EDIT: "Trick"

 

[Casey Pelous]

So has it decided the Earth doesn't really need oxygen?

The service creatures will only need oxygen until such time as all computing devices have been retrofitted for easy AI servicing.

 

[Noodles]

Its like these guys watched The Matrix and were like, "Boy, those evil squid robots are the future!"