"The soaring valuations of AI companies aren't just a bet on better software. They're a wager on who will control human labor in the future, according to Roman Yampolskiy, a University of Louisville computer science professor who was one of the first academics to warn about AI's risks. As artificial intelligence moves from tools to increasingly autonomous agents, Yampolskiy said markets are pricing in a radical shift: machines providing "free labor" at scale."
"'You go from having tools to having agents with humanlike capability that really represents free labor,' Yampolskiy told the UK's LBC radio station in a recent interview. 'Free labor - cognitive free labor, physical labor.' That dynamic, he said, helps explain why investors are willing to pay lofty valuations for AI companies even before many of them have established clear business models. 'If a company valuation is a hundred billion today, it's actually a small bet on having access to that free labor,' he told LBC."
"In comments later to Business Insider, he said that 'once a model is trained and deployed, copying its capabilities across millions of tasks is mostly compute, not salaries.' Markets, he added, tend to underestimate how abruptly change can arrive. 'When quality crosses a usability threshold, substitution can be abrupt,' he said. 'Wage value can collapse faster than institutions can adapt.'"
AI is transitioning from tools to autonomous agents capable of providing scalable cognitive and physical labor. Investors are valuing companies based on access to that labor, which helps explain high valuations despite unclear business models. Once a model is trained and deployed, reproducing its capabilities across millions of tasks costs compute rather than salaries. Quality improvements can cross usability thresholds and trigger abrupt substitution, collapsing wage value faster than institutions can adapt. Any job performed entirely on a computer is vulnerable to automation, including programming, accounting, tax preparation, and web design.
Read at Business Insider
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